This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Relations between Brussels and Poland’s hardline Eurosceptic government have deteriorated further after a Polish magazine published a cover portraying five leading EU politicians – including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel – in Nazi uniforms beneath the headline These people want to control Poland again.

The photoshopped image on the front of popular weekly Wprost showed Merkel, the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, European parliament president Martin Schulz, EU commissioner Günther Oettinger, and Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister, leaning over a map, echoing wartime photographs of Adolf Hitler and his generals.

In a post on his Facebook page, Verhofstadt, who heads the liberal Alde group in the European parliament, described the image as “outrageous”, adding that the EU was a “community of values” and that it was “the duty of all of us – commissioners, chancellors or not, to raise our voice when a government is endangering these principles and attacking democratic institutions”.

Guy Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt) This @TygodnikWPROST cover is outrageous, just like #Ziobro comments. My reaction via https://t.co/hU0AGJXIRR pic.twitter.com/flPhSK1JcH

Schulz and Oettinger, both German, have been sharply critical of the conservative, staunchly Catholic Law and Justice (PiS) party, which swept to power in October and has since sought to strengthen government control over the constitutional court, civil service and Polish public radio and television.

The commission has already written to the Polish government asking how its new media law will work with EU rules on media freedom. Schulz described the government’s actions as a “dangerous Putinisation of European politics”, while Oettinger suggested Poland should be put under rule of law supervision, legislation designed to deal with “systemic threats” to EU values.

Responding to the criticism, Poland’s government summoned Germany’s ambassador for talks and warned Brussels not to interfere in its affairs on the basis of “biased and politically engaged” reports.

The defence minister Antoni Macierewicz went further, saying Poland would not be lectured by Germany “on democracy and freedom”, while his colleague, justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, wrote an open letter to Oettinger alluding to the Nazi occupation of Poland.

“Such words, said by a German politician, cause the worst of connotations among Poles,” Ziobro wrote. “Also in me. I’m a grandson of a Polish officer, who during World War II fought in the underground National Army with ‘German supervision’.”