Polish FM said to have called US ties 'worthless'
Today @ 09:26
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- By Lukasz Lipinski
Warsaw - Poland may be heading for
early elections if an ongoing eavesdropping scandal continues to grow, with
foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, seen as in the running for a top EU job,
now caught up in the affair.
Radek
Sikorski - his name has often appeared in connection with the EU foreign policy
post, up for grabs later this year (Photo: consilium.europa.eu)
Sikorski was apparently caught
rubbishing relations between Warsaw and Washington, according to tapes
published by weekly magazine Wprost.
He told to Jacek Rostowski, then
finance minister, that relations with the US create a false sense of security
in Poland and cause conflicts with Germany and Russia. "The
Polish-American alliance is worthless," he said, according to the tapes.
"We'll think that everything is
super, because we gave the Americans a blow job. [We are] losers. Complete
losers," said Sikorski, who has often been mentioned as a potential
successor to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
He described the Polish attitude
toward the US as "murzynskosc", which can be translated roughly as
"like negroes" or more politely as "negritude".
"The problem in Poland is that
we have very shallow pride and low self-esteem," he added.
According to the tapes, Rostowski
agreed to support Sikorski in his campaign to become EU energy commissioner. In
return, Sikorski promised to get Rostowski the top place on the EU election
list for his constituency.
The conversation between top
officials in Poland’s ruling party Civic Platform (PO) allegedly took place in
one of the Warsaw’s restaurants in January.
The scandal started a week ago when
Wprost published the first portion of secretly taped conversations between
politicians.
They appeared to reveal that in July
2013 internal affairs minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz asked the head of the
central bank for support in financing the budget deficit if the economic
situation and ruling party polls were to worsen.
Central banker Marek Belka, in turn,
asked for the dismissal of Rostowski (which happened in November).
According to Wprost there are
hundreds of hours of tapes recorded in different restaurants. The weekly says
that they got some of them by e-mail from a businessman.
An investigation is underway into
who was part of the taping.
According to leaks from prosecutors,
some waiters were involved (one has already been charged), but it is not known
who might have asked them to do it. Some commentators blame the opposition,
some blame other sources – such as foreign secret services or business lobbies.
Investigators raided Wprost's office
on Wednesday (18 June) to get the recordings, but after some hours they were
forced to retreat amid protests by journalists from different newspapers.
Wprost passed the tapes to the prosecutors the next day.
At the beginning prime minister
Donald Tusk tried to play down the crisis and claimed that internal affairs
minister Sienkiewicz and central banker Belka did not break the law.
But as the scandal evolved he was
forced to change his position.
On Thursday, Tusk said he did not
rule out Sienkiewicz's dismissal and for the first time said that should the
political crisis escalate, early elections might follow.
Opposition parties are calling on
the government to step down. They have also filed a motion for a parliamentary
inquiry.
However an early election is
unlikely to happen soon. The PM is seen as wanting to discipline his party and
the governing coalition by raising the possibility.
But this strategy will depend on
subsequent recordings. If nothing too substantial is revealed, Tusk may be able
to regain control of the situation and defend his cabinet before parliament.
In the long run, much also depends
on the poll ratings of Tusk’s PO.
If they take a dive due to the
wiretapping scandal, the prime minister will find it hard to maintain a safe
majority in parliament.
The next electoral test is meant to
be local elections in November. If PO loses these, the government may not last
until the general election scheduled for autumn 2015.
Section
Comment of Donald Hank:
If, despite
the below described faux-pas, Sikorski becomes the EU foreign minister,
replacing the worthless figurehead Catherine Ashton, that could signal a
sea change in relations between the US oligarchs and the rest of the
world.
Put
this together with the recent anti-Fed movement in Germany and the
chafing at NSA's spying in Europe and the dictators in Washington could
lose much of their clout. They would no longer be able to enforce
sanctions against Russia, for example, and if the trend in Germany
toward a rapprochement with Russia continues, then Russia, acting in
concert with Europe, could provide a long-desired counterweight to US
foreign policy, which, among other things, is threatening to establish,
behind the scenes, a caliphate in the Middle East.
These insane policies must not prevail.
A come-uppance for the smarty pants world changers in Washington is long LONG overdue.
Don Hank
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