Early results from Poland's presidential election have given the country's acting president the lead, but not enough to avoid a runoff vote.

The State Electoral Commission said early on Monday that with more than 70 per cent of polling stations reporting, Bronislaw Komorowski had won 40.1 per cent of the votes, ahead of the 37.4 per cent for Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin brother of the late president, Lech Kaczynski.

But it appeared Komorowski would not garner enough votes for an outright win and is very likely to face Kaczynski in a runoff election on July 4, without the eight other candidates who ran in Sunday's first round.

Full results are expected later on Monday.

Political logjam

Victory would be a boon for Komorowski's Civic Platform party, unlocking a political logjam more than a year before the autumn 2011 parliamentary elections.

The election date was moved up after Lech Kaczynski was killed in a plane crash along with his wife and 94 others near the western Russian town of Smolensk on April 10.

Nazanine Moshiri, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Warsaw, said that there was a lot of sympathy for Kaczynski, following the death of his twin brother and as his mother is seriously ill in hospital.

"But there are other things at stake in this election, like the direction Poland is heading. Lech was very much against Poland joining the euro and withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

"He vetoed a lot of policies the government was trying to bring in to modernise and liberalise the market. So there're a lot of things on people's minds here."

Moshiri said that Komorowski was pro-Europe and pro-reforms, going against Jaroslaw Kaczynski's support base.

"So this really is a contest between two different visions of what the future should be here in Poland," Moshiri said.