Thin-skinned PiS' fury over German paper jibe
Przemysław Gosiewski, a Law and Justice deputy who will soon become a cabinet member, has asked the prosecutor's office to carry out a probe into the publication of the German left-wing paper Tageszeitung. According to Gosiewski, the paper insulted the Polish head of state, and he has also suggested that Poland could issue a European arrest warrant for Peter Koehler, the author of the article.
The fringe German paper was brought into the international spotlight after it ran a satirical article on the Polish President, Lech Kaczyński, who subsequently decided to pull out of a Weimar summit, where he was to meet with German leader Angela Merkel and French president Jacques Chirac. Both the Polish and foreign media claimed that Kaczyński had pulled out of the meeting because of the article and not as a result of a digestive tract ailment - the official excuse.
In the article, Peter Koehler compared President Kaczyński to a potato, joked about his twin brother Jarosław living with his mother and implied that the Kaczyński brothers were stealing money from the state budget. The Polish government called for the German Chancellery to condemn the article, but it refused to comment on matters of press freedom.
While the current Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga compared Tageszeitung to the Nazi publication Stürmer and outgoing Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz called the article an outrage, a group of former Polish Foreign Ministers wrote a letter condemning President Kaczyński's decision not to attend the Weimar Triangle meeting.
The President's absence at the summit also raised media concerns about his poor health. Daily Życie Warszawy wrote that Lech Kaczyński suffered from a serious coronary disease but Health Minister and heart surgeon Zbigniew Religa denied the newspaper's speculations.
"With all certainty President Lech Kaczyński does not have any heart disease," Minister Religa said after inspecting test results for the president and talking to his personal doctor. "His state of health is entirely normal, he has no health problems. I say this as a doctor, taking full responsibility." (Reuters)
