Udział mniejszości niemieckiej w wyborach w III RP, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem wyborów do Sejmu i Senatu w 2023 roku
Participation of the German Minority in the Third Polish Republic’s Elections with the Emphasis on the Elections to the Sejm and the Senate in 2023

Summary/Abstract: The elections to the Sejm of the 10th and the Senate of the 11th term, scheduled for October 15, 2023, were described in the media and political discourse as the most important election since 1989. In the Opole Voivodeship, the electoral context was mainly created by the problem of financial and time limitations in learning German as a national minority language, which was the result of the introduction of discriminatory mechanisms against the German minority into the Polish legal system at the beginning of 2022. The polarization of the Polish political scene, which has been growing over the years, contributed to the record-breaking voter turnout that amounted to as much as 74.38%. A record level of voter participation in voting was also achieved in the Opole Voivodeship, which amounted to 66.55%. As a result of the elections, twelve members of the Polish Sejm and the three Senators were elected from the Opole Voivodeship. However, for the first time, there is no representative of the German minority among the Opole parliamentarians. The article, summarizing the participation of the German minority in elections in Poland after 1990, proposes a detailed analysis of the results obtained in the 2023 election.

• Details
• Contents