A glossy magazine cover depicting a bare-breasted Angela Merkel suckling the nationalist twin rulers of Poland has reignited tensions between Berlin and Warsaw — just days after a bad-tempered European summit nearly collapsed because of Polish resistance to a German blueprint on how to run the European Union.
The right-wing Warsaw weekly Wprost, which backs the conservative nationalist regime of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, has the cover of its latest issue as a montage showing a beaming Merkel as “Europe’s stepmother” baring her breasts to nourish the infant Polish twins.
In an article in the magazine, a Polish government official reacted to last month’s summit in Brussels, at which Poland stood alone, threatening to wreck a deal, and won big concessions from Merkel, by arguing that Germany was treating its eastern neighbour “neo-colonially” and refusing to accept it as a European partner.
Mariusz Muszynski, the Polish ministry official who advises on relations with Germany, accused Merkel of “humiliating” Poland at the summit because she was “full of complexes herself”.
The magazine’s treatment of Merkel was condemned across the political spectrum in Germany. “This montage is tasteless and does nothing to help German-Polish relations,” said Rainer Bruderle, of the liberal Free Democrats.
In the run-up to the June summit, the Polish prime minister stunned colleagues in Europe by seeking to parlay Polish suffering at the hands of the Nazis into greater power in EU councils. Had it not been for the Nazi occupation and murder of six million Poles, Poland would be much bigger and more powerful in the EU, he argued.
Kaczynski lost, but got a new EU voting system postponed, guaranteeing that in crucial talks on EU budgets in 2013/14, Warsaw will be in a more powerful position than it might have been.
Wprost has often used graphics to provoke Germany. Its editor-in-chief, Stanislaw Janecki, told Spiegel Online: “We just wanted to have a bit of fun.” He said Merkel was admired in Poland “particularly with regard to relations with Russia”.
But the timing of the stunt was awkward, as both governments sought to recover from the summit showdown. — Â