Inedible potatoes

Pan Kaczynski was carried past Weimar

President Lech Kaczynski's refusal to go last Monday to Weimar, Germany, for a meeting that had been in preparation for six months with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Jacques Chirac caused a political storm in Poland. Kaczynski's decision became known just a few hours before the start of the event. Now it has been postponed indefinitely.

The failed summit would have been a jubilee - 15 years ago the “Weimar Troika” appeared, conceived as a tool for bringing Poland closer to NATO and the EU. After Poland entered the Iraq War on the side of the United States, the Weimar Troika weakened. However, Warsaw, jealously watching the strengthening of Russian-German relations, was interested in the meeting. Polish leaders did not hide that they would raise at the summit the issue of the Russian-German North European Gas Pipeline project, which the Poles strongly oppose.

The first explanation for the reason for postponing the meeting was laconic: President Kaczynski was “not feeling well.” This message from the presidential administration only fueled passions. Citing examples of similar cases in the US, Germany and other countries, Polish media demanded a medical report. Finally, the diagnosis was made public: a disorder of the gastrointestinal tract. Wanting to avert suspicions of a “diplomatic illness” from Mr. Kaczynski, the presidential ministers (that is, high-ranking employees of his administration) reported that there was an attempt to send Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz to Weimar instead of the president. But the organizers of the meeting politely replied that they were “interested in the previously agreed upon format.”

They began to remember that during the six months of his reign, the President of Poland had called in sick more than once. “A cold” and “high temperature” were the reasons for the cancellation of a meeting with Bill Gates, the absence from the annual meeting of the judges of the Constitutional Tribunal, and later from its anniversary meeting. The recent postponement of the visit to the UK also looked strange.

However, many are inclined to consider the article “Young Polish potatoes. Thieves who want to rule the world,” published last week in the German newspaper Tageszeitung. Written in a mocking tone, the text ridicules the Polish president for his narrow international outlook. “In Poland, many people place great distrust in everything that is not Poland. Ever since twelve-year-old Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother acted out so much buffoonery in the film “The Two Who Stole the Moon,” he has been closer to the Moon than to Germany or Russia,” said the author of the publication.

Minister of Presidential Administration Andrzej Krawczyk, who was preparing the visit to Weimar, called the publication outrageous and admitted that it “in fact became the reason for the president’s enormous anxiety.” At the same time, he stated that the president’s refusal to travel had nothing to do with the article. However, Warsaw is waiting to see how Berlin will react to the provocative publication.

It is noteworthy that the scandalous article was posted on the official website of the Polish Foreign Ministry, which provides an overview of the foreign press about Poland. For such an understanding of freedom of speech, the director of the information system department of the Polish Foreign Ministry, career diplomat Pavel Dobrovolsky, was immediately fired.

Valery MASTEROV, staff correspondent for the Moscow News newspaper in Warsaw, for Vremya Novostei