Andrzej Lepper | Polish populist, 57

Andrzej Lepper, 57, a pig farmer-turned-firebrand populist who was briefly deputy prime minister in a shaky Polish government and who was later disgraced by a sex scandal, has died in what police suspected to be a suicide.

His body was found in his party office in Warsaw on Friday, police said. "Everything indicates that he killed himself," a police spokesman said.

Mr. Lepper rose to prominence in the 1990s, a time of deep social frustration in the early years after the fall of communism in Poland. Many communist-era jobs had been lost, unemployment was stuck around 20 percent, and the country was not yet enjoying the economic boom that came with European Union membership in 2004.

In 2000, he founded a party, Self-Defense, that became a junior partner in a conservative-nationalist government that held office from 2006 to 2007. He was deputy prime minister and agriculture minister in that government, which was led for most of its short, shaky tenure by then-Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Mr. Lepper was accused of soliciting sex from a woman who worked for his party and was convicted of those charges last year. - AP