Transcripts of a private meeting between President Kaczynski and Foreign Minister Sikorksi shows relations between government and head of state continue to worsen.
"Your ego is inflated to monstrous proportions," the President allegedly said to Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski during a private meeting on the negotiation of the US missile shield deployment.
"If you continue to insult me, I will leave," answered the minister. This is a part of the conversation between the two politicians, reported in the Dziennik daily.
The daily describes the meeting to which the head of state invited the foreign minister on 4 July. On that day, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that the American offer on the antimissile shield was unsatisfactory.
President Lech Kaczynski recorded the talks he had with Radoslaw Sikorski, the contents of which Dziennik claims it has access to.
According to the newspaper, the President was insinuating that Sikorski had betrayed Polish interests.
The president quizzed Sikorski on whether he knows the American Democrat Ron Asmus, as he suspected that Sikorski had made a secret pact with the Democrats, on a recent visit to Washington, that the deal on the anti-missile shield will be signed with them after the elections in November.
According to the daily, the president also thought that Sikorski translated the telephone conversation on the shield between Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Dick Cheney, the US Vice President, deliberately distorted what the politicians said to one another. Kaczynski repeatedly asked Sikorski if he is a translator, to which the latter responded that the conversation was translated by a White-House interpreter, not him.
The conflict between Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and President Lech Kaczynski has been going on since his appointment late last year after the autumn elections. The head of state has repeatedly said that Sikorski should not be in charge of Polish foreign policy.
The foreign minister on the other hand, allegedly told the head of the President's Office, Anna Fotyga, before a meeting between the President and the PM, at which Sikorski was present, that: "One can be a president, but also a boor."