Polish president depicted as potato in German paper

A GERMAN paper published photos comparing Poland’s president to a potato yesterday on the eve of a summit between Germany, Poland and France — five months after the three-way meeting was scrapped following a similar jibe.

Berlin’s left-wing Tageszeitung daily printed two pictures of Polish president Lech Kaczynski next to potatoes on its front page below the headline: “Which one of you is it that’s coming again?”

The paper sparked a furore in July when it called newly elected Kaczynski “Poland’s new potato” and said he was among “rogues who want to rule the world”. Diplomats said then the row scuppered a three-way summit, now set for today in Germany.

To liken someone to a potato is seen in Polish culture as rather like calling them a peasant.

“Now he is actually coming. Last time he didn’t. So we wanted to welcome him,” the newspaper’s deputy editor Reiner Metzger said, referring to Kaczynski, whose twin brother Jaroslaw is prime minister.

“It is supposed to look like the children’s game ‘snap’ but it’s also a play on the fact that all the Kaczynskis look the same,” he said of the photographs.

Germany’s Angela Merkel and French President Jacques Chirac will try to woo an increasingly renegade Poland into the EU fold over energy ties with Russia.

Kaczynski’s office said the July summit was cancelled because the president was ill.

Relations between Berlin and Warsaw have been strained by Germany’s support for a Russian gas pipeline by-passing Poland, and more recently by a Berlin exhibition on expulsions organised by Germans forced to flee eastern Europe in 1945.

Many Poles believe that the group, which represents 12.5 million Germans evicted from eastern parts of the defeated German Reich after World War Two, wants to rewrite history.