Mourning Poland prepares for fresh political rows

POLAND steeled itself yesterday for a return to political wrangling after burying president Lech Kaczynski, as hundreds of mourners bid a final farewell at his tomb.

Lawmakers are this week set to announce June 20 as the date for presidential elections after Kaczynski and 95 others died in a plane crash in Russia, while other top posts left vacant by the accident must also be filled.

Around 150,000 mourners thronged Krakow on Sunday for the funerals of Kaczynski and his wife Maria, who were buried alongside kings, national heroes and poets at the historic Wawel Castle.

“I hope that a certain social peace is preserved under the circumstances. The usual kind of election campaign is totally inappropriate,” Jadwiga Wrobel, 67, said as she queued to see the couple’s tomb yesterday.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, one of the few foreign leaders to beat Europe’s volcanic ash-spawned air travel crisis and attend the funeral, called for reconciliation between the two often hostile neighbours.

Kaczynski’s government jet slammed into a forest in western Russia on April 10 while heading for a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish prisoners of war by Soviet secret police in the nearby Katyn forest.

Polish acting president Bronislaw Komorowski has accepted Medvedev’s invitation to attend a May 9 ceremony in Moscow’s Red Square marking the 65th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II.

“The time of mourning is coming to an end. Politics is back in Poland and with it comes conflict, arguments and, let’s have no illusions, scandal-mongering battles,” Wojciech Maziarski, chief editor of the Polish edition of Newsweek, wrote.