Poland’s interim president, Bronislaw Komorowski, placed first in yesterday’s elections to substitute head of state Lech Kaczynski, who died in an airplane crash, but faces a runoff against the late leader’s twin, exit polls showed.

Liberal parliamentary speaker Komorowski received 40.7 percent of the vote, ahead of 35.8 per cent for Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a conservative former prime minister, according to the polls. A contestant required 50 percent of the vote to avoid a second round of voting on July 4.

Pre-election polls suggested Komorowski, 58, would succeed a runoff against Kaczynski, 61. “In life, as in football and all sports, it’s extra time that’s the most difficult,” Komorowski, 58, told cheering supporters in his Warsaw.

The exit poll by the TNS OBOP agency for Polish public television was released as voting ended at 8 p.m. Partial official results are due early today.

The polling consequence gave centre-left Social Democrat Grzegorz Napieralski an unexpectedly high 14 percent, and both Komorowski and Kaczynski scrambled to praise him.

“Napieralski’s supporters will vote for Komorowski,” said sociologist Professor Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski. “If Napieralski decides otherwise, he risks losing the political capital he won during the campaign.”

The sudden election was called after Lech Kaczynski died alongwith 95 others, including his wife, Maria, and top political and military figures on April 10 when their aircraft crash in western Russia, leaving Poland reeling. They had been heading to a memorial ceremony for thousands of Polish officers killed by the Soviets during the Second World War.

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