War of words

It was the week when finally the gloves came off. The president, in thinly veiled comments, called into question the prime minister's ability to remain in office, and the prime minister responded by tarring the president with the brush of the Rywin scandal.

There had been a lull in the squabbling between the two men, but then hostilities broke out again when Aleksander Kwaśniewski revealed that he had told Leszek Miller and Gazeta Wyborcza editor Adam Michnik as long ago as September to report to the prosecutor what they knew about an attempt by Lew Rywin to solicit a bribe from newspaper publisher Agora. Kwaśniewski went on to suggest that the government should resign if its plummeting popularity ratings, resulting in part from the fraud scandal, were to hinder much-needed reforms and jeopardise the outcome of the EU referendum.

Miller's response was to point out that, if the president had thought the matter was so important, then he should have gone to the prosecutor himself. To add spice to the argument, Miller dropped the bombshell that he had found out that the president had himself received a letter from Rywin at the end of July. Miller declined to describe the letter's contents, saying it was not polite to reveal what was written to someone else.

So the president handed the letter over to the parliamentary commission investigating the Rywin affair, and thus its contents became public knowledge. In what was in reality a badly written note, Rywin claimed that Agora was falsely accusing him of corruption, and heavily implicated TVP president Robert Kwiatkowski in the affair.

Meanwhile, Miller was insisting that his government had no intention of resigning, saying the country needed political stability to prepare itself to join the EU in 2004. But the prime minister said he would not rule out the possibility of general elections being brought forward to mid-2004 from 2005.

Public prosecutors then questioned the president as a witness in the corruption scandal. In a move that shocked many, they called at his palace in Warsaw to discuss the Rywin-gate affair. The parliamentary commision even discussed the possibility of taking the unprecedented step of asking the president to testify.

However, Joanna Szymanek-Deresz, head of the president's chancellery, said that by law the president should not appear before the commission.

While the debate surrounding the possible involvement of the prime minister and the president in the whole affair rumbled on, Rywin-gate did produce a casualty. Juliusz Braun, chairman of the National Radio and Television Council, resigned. Explaining his decision, Braun said that his views could not be reconciled with those put to the Sejm commission by council secretary Włodzimierz Czarzasty.

"For some of my colleagues my confessions during the hearing were a problem. My opinion is simply different. The real problem is the facts, not words," Braun said.