Polish air disaster: Right-wing twins who took their country's two top jobs

POLAND'S president was best known as one of the only pair of identical twins ever to run a country.

For a year and a half, deeply conservative Lech Kaczynski was served as prime minister by his like-minded brother Jaroslaw. Even as they passed their 60th birthday, many voters struggled to tell them apart, either by policy or appearance.

The Kaczynskis, extremely popular among the rural poor, were overtly nationalist, suspicious of the European Union and cool towards their country's former enemies, Germany and Russia.

Devout Catholics, they were also socially conservative. Lech Kaczynski, as mayor of Warsaw before becoming president in 2005, twice banned the Polish capital's gay pride parade.

The twins – and their Law and Justice party – had been losing ground politically. Jaroslaw was ousted as prime minister, arguably a more important job than the presidency, after elections in 2007.

He was replaced by Donald Tusk, a centre-right, pro-Europe figure whom Lech had defeated in the presidential poll. Lech was often accused of conspiring with Jaroslaw, who became leader of the opposition, to hinder Tusk's reforms.

Poles yesterday entered seven days of mourning. But within two months, they must elect a new head of state. A poll had been scheduled for this autumn. Lech Kaczynski, who had planned to stand again, was widely expected to be beaten by Tusk ally Bronislaw Komorowski, the current speaker of the Polish parliament, the Sejm. With so many figures in the Law and Justice party killed yesterday, it will struggle to find an electable candidate if Jaroslaw won't run.

Some of Poland's intelligentsia openly derided Lech Kaczynski. His enemies called him a "peasant". His friends, however, described him as pleasingly unpretentious and plain-spoken.

The Kaczynskis were veteran campaigners against the old Communist regime in Poland. Born in Warsaw in 1949 – their father was a hero of the city's uprising against its Nazi occupiers – the brothers spent much of their lives opposing the Soviet-imposed regime. In the late 1970s, they advised the country's first independent trade union, Solidarity, and its leaders in the shipyards of Gdansk. Both men were arrested in 1981 when the government imposed martial law.

They were eventually to fall out with Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, accusing him of doing dirty deals with the Communists. Last year, Walesa, who became Poland's first post-Communist president, sued Lech Kaczynski for suggesting he had spied for the old regime.