The election to find a successor to Polish president Lech Kaczynski, who died in plane crash last weekend, will most likely take place in June, an aide to Prime Minister Donald Tusk said today.
The date for the poll is expected to be June 20th.
Acting president Bronislaw Komorowski had been expected to announce the date on today after talks with politicians, but opposition parties had urged a delay.
Aide Grzegorz Schetyna said the final decision on the date would be taken on April 21st.
Mr Kaczynski had been expected to be the candidate of the main opposition right-wing Law and Justice party. The presidential candidate of the left-wing opposition SLD party was also among the 96 people killed in Saturday's crash in Russia.
Investigators are pointing to human error as the cause of the crash which also killed Poland's first lady Maria Kaczynska.
Yesterday, thousands of mourners knelt, prayed and cried before the first couple’s coffins in the palace’s Columned Hall in Warsaw, where the president appointed and dismissed governments.
At one point, the line to get in swelled to nearly a kilometre.
Polish television broadcast live images of mourners walking by the closed coffins. Many were families with children, parents and grandparents. A pair of soldiers flanked each coffin.
Earlier, Mrs Kaczynska’s body was greeted with tears and tulips after being flown home from Russia. Officials announced that the first couple would be buried on Sunday after a state funeral at Krakow’s Wawel Cathedral.
Archbishop of Krakow Stanislaw Dziwisz said the funeral rites would begin with a Mass at St Mary’s Basilica.
The bodies will then be carried in a funeral procession across the Old Town to the 1,000-year-old Wawel Cathedral - the main burial site of Polish monarchs since the 14th century and more recent heroes including 20th-century Polish statesman and military leader Jozef Pilsudski.
The first couple would be buried in a crypt near Pilsudski, Dr Dziwisz said.
The last Polish leader killed in office, General Wladyslaw Sikorski - the exiled second World War leader who perished in a mysterious plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943 - is also interred there.
But some Poles criticised the decision to bury Mr Kaczynski, whose combative style earned him many opponents, in a place reserved for the most esteemed of national figures.
Hundreds staged a protest in front of the archbishop’s residence in Krakow last night, carrying banners reading “Really worthy of kings?” and “Not to Wawel.”
US president Barack Obama will travel to Poland to attend Sunday’s funeral and Russian president Dmitri Medvedev and French president Nicolas Sarkozy are also expected to attend.
Mrs Kaczynska’s body, in a wooden coffin draped with Poland’s white and red flag, arrived in a military CASA plane at Warsaw’s Okecie airport. It was met by her only child Marta, and by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, her brother-in-law, the twin of the late president.
Marta knelt by her mother’s coffin and wept as an honour guard stood by.
Mrs Kaczynska’s body was ferried slowly to the Presidential Palace in a black Mercedes-Benz hearse, as her husband’s had been on Sunday. Thousands of Warsaw residents lined the route, gently lobbing bouquets of tulips and roses on top of the hearse.
The Tu-154 plane went down while trying to land in dense fog at Smolensk in western Russia. All aboard were killed, including dozens of Polish political, military and religious leaders.
They had been travelling in the Polish government-owned plane to attend a memorial in the Katyn forest for thousands of Polish military officers executed 70 years ago by Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s secret police.
Russian deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov said yesterday the plane appeared to have been functioning normally. The pilot had been warned of bad weather in Smolensk and advised by air traffic controllers to land elsewhere - which would have delayed the Katyn observances.
He was identified as Captain Arkadiusz Protasiuk (36). The co-pilot was Major Robert Grzywna (36).
Traffic controller Anatoly Muravyev, a member of the Russian team that handled the plane, told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper that the crew ignored their warnings about worsening weather.
The crew “started landing with confidence and with no swerving”, Mr Muravyev was quoted as saying. “But then the traffic controllers had doubts.” He said the head controller three times ordered the plane to reattempt the landing and then advised the pilot to fly to another airport.
“The crew did not listen, although the controllers warned them about bad visibility and told them to get ready to fly to a reserve airport,” Mr Muravyev said.
Polish prosecutor general Andrzej Seremet said prosecutors were still reviewing data from the flight recorders.
So far, 87 bodies had been recovered and 40 of them identified, he said.
Agencies