Both method, the failure to announce the compensation plan is humiliating for each leaders, who supposed to make use of the go to to mark a brand new, extra cooperative chapter in relations between the international locations. It additionally opens Tusk to intense criticism from right-wing populists at house who demand reparations from Germany.
Ultimately, the joint motion plan mentioned the 2 governments would stay “engaged in an intensive dialogue on measures to assist the dwelling victims of the German aggression and occupation between 1939 and 1945.”
Tusk tried to painting that dialogue in a optimistic mild, at the same time as he’s going through assaults from his political opponents at house.
“I’m not disenchanted,” he mentioned of the failure to achieve a right away compensation deal. “These are all steps that go in the correct course,” he mentioned. “The longer term will present whether or not my expectations and hopes are based mostly on strong foundations.”
PiS, now within the opposition, denounced the failure to get Germany to pay up.
“Scholz has handled Poles in a degrading method, and Tusk remains to be blissful about it,” former PM Beata Szydło posted on X.
Tusk has made repairing relations with Berlin a key a part of his effort to return Poland to the European mainstream. However 79 years after the top of a struggle that killed as many as 6 million Poles (half of them Polish Jews), the problem remains to be a uncooked wound.
“There isn’t any such gesture that might fulfill Poles, there is no such thing as a sum of cash that might offset all that occurred throughout World Conflict II. And right here there is no such thing as a dispute between us both,” Tusk mentioned.