Jaroslaw Kaczynski has announced he will run to “succeed his twin bother as president of Poland”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/21e3fb1a-5194-11df-bed9-00144feab49a.html. While I am aware of spouses attempting to fill the seats of their deceased spouse, I don’t know of a previous instance when a twin has attempted to do this. A key distinction between this case and other attempts at substituting one family member for another following a tragedy is that Jaroslaw Kaczynski is very well known to the Polish public as the head of the Polish “Law and Justice”:http://www.pis.org.pl/main.php party, and as an ex-Prime Minister (2006-2007). Moreover, of late Kaczynski has been distinctly unpopular:
bq. Source: “CBOS”:http://www.cbos.pl/: Zaufanie de Politykow w Styczniu, Pub: BS/9/2010
The above graph compares his popularity (blue) both to this brother (green) – who was also unpopular but was better liked – and to Bronislaw Komorowski (green), the nominee of the ruling Civic Platform party and the current acting Polish president, over the past year and a half. Based on these numbers, the chances for J. Kaczynski to win the election look slim, so it will be interesting to see if gets any sort of “sympathy bounce”, and/or if this sympathy bounce is mitigated by his previous levels of unpopularity.