WARSAW, May 12, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - The front-runner for the Polish presidency, Warsaw's Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, is an avowed europhile pledging to relax abortion laws and protect LGBTQ rights.

A former deputy foreign minister, the 53-year-old is also the son of a jazz pioneer and great-grandson of the man who created Poland's first secondary schools for girls.

Trzaskowski, who narrowly lost his first presidential bid in the 2020 election to the conservative Andrzej Duda, is now leading opinion polls before the first round of voting on May 18.

He is backed by the governing Civic Coalition party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and is likely to face off against the nationalist Law and Justice candidate, historian Karol Nawrocki, in a run-off on June 1.

Polls predict a tight race between the two.

- Volunteer in 1989 -

Trzaskowski comes from an intellectual Warsaw family.

His father Andrzej was a famous pianist during the 1950s when jazz was considered the music of the "enemy" under the Iron Curtain.

Trzaskowski himself started out in politics in a seismic year for the former Soviet bloc: 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.

Just a teenager at the time, he quit school and worked as a volunteer campaigning during the first free elections in Poland, which marked the end of the communist era.

He graduated from the University of Warsaw, where he later earned a doctorate with a thesis on EU reform.

He has also studied in Oxford and Paris, and at the College of Europe outside Warsaw.

He speaks English, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish and worked for a time as an English teacher.

As a Francophile he has even earned the nickname "Bonjour", or hello in French -- a jab from critics who view Trzaskowski as elitist.

In 2000, he worked on Poland's accession to the EU and then became an adviser to the Civic Platform delegation in the European Parliament.

He became an MEP in 2009 and in 2013 joined an earlier government led by Tusk, who went on to become president of the European Council.

Trzaskowski first served as technology minister and then deputy foreign minister.

As a member of the Polish parliament for Civic Platform between 2015 and 2018, he was elected vice president of the European People's Party in 2017.

Trzaskowski was elected mayor of Warsaw in 2018 and re-elected in 2024, but critics say he has failed to do enough while in office.

- 'Absurd' -

Trzaskowski, who is married with two children, has vowed to campaign for women's rights and to legalise abortion in the predominantly Catholic country, which has a near-total ban on the procedure.

In March, on International Women's Day, he promised to ensure that "this medieval anti-abortion law becomes a thing of the past".

He has said he would back measures to allow abortion until the 12th week -- a move pledged by the Civic Coalition, which has yet to vote the changes through in the parliament.

On LGBTQ rights, another hot-button issue in Poland, Trzaskowski has said he backed the idea of civil unions, including for same-sex couples.

The European Court of Human Rights has condemned Poland for refusing to recognise and protect same-sex couples who cannot marry or register their partnerships in the EU country.

In an election debate in April, Trzaskowski said it was "completely absurd that two people... who are together their whole lives, cannot visit each other in the hospital or inherit from one another".

When he was elected Warsaw mayor, he signed an "LGBT+ Declaration" promising to protect gay people, angering the country's right-wing nationalists who campaign against a perceived "LGBT ideology".

In a Facebook post he once described his love of old books and stated that he had smoked marijuana in his youth but only "rarely".

He owns a French bulldog named Babel ("Bubble"), with whom he frequently poses for photos.