Mitt Romney left Israel for Poland and a meeting with Lech Walesa Monday after raising more than $1 million from 40 supporters at a breakfast.
Poland is the last stop in his three-country tour that began in Britain and is designed to win him support from those opposing President Barack Obama’s foreign policies, especially towards Israel.
His trip got off to a bad start when he questioned London’s preparedness for the Olympics, a comment that was roundly criticized as a snub of one of America’s closest allies.
He won a warmer-than-warm reception in Israel, capping off his two-day visit with a breakfast with approximately 40 supporters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The fund raising event added more than $1 million to his campaign coffers, and among those present was gambling casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who owns the Hebrew-language and pro-Netanyahu Yisrael HaYom newspaper
In Poland, he will visit Gdansk’s Solidarity Square, where the movement began to break the hold Soviet Communism had over Poland since the end of World War II and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Solidarity movement was led by Walesa, who was elected the country’s president in 1990, seven years after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Romney is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Gdansk before visiting the site of the first clash between Polish and Nazi forces during Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.
The presumptive Republican party’s presidential candidate will speak in Warsaw on Tuesday on “U.S.-Poland relationship and the values of liberty,” according to his campaign advisers. Romney’s foreign policy adviser is Ian Brzezinski, a deputy assistant defense secretary under former President George W. Bush.