Polish local elections, 2006

The 2006 Polish local elections were held in two parts. with its first round on November 12 and the second on November 26, 2006. In the election's first round, voters chose 39,944 gmina councillors, 6,284 powiat councillors and 561 deputies to provincial voivodeship sejmiks. Additionally, 2,460 city and town mayors, borough leaders and other officials were decided by direct or runoff elections in the second round. The elections were seen as a test to the government of Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński, whose coalition between his own Law and Justice party and its junior coalition partners, the Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland and the League of Polish Families, had undergone a severe crisis two months prior.

Following the appointment of Jarosław Kaczyński as Prime Minister following the resignation of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the coalition between Kaczyński's own rightist Law and Justice, the agrarian Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland and the Christian right League of Polish Families parties experienced deep conflict. In September 2006, Self-Defense's leader Andrzej Lepper increasingly sparred with Kaczyński over the national budget, criticizing the prime minister's stance on rural infrastructure spending and sending extra troops to assist the War in Afghanistan. Kaczyński responded by asking for Lepper's dismissal from the government. In light of the political crisis, Kaczyński sought a new coalition partner in order to avoid early elections. One month later in October, Kaczyński and Lepper reconciled, returning Self-Defense to the coalition government and reappointing Lepper as both his deputy and as Minister for Agriculture. However, the coalition crisis dented the government's popularity in opinion polls.

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