Polish PM invites rival president for Christmas kitchen-table talks, gets frosty response
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has invited President Karol Nawrocki and his family to his home for a pre-Christmas conversation, offering a seat at his kitchen table in an attempt to ease a bitter political dispute.
The president's office responded by calling the invitation an insincere political maneuver.
Tusk made the public offer on November 11 during a ceremony in the Polish city of Szczecin, where a new ferry, Bursztyn Unity, was being christened, Polish broadcaster RMF24 reported.
“Mr. President, we were supposed to meet. I waited a little for that invitation,” Tusk said. “But from the heart, without waiting any longer, I want to invite you, together with your wife, your family and your children, to my home in Sopot.”
He proposed sharing opłatek, a thin Christmas wafer traditionally exchanged in Poland as a gesture of goodwill, before Christmas Eve.
“My apartment isn't big, but there will be room for the two of us at the kitchen table,” Tusk said. “Let's talk, as people used to say, as one Pole to another.”
“Poland is worth our conversation. Poland is worth the solidarity of Polish women and men,” he added.
The invitation came amid a dispute between the prime minister and president over Poland's Constitutional Tribunal, the country's constitutional court.
But the presidential office was unimpressed.
Nawrocki's spokesperson, Rafał Leśkiewicz, described the offer as a “clever move” by Tusk.
“There is absolutely no sincerity in it. We have no illusions about that. It was a purely political gesture,” Leśkiewicz told Polish media on November 12.
He accused Tusk of violating the constitution and using police to install what he called “usurpers” at the Constitutional Tribunal. Those were the spokesperson's allegations, not established findings.
Leśkiewicz said Nawrocki was willing to meet the prime minister, but only if two conditions were met: police must be withdrawn from the tribunal, and judges whom the president considers entitled to enter the building must be allowed access.
“A meeting should certainly take place,” the spokesperson said, “but those two conditions must be fulfilled.”
For now, Tusk's invitation to share a Christmas wafer at his kitchen table has not produced an agreement to meet.