Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s pro-euro Civic Platform party is likely to cement its grip on power in a presidential election that must now be held by June after President Lech Kaczynski died in a plane crash.
Polls taken before the April 10 accident showed Civic Platform’s candidate, Bronislaw Komorowski, was running ahead of Kaczynski and other contenders in an election originally scheduled for October. The tragedy, in Smolensk, western Russia, killed all 96 passengers on route to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet forces.
Following the crash, in which Left Democratic Alliance party candidate Jerzy Smajdzinski also died, Komorowski is left as the sole surviving contender of Poland’s three major parties. The only significant impediment to a Civic Platform victory may be the possibility of a wave of sympathy for the dead president, political commentators said, and that still probably won’t be enough to prevent Tusk extending his control over the political system.
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