Poland's acting president on Sunday appeared to have fended off a stiff electoral challenge from the twin brother of the leader who died in a plane crash in April. 'I congratulate the victor,' Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin brother of the former president, Lech Kaczynski, said in a concession speech to the acting president, Bronislaw Komorowski. Final results from the election commission are not expected until Monday. With the official tally of votes incomplete, some of Kaczynski's supporters expressed hope that his concession might have been premature. But Polish public television projected that Komorowski, the governing party's candidate and the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, would win with 53.1 percent of the vote, with Kaczynski, a former prime minister, at 46.9 percent. Speaking before Kaczynski's concession speech, Komorowski stopped short of claiming an outright victory. 'Tonight we open a small bottle of champagne. For a bigger one, we will have to wait until tomorrow,' Komorowski, 58, a father of five, told supporters in central Warsaw. Komorowski said he wanted to 'create unity,' making reference to the plane crash that claimed the life of his predecessor, by calling the race 'an unusual campaign, a difficult campaign held in the shadow of catastrophe.' If the preliminary result holds up, it would mark a significant victory for the country's governing party, Civic Platform, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. With a member of his party controlling the presidency, Tusk no longer faces the constant threat of a presidential veto in enacting his agenda of economic changes, including privatizing state-owned enterprises and cutting government spending as part of a bid to join the group of countries using the euro currency. 'I hope that now Tusk will be able to carry out the reforms he could not before,' said Danuta Sterna, 58, a teacher from Warsaw, outside a polling place here. She cited education and relations with the European Union as other areas where she hoped for improvement. But the tight vote also illustrated how politically polarized the Polish people remain. Urban voters, and particularly those in the western part of the country, tend to support Civic Platform and its agenda of economic liberalization. Rural voters and the most religious, especially in the eastern part of the country, support the more nationalist Kaczynski and his Law and Justice Party. 'It is the presidential elections that tend to divide Poland in the worst way possible,' said Jaroslaw Flis, a political scientist at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. 'It is divided between people who feel morally superior and people who feel intellectually superior.' Starting in 2006, the Kaczynski twins occupied the two most important positions, president and prime minister, in Poland, which is the largest former Communist country to join the European Union and the NATO alliance. But Jaroslaw Kaczynski lost the post of prime minister in 2007 to Tusk, ending the brothers' unusual dual rule. The latest election was emotional and unpredictable from the start, when it was moved up by several months after Lech Kaczynski's death. He and 95 others, including his wife and dozens of top political and military leaders, were traveling to the Katyn forest, where more than 20,000 Polish officers and others were massacred by Stalin's secret police during World War II. Following that national tragedy, a series of deadly floods swept through Poland in May and June. The government came under sometimes harsh criticism over its response. Though Komorowski led by as much as 20 percentage points in polls after Kaczynski's twin announced his candidacy in April, the election ended much closer to even. Andrzej Rychard, a sociologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, said that Komorowski had positioned himself less as an independent candidate and more as a strong supporter of government policies, making him susceptible to blame for voter dissatisfaction. 'He presented himself more as a prime minister than as a presidential candidate,' Rychard said. Komorowski, who is often overshadowed by the popular prime minister, Tusk, did not help himself during the campaign with a number of verbal gaffes, including confusing the budget deficit with the national debt and saying he wanted to pull troops out of the NATO alliance when he meant to say Afghanistan. 'He's the opposite of the person who usually becomes president, with a strong point of view and a lot of charisma,' said Wiktor Swietlik, a political analyst and columnist for the newspaper Polska The Times who is working on a book about Komorowski. 'Not everybody has to be like Churchill, Roosevelt or de Gaulle.' 