The paper deals with non-partisan candidates in direct presidential elections in democratic countries of Europe. It comes up with identification of conditions and strategies (both for the candidates and political parties) which are favourable for non-partisan candidates and lead to a success in the form of winning the elections or at least moving to the second round of the presidential elections. The analysis is performed using the QCA while taking following features into consideration: Presence or absence of the incumbent, power of the president, a position of presidential elections within the parliamentary election cycle, nomination strategy of the strongest parties and previous political experience of the non-partisan candidate.