EU Summit Fallout

This comes after a number of inflammatory remarks by Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski against the backdrop of the weekend's turbulent EU summit in which Germany and Poland clashed over proposed changes to the bloc's voting procedure that would weaken Warsaw's clout.

"Anybody who tries to weigh up the dead of the Second World War against votes in the (EU) Council has to be rejected out of hand," Martin Schulz, leader of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, told fellow lawmakers in Brussels on Wednesday to loud applause.

"The EU is an idea aimed at eliminating the specters of the past ... We will not permit the few to bring up those specters," he added.

Schulz was referring to Kacyznski's remarks that Poland deserved more voting power in the EU because its population would have been far larger if it had not been decimated during the Nazi era. The prime minister compounded matters on Tuesday when he compared modern-day Germany to the era that brought Adolf Hitler to power.

"Not representative"

Marek Siwiec, a Polish member of the European parliament said that Kaczynski's comments and the Polish blocking tactics at the EU summit did not represent the views of the Polish people.

He praised Germany for avoiding any kind of "demonstration of power" in its role as holder of the EU presidency vis-a-vis Poland and other EU states and praised German chancellor Angela Merkel's pleasant "new leadership style."

Poland eventually won concessions at the summit, notably a delay to the introduction of the new voting system which it opposed, but faced criticism for its negotiating manner.

The German chancellor continues to seek to play down the dispute with Poland.

"For us our Polish neighbor has the same importance as our French neighbor," she said in a speech on Wednesday in Brussels.

She has not commented on a controversial caricature of her that appeared on the front cover of the conservative Polish magazine Wprost on Monday. Entitled the "Stepmother of Europe," the photomontage depicted the German chancellor breast-feeding the Kaczynski twins.

Outrage

A number of German politicians expressed outrage on Tuesday about the caricature that accompanied an article written by Mariusz Muszynski, the Polish foreign minister's commissioner for German-Polish relations.

But Eckart von Klaeden, the foreign policy spokesman for the conservative CDU/CSU bloc, has also called for the matter to be approached in a more relaxed manner. He told the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung that press freedom also protected things that people might regard as stupid or tasteless.

Von Klaeden also referred to a caricature that appeared in Germany's taz newspaper a year ago that compared the Polish president as "Poland's new potato." At that time Berlin responded to protests from Warsaw by referring to the freedom of the press.

"Exactly the same standards should apply with regards to the cover of a Polish magazine," he said.

Von Klaeden also expressed optimism that the tensions between Germany and Poland would soon settle.

"Once all the momentary fuss has subsided, it will be possible to clearly see the success of the summit in Brussels," he said.