The Civic Platform (Polish: Platforma Obywatelska, PO)[nb 1] is a centre-right liberal conservative political party in Poland.

It was formed in 2001 by splinter factions from the Solidarity Electoral Action, the Freedom Union and the Conservative People's Party, and it later placed second in the 2001 Polish parliamentary election.

Following the Smolensk air disaster in 2010, Bronisław Komorowski served as acting president of Poland and later won the 2010 Polish presidential election.

Tusk continued to serve as prime minister and leader of Civic Platform until he resigned in 2014 to assume the post of the president of the European Council.

Founders Andrzej Olechowski, Maciej Płażyński, and Donald Tusk were sometimes jokingly called "the Three Tenors" by Polish media and commentators.

Ludwik Dorn, the chairman of the PiS parliamentary club at the time, remarked: "Together, we gained as much as the PO itself collected a year earlier."

However, in the 2005 general election, in which it was led by Jan Rokita, PO polled only 24.1% and unexpectedly came second to the 27% garnered by Law and Justice (PiS).

[5] Ultimately, Lech Kaczyński (PiS) won the second round of the presidential election on 23 October 2005 with 54% of the vote, ahead of Tusk, the PO candidate.

Instead, PiS formed a coalition government with the support of the League of Polish Families (LPR) and Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland (SRP).

The PiS-led coalition fell apart in 2007 amid a corruption scandal involving Andrzej Lepper and Tomasz Lipiec[6] and internal leadership disputes.

During the PO primary elections, Bronisław Komorowski defeated the Oxford-educated, PiS defector Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.

PO's dominance is also a reflection of left-wing weakness and divisions on both sides of the political scene, with PiS suffering a splinter in Autumn 2010.

[23] Due to the peculiarity of Polish politics, as a major liberal opponent of the conservative PiS, the party is also classified as centrist[24] or centre-left.

[44] Since 2007, when Civic Platform formed the government, the party has gradually moved from its Christian-democratic stances, and many of its politicians hold more liberal positions on social issues.

[58][59][60][61] This tendency is especially popular among the younger generation of the party's politicians, such as mayor of Warsaw and presidential candidate Rafał Trzaskowski.

[65] As of 2020, the party enjoyed the greatest support in large cities and among people with higher education and in managerial positions, while in terms of age, the electorate was evenly distributed,[66] and the electoral base of the Civic Platform lay in middle-aged, highly educated gold-collar and white-collar workers of the middle and upper-middle classes.

[68] Churchgoing Catholics are roughly evenly split between Civic Platform and Law and Justice, with a significant minority of churchgoers supporting Polish People's Party as well.

[70] The party also faced a challenge from Nowoczesna, whose vote "came largely from former Civic Platform supporters, disappointed with its failure to shake off its social conservatism".

[71] According to Janusz Jartyś of the University of Szczecin, the ideological base of Civic Platform are "national-conservative, liberal and social-democratic voters", with each faction expecting "at least partial implementation of their demands, stability in the governance of the country and social peace".

[72] According to Søren Riishøj, the party is also unpopular amongst the traditionally social-democratic voters, who are opposed to Europeanisation and globalization, and are critical of the Civic Platform's "almost U.S. type of election campaign.

"[73] As of 2021, according to CBOS, Civic Platform was overwhelmingly popular amongst pro-European voters, with almost 80% of party's supporters wishing to cooperate with the European Union more.