section_path: Europe/Poland
section_name: Poland
paragraph_text: Poland
  
  The Polish Sejm is elected by party-list ordination, which does not allow lone candidates to run, although since 2001 there has been a possibility to create a non-partisan Voters' Electoral Committee (pol. KWW, komitet wyborczy wyborców); they are by almost any means party lists, but no officially registered party is behind them. They can be unregistered parties, e.g. Kukiz'15, or non-partisan movements, although the latter never reached the 5% threshold. National minorities candidates also form Voters' Electoral Committees (like German Minority Electoral Committee, represented in Sejm between 1991 and 2023), but they do not have to reach the nationwide threshold. However, during a Sejm term many members switch parties or become independents.
  
  Tickets such as Civic Platform during the 2001 election were formally non-partisan, Civic Platform was widely viewed as a de facto political party, as it is now.
  
  The situation in the Senate is different, as the voting system allows independents to run as single candidates and some are elected in their own right. In the last parliamentary election (2023) four independents won seats in the Senate.
  
  Three presidents since 1990 have technically been independents. Lech Wałęsa was not an endorsed candidate of any party, but the chairman of the Solidarity and he was elected without full support of this union (Solidarity votes split between him and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki). Aleksander Kwaśniewski was a leader of the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland, but formally resigned from the party after he was elected, as did Lech Kaczyński, who was the first leader of Law and Justice, Bronisław Komorowski (PO) and Andrzej Duda (PiS). The resignation is required because the Constitution says that the president shall hold no other offices nor discharge any public functions. The aforementioned presidents often participated in their party's campaigns (e.g. Andrzej Duda in the Law and Justice campaign three months after his resignation from the party).