Poland Riles Germany With a Lewd Take on the Motherland

A glossy magazine cover depicting a bare-breasted Angela Merkel suckling the nationalist twin rulers of Poland reignited tensions between Berlin and Warsaw days after a bad-tempered European summit nearly collapsed because of Polish resistance to a German blueprint on how to run the EU.

The right-wing Warsaw weekly magazine Wprost, which backs the conservative nationalist regime of the prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and his twin brother, the president, Lech Kaczynski, has the cover of its latest issue as a montage showing "a beaming chancellor 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 the weekend summit in Brussels, at which Poland stood alone threatening to wreck a deal and won big concessions from Mrs Merkel, by arguing that Germany was treating its eastern neighbor "neo-colonially" and refusing to accept it as a European partner. He accused Mrs Merkel of "humiliating" Poland at the summit because she was "full of complexes herself".

The magazine's treatment of Mrs Merkel was condemned across the political spectrum in Germany yesterday. "This montage is tasteless and does nothing to help German-Polish relations," said Rainer Brüderle, of the liberal Free Democrats.

Markus Meckel, of the Social Democrats, and head of the German-Polish parliamentary group, said: "It is quite unbelievable. Poland has lost so many friends over the past weeks and months. It should really think hard in the future about how it hopes to win them back."

In the run-up to last week's 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, half of them Jews, Poland would be much bigger and more powerful in the EU, he argued.

Mr 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 much more powerful position than it might have been.

But Mariusz Muszynski, the Polish ministry official who advises on relations with Germany, said in Wprost that Berlin still refused to treat Poland as "a partner" in Europe. Wprost, which has a circulation of 700,000, has often used graphics to provoke Germany. Its editor-in-chief, Stanislaw Janecki, defended the latest image. "We just wanted to have a bit of fun," he told Spiegel Online. He said Mrs Merkel was admired in Poland "particularly with regard to relations with Russia".

But the timing of the latest stunt was awkward, as both governments sought to recover from the weekend showdown.