Poland’s government has named a new figure to head the Polish embassy in the United States. However, he will not formally be an ambassador because President Andrzej Duda, an ally of the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, has refused to sign off on his nomination.
The appointment of Bogdan Klich, a senator from the main ruling Civic Platform (PO) party, has also been criticised by PiS figures given that he has strongly criticised Donald Trump in the past.
“Senator Bogdan Klich will soon arrive in Washington and take over the management of the Polish embassy,” foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told broadcaster RMF.
“He probably won’t be an ambassador because the president announced that he won’t sign off [on nominations] for anyone, especially not for Senator Klich, but he will become the head of the mission,” added Sikorski.
Last month, Duda announced that, while he remains in office, he will not sign off on the government’s nomination for Klich to become ambassador.
He noted that Klich served as defence minister at the time of the Smolensk disaster, when a Polish military plane crashed in Russia, killing then-president Lech Kaczyński and 95 others.
“Radosław Sikorski and [Prime Minister] Donald Tusk want to send as Polish ambassador to the US, to the world’s largest military power, where the safety and health of the president is in a category unimaginable to Poles, a man who was defence minister when the president of Poland died in a plane crash in a military plane,” said Duda.
“It will be one big joke,” added the president, speaking to TV Republika. “I will never agree to this, as long as I am the president for another fourteen months I will never sign this ambassadorial nomination. I will not sign it because I will not compromise Poland.”
However, speaking to RMF, Sikorski said that “if PiS has proof of Senator Klich’s participation in the Smolensk attack, he will not go to the US but to jail”.
PiS has long claimed that the former PO-led government was responsible for causing the Smolensk crash, or at least helped Russia cover up the true causes. However, despite spending eight years and tens of millions of zloty reinvestigating the crash, PiS has failed to offer proof supporting its claims of a conspiracy.