Friends of Polish President-Elect Andrzej Duda thought he was on the plane that killed his mentor Lech Kaczynski five years ago. He wasn’t, but days before the crash, the late president told Duda something that changed his life.

“The president stared out the window and said that he wasn’t getting any younger, and his generation would soon pass,” Duda, 43, said during a speech in February. “He looked up and said ‘but you are the future of Polish politics, and the responsibility rests with you to carry on.’”

Duda, who defeated President Bronislaw Komorowski on Sunday in Poland’s biggest political upset in a decade, sees himself as the heir of Kaczynski’s mission to turn Poland into an “honest” country outside the “European mainstream,” one not afraid to pursue its own economic and foreign policies. His vision, including plans to tax banks and buy them back from foreign owners, has spooked markets and threatens to return Poland to the bitter political fighting last seen when his Law and Justice party was in power in 2005-2007.

The late president’s twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party leader who hand-picked Duda for the presidency, is now vying to use the victory as a stepping stone to win a general election due by November. He was unseated after a two-year term in which he repeatedly accused rival politicians, judges, journalists and the business elite of mounting conspiracies against him. His anti-corruption chief received a three-year jail sentence in March for illegal entrapment of politicians.

Kaczynski’s Soldier

Arkadiusz Mularczyk, who introduced Duda to Law and Justice in 2005, recalls how he thought his friend was in the crash in Smolensk, Russia, that killed all 96 people on board. Instead, he was one of the few survivors in Kaczynski’s entourage left to challenge Komorowski, who as speaker of parliament was next in line under the constitution. Komorowski beat Jaroslaw Kaczynski in an election to win a five-year term.

“He was the last to leave the battlefield by resigning from Lech Kaczynski’s office,” Mularczyk said by phone in May. “Andrzej thinks of himself as the president’s political heir.”

With some Law Justice members insisting the cause of the Smolensk disaster has been covered up by former Civic Platform Premier Donald Tusk and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Duda took a milder tone in the campaign, pledging to unite Poles and bring change after the Platform’s eight years in power.

Disappearing Boss

After winning a seat in European Parliament last year and getting the nod from Kaczynski to run for president, the trained lawyer set out on a bus tour to meet people and gain nationwide recognition. He handed out free coffee and rolls to Poles as they rushed to work and held stump speeches that attracted thousands, helping him erase a 30-percentage-point deficit in opinion polls against Komorowski since March.

Kaczynski, 65, was conspicuously absent from the vast majority of Duda’s campaign events, even skipping the post-election celebration on Sunday. This allowed the candidate to distance himself from his party’s and his boss’s image.

“Someone must have told Jaroslaw Kaczynski that they need a man with more centrist views, a gift of gab and good rapport,” Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, a prime minister under Law and Justice in 2005-2006 who later fell out with Kaczynski, told TVN24 on May 13. “Andrzej Duda is a decent man, but in the bigger scheme of things it’s not about him,” but about what Kaczynski wants, he said.

Market Alarm

Echoing policies pursued by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, such as more taxes on banks and retail companies, Duda alarmed markets. He also campaigned against Poland joining the common euro currency, saying it would cause a spike in prices and erode the nation’s economic sovereignty.

The zloty has tumbled 1.3 percent against the euro since before Duda won the first round of elections on May 10, the worst-performance among 24 emerging-market currencies after Columbia’s peso, Brazil’s real and Hungary’s forint.

The yield on benchmark 10-year bonds jumped 33 basis points in the period to 2.93 percent this week, the highest since October. An index of Warsaw-listed banks dropped 3.4 on Monday, the biggest daily decline in four months.

Duda’s proposals, which include reducing the retirement age, raising the level of non-taxable income and tax benefits for families, could cost more than 400 billion zloty ($109 billion) during the next five years, according to Finance Minister Mateusz Szczurek. That’s more than Poland’s planned 2015 budget revenue and sixfold the forecast deficit.

But this didn’t matter to Duda’s voters, especially those under 30 years old who were his staunchest supporters. They’re facing youth unemployment rates of 20.5 percent, a fraction below the EU average. Reluctant to move to the U.K. or other richer western nations like as many as 2 million of their countrymen did since 2004, they pushed to alter the status quo.

“Our grandchildren told us they’d leave the country unless we voted for Duda,” 79-year-old music teacher Jozef Balakier said after casting his ballot in Warsaw. “Maybe something will change.”