Polish leader eyes quick election

POLAND’S acting president vowed to move swiftly to set an election date and remove uncertainty after the deaths of President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of other high-ranking officials in a plane crash.

The coffin of Kaczynski’s wife Maria was received by family members, top military officials and senior Catholic clergy at a sombre ceremony at Warsaw airport before being driven to the presidential palace to lie in state alongside her husband.

Thousands of Poles lined the 10-kilometre route to the city centre, showering the hearse carrying the popular first lady with flowers in a repeat of the moving procession that brought the president’s body home Sunday.

Kaczynski, a combative nationalist known for his distrust of both the European Union and Russia, had been travelling to mark the 70th anniversary of the massacre of more than 20,000 Polish officers by Soviet secret police in the Katyn forest in western Russia when his plane went down Saturday in thick fog.

A total of 96 people died in the crash, including Polish military commanders, top opposition figures and the central bank governor, plunging the country into mourning and bringing forward a presidential vote scheduled for October.

Bronislaw Komorowski, the lower house speaker and a member of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Platform (PO), had been expected to easily beat Kaczynski in the election.

But popular sympathy for him and other victims of the plane crash has made it harder to predict the outcome.

“The election date must be set,” Komorowski told TVP Info television, promising to announce the date today. “This must be done as soon as possible to shorten the period in which Poland is in a period of uncertainty.”

Legislators, religious leaders and relatives of the dead, many in tears, packed into parliament for a special joint session to honour the victims yesterday. Red and white flowers, the colours of the Polish flag, and photos of parliamentarians who perished were placed on their vacant seats.

The deceased president’s identical twin brother Jaroslaw, who heads the right-wing opposition party Law and Justice, stood alone in the front row of the chamber as a quartet played American composer Samuel Barber’s melancholy Adagio for Strings.

The surviving twin’s party must move quickly to come up with a candidate to take on Komorowski. According to the Polish constitution, the election must take place within 60 days of the announcement. The most likely dates for the vote appear to be May 30 or June 13.