Former prime minister and longtime leader of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), Leszek Miller, strongly criticized the actions of Sejm Speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty toward the United States. As it turns out, even post-communists are not defending their former “comrade.”
Former prime minister Leszek Miller sharply responded to the speech by Sejm Speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty, who publicly criticized U.S. policy and President Donald Trump, for which the United States severed diplomatic ties with him. In Miller’s view, such actions are a display of incompetence:
“Foreign policy is not a competition for the sharpest phrase or a journalistic program broadcast from the Sejm podium. When the Speaker of the Sejm starts speaking like a commentator, and a commentator wants to speak like the sovereign, diplomacy ends where improvisation begins. And then complaints directed at the ambassador are nothing more than an attempt to drown out one’s own incompetence and lack of responsibility,” wrote Leszek Miller.
Czarzasty’s speech in the Sejm met with an immediate response from the American side. U.S. Ambassador to Poland Tom Rose announced the severing of working contacts with the Speaker of the Sejm following his public attacks on the U.S. president.
The former member of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) pointed out that Czarzasty had confused personal convictions with the official position of the state:
“Accusing the sitting U.S. president of ‘frequent violations of international law,’ uttered not in an emotional discussion ‘on a bus’ – where, according to a well-known TVN commentator, more can be said – but from the Sejm podium by the second most important person in the state, could not go unanswered,” Miller writes.
Miller assessed that the Speaker of the Sejm was thus attempting to act as an additional center of foreign policy:
“The ambassador, representing an allied superpower and the dignity of the office of the U.S. president, had no room for maneuver. This reaction was neither instructing Poland nor an attempt to interfere in our internal affairs, nor – even more so – a demand to remove the Speaker of the Sejm. The ambassador did not comment on Czarzasty’s usefulness in the Sejm. He merely stated that he saw no possibility of further contacts with a person who had publicly insulted his country’s president,” he analyzes.