Aleksander Kwaœniewski is a Polish politician and currently the President of Poland. He was an activist of Socialist Union of Polish Students. He succeeded Lech Wa³êsa as President after winning the 1995 elections. Kwaœniewski was elected for his second and final term as president in 2000 (gaining majority of votes already in the first round). He was also a former leader of the left-wing Socjaldemokracja Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, an heir to the Polish United Workers Party, and later of the Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (Democratic Left Alliance). He is an atheist.
Alliance of the Democratic Left (Polish: Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej, SLD) is one of the main Polish social democratic political parties. A coalition of parties used this name from 1991 to 1999. It was formally established as a single party on April 15, 1999. Most of the members who established the party in 1999 had previously been members of SdRP (Socjaldemokracja Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej - Social Democrats of the Republic of Poland). SdRP and some other socialist and social democratic parties had formed the original Alliance of the Democratic Left as a left-wing coalition just prior to the nation's first free elections in 1991. At the time, the coalition's membership drew mostly from the Polish communist party, the Polish United Workers Party, which ruled the People's Republic of Poland with Soviet support before 1989. An alliance between the SLD and the Polish Peasant Party ruled Poland in the years 1993–1997.