President Komorowski has said the so-called 'tape affair' scandal, which has rocked the Civic Platform-led government, presents “a real threat to the stability of the Polish state”.
“We do not have enough knowledge today on who made and what has been achieved by these recording – we can only guess at the bad intents and purposes - but today we can see that the result is a real threat to destabilize the country,” Bronislaw Komorowski said on Monday following more contents of tapes being released by the Wprost magazine, in Poland's worst political scandal in years.
Komorowski said that he had been having meetings with Prime Minister Donald Tusk and deputy prime minister Janusz Piechociński, leader of the junior coalition partner PSL, on “whether there is still a desire and ability among the current coalition” to continue in government.
Prime Minister Tusk said last week that if the “crisis in confidence” in the government worsened then he would try to call for early elections.
'No change' in US relations
On recorded statements made at a restaurant in Warsaw earlier this year by Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, released on Monday by the magazine, that the “Polish-US alliance is worthless”, President Komorowski said that he “is not in the habit of commenting on the private conversations of ministers – especially when they were recorded illegally”.
“But when it comes to the official line of the Polish state in its relations with the United States, then nothing has changed,” Komorowski told reporters.
Earlier on Monday, Donald Tusk said that, “whoever is secretly recording politicians is not working for the public good but to destabilise the government”.
Amid calls for the resignation of his interior and foreign ministers, among others, Tusk added that he will not sack a minister whose, “only crime is to make inappropriate comments during confidential conversations,” and emphasised that the priority is now to ascertain the identity of whoever it is making the recordings.
Tusk said that opposition politicians, who are “rubbing their hands” at the prospect of the government in crisis are being “short sighted,” as a weakened Polish state cannot act effectively on the international or domestic stage, he said.
Maciej Karczynski, a spokesman for the Internal Security Agency (ABW) – which made the controversial raid on the Wprost magazine offices last week – said that the agency “know more than it can say” on the investigations into who is wire-tapping politicians.'
“For several days now the police and officers of the Internal Security Agency have been working together to solve this puzzle: to find the people responsible for the recordings, as well as to determine how, and why, they were made,” Karczyński told TVN24. (pg)
Ewa Malcher
