Krzysztof Gawkowski

Krzysztof Kamil Gawkowski (born 11 April 1980) is a Polish politician and writer, who has been serving as a Deputy Prime Minister of Poland and Minister of Digital Affairs since December 2023.

Gawkowski is associated with Democratic Left Alliance, Spring. From November 2019 to December 2023, he was the leader of The Left's parliamentary club. He is a member of the Sejm (10th term).

Memoir
Gawkowski grew up in Wołomin, Poland. He graduated law at University of Warsaw and in 2006 graduated in political studies at University of Communication and Social Media in Warsaw. He declares he is a Catholic.

Politics
As a teenager in the 1990s he was a member of the Young Social Democrats Federation., and at 20, he joined the social-democratic Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), then one of the largest parties in Poland. In 2002 and 2004 he was a councillor in the town of Wołomin, near Warsaw. At the 2010 Polish local elections he was elected at the Masovian Regional Assembly for SLD. The next year he was a candidate for Parliament (Sejm).

In 2016 he was appointed as co-leader of the Democratic Left Alliance. However, after almost twenty years he gave up his affiliation with the Alliance.

In 2019, Gawkowski started to cooperate with Robert Biedroń who headed the newly founded left-wing party Spring. In May he was a candidate to the European Parliament on the Spring list but was not one of the 3 left-wing candidates elected. However, in October of the same year, he was a candidate to the Sejm for the Bydgoszcz constituency in the North-West in the joint electoral alliance The Left between Spring and the SLD, and was elected (see List of 9th term Sejm MPs). He was appointed Leader of the parliamentary club dominated by a majority of SLD MPs, thereby more or less returning to the tent of his old party. In 2021 Spring and SLD merged into the new party New Left.

In the 2023 parliamentary elections he successfully ran for re-election after he received 21,831 votes.

As the two leaders of the party, Włodzimierz Czarzasty and Robert Biedroń, served as Deputy Marshal of the Sejm and European Parliament member, Gawkowski was appointed on 13 December 2023 as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, representing the highest position for his party in Tusk's government.

Writer
He has written a few poetic and academic books.

Poetry

 * "Cień Przeszłości", Warszawska Firma Wydawnicza, Warszawa 2018, ISBN 978-83-7805-359-0
 * "Piętno prawdy", Warszawska Firma Wydawnicza, Warszawa 2010, ISBN 978-83-61748-44-1

Academic books

 * "Obudzić państwo", Warszawska Firma Wydawnicza, Warszawa 2015, ISBN 978-83-7805-339-2
 * "Cyberkolonializm", Helion, Gliwice 2018, ISBN 978-83-283-4801-1
 * "Administracja samorządowa w teorii i praktyce", Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, Toruń 2017, ISBN 978-83-8019-757-2