Polish ruling Law and Justice MP Tadeusz Cymański publicly apologised for a tweet by a minister insulting opposition leader Donald Tusk after a football match where Poland beat Germany.
Poland’s win over Germany in Friday’s football match in Warsaw, only the second in history, made big waves in Polish media but also led to a surge in historical resentment. In the Polish ruling camp, on the other hand, some brought up its old rhetoric, presenting ex-Prime Minister Donald Tusk as Berlin’s agent.
“Poland – Tusk 1:0,” Deputy Climate Minister Jacek Ozdoba commented on the match’s result on Twitter. The tweet met with criticism from both other politicians and sports officials. “Excuse me, what a moron?” former football player and head of the Polish Football Association, Zbigniew Boniek, tweeted.
Asked about Ozdoba’s tweet in a private Polsat News television morning programme, ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party MP, Tadeusz Cymański, said he would not use similar words and was sad because of that comment. He also apologised to “anyone who felt resentful” because of it.
The public apology irritated Ozdoba, who replied by criticising Cymański and accusing him of “having his mouth full of clichés” while “doing nothing and being passive in social issues.”
Associating Tusk with Germany is a frequent theme in the political agitation of PiS and Sovereign Poland, its junior coalition. Combined with anti-German rhetoric, they aim to present the former European Council President as the pupil of ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel and an enemy of Poland.
In recent years, state broadcaster TVP, widely considered government-controlled, has repeatedly blamed Tusk for various internal problems, often emitting a video with Tusk uttering the words “für Deutschland,” a two-second, taken out-of-context fragment of one of his past speeches.
In some other material from its evening news service, TVP compared Tusk to the Teutonic Order, a German crusader Catholic order defeated by Poland and Lithuania in one of the largest battles of mediaeval Europe in 1410. “Tusk gave an order for the attack on Poland,” the news bar said.
PiS and Tusk’s centre-right Civic Platform (PO) have been the two leading forces in Polish politics since the early 2000s. Having come to power in 2015, PiS is now the favourite to secure its third consecutive term in the autumn’s elections.
According to the newest poll, the ruling coalition enjoys the support of 33.5% of Poles, which gives it a relatively stable advantage over the Civic Coalition (KO), headed by PO (28.7%).
KO won a few percentage points after the big march organised by Tusk on 4 June, which gathered between 100 thousand and 500 thousand opposition supporters, one of the largest demonstrations in Poland’s post-communist history.
(Aleksandra Krzysztoszek | EURACTIV.pl)
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