PRESS REVIEW: Former FM Sikorski and wife behind Poland's bad PR abroad: w Sieci

The weekly criticizes former Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and his wife Anne Applebaum, an influential US writer and a columnist for The Washington Post and The Spectator.

w Sieci recalls Sikorski’s controversial 2011 speech in Berlin in which he said: “I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity”.

The weekly adds that a few months ago, Sikorski, who is now a lecturer at Harvard University, went on record claiming that “Poland’s greatest successes in the European Union have been in those areas in which Poland forfeited its national sovereignty”.

The Sikorskis are openly critical of the Polish president and the country's conservative government, and through their extensive network of contacts are said to play a prominent role in shaping opinions about Poland in the media abroad.

In its Monday issue, w Sieci said that the Sikorskis' stance on current developments in Poland is biased and “does not even pretend” to present the arguments of both the opposition and the government.

One of the examples cited by the weekly is Anne Applebaum’s description of the ruling parties in Poland and Hungary as “national socialists”, a label that brings to mind Hitler’s party in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Applebaum admitted that the head of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński, and Hungarian PM Viktor Orban “are not fascists yet”, but added that “this is likely to happen with time”.

The weekly argues that it is difficult to imagine prominent Western media trying to sell as independent journalism “propaganda attacks by the wife of a prominent politician directed at his opponents”. (mk/rg/pk)