WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland's main opposition party, the centrist Civic Platform, chose lawmaker and deputy parliament speaker Malgorzata Kidawa-Blonska as its presidential candidate at a party congress on Saturday.

Kidawa-Blonska will be facing the popular conservative incumbent, President Andrzej Duda, as well as the candidates of smaller parties in the election expected to be held in the spring.

“I will be the president of all Poles," she declared to party members after a secret vote in which 700 party delegates chose her over Poznan mayor Jacek Jaskowiak.

Kidawa-Blonska was also the opposition's candidate for prime minister in a parliamentary election in October. The party, however, lost to the ruling conservative Law and Justice party.

Civic Platform led Poland from 2007 to 2015, most of the time with Donald Tusk as prime minister before he left to become EU leader. During its eight years at the helm, the party oversaw economic expansion and even guided the country through the financial crisis of 2008 without Poland's economy falling into recession.

But voters grew tired of its heavily pro-market policies, which had also allowed inequalities to grow, and booted it out in 2015 in favor of a populist party that has expanded the welfare state.

Kidawa-Blonska is seen as a moderate politician with patriotic credentials. She is the great-granddaughter of both a pre-World War II president, Stanislaw Wojciechowski, and a prime minister, Wladyslaw Grabski.

In a separate political development on Saturday, two left-wing parties, the Democratic Left Alliance and Spring, were planning to join forces to strengthen the position of the political left in the ex-communist nation, which today leans heavily to the right.