A sombre election season in Poland was prolonged by two weeks when a first round of voting produced no immediate successor to Lech Kaczynski, the president killed more than two months ago in a plane crash.

EXIT polls in Poland’s presidential election last night show that the interim president and parliament speaker Bronislaw Komorowski is leading Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the brother of the president killed in a plane crash in April, but without the 50% needed for outright victory.

Frustrated Polish voters handed power to a reformed party of ex-communists in parliamentary elections and sent the once-mighty Solidarity bloc into political oblivion, exit polls showed.