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WARSAW — There’s a lot of electoral mileage in Poland from attacking migrants.
Both the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party and the centrist opposition led by former European Council President Donald Tusk are raising fears about Muslim immigrants ahead of this fall’s parliamentary election.
PiS seized on the issue over the last few weeks. The government held out against an EU deal on relocating migrants — drawing the ire of most fellow member countries as well as the European Commission. Party leader and the country’s de facto ruler Jarosław Kaczyński called for a referendum on the issue to be held alongside the election.
“We will not agree to this. The people of Poland also do not agree to this,” Kaczyński said during a rally Saturday, referring to the EU relocation plan.
It’s an effort to replay the scenario that helped the party win power in an election held during the peak of the EU’s migration crisis in 2015. At that time, Kaczyński darkly warned that migrants coming to Europe were carrying “all sorts of parasites and protozoa.” He lambasted the government of the time, led by Tusk’s Civic Platform party, for agreeing to take in some asylum seekers under an EU plan.
But this year, Tusk is fighting back using language straight from PiS’s playbook.
Attacking migration
In a series of social media videos earlier this month that have gone viral in Poland, Tusk warned that PiS is trying to distract public attention by denouncing the EU migration plan, which wouldn’t actually see any people arriving in Poland, while opening the door to mass migration from Muslim countries.
Tusk started by referring to the riots sweeping France — echoing the same language used by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki during last month’s European leaders’ summit dealing with the migration issue. To the fury of France, Morawiecki tweeted about the riots and said: “We don’t want such scenes in any city in Europe … stop illegal migration. Safety first.”
Pivoting off the French riots, Tusk said that Kaczyński is “preparing a document that will allow even more people to come from countries like Saudi Arabia, India, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.” He went on to accuse the government of bringing in 130,000 people from those countries last year, 50 times more than when Tusk’s party was in power in 2015.
“Why is Kaczyński scapegoating strangers and immigrants while wanting to let hundreds of thousands of them in at the same time? Maybe it’s because he wants an internal conflict and Polish citizens to be afraid because that’s when it’s easier for him to rule,” Tusk said.
“Poles must regain control over this country and its borders,” he concluded.
Tusk is following other center-right politicians in Europe, who are trying to cater to popular fears over increases in migration as a way to compete with populist rivals.
Condemnation
Tusk’s language was denounced by the Left opposition party and human rights NGOs as borderline racist and xenophobic.
“Competing with the far right is not a ‘vote on migration policy.’ It’s wrestling with a pig in the mud,” said Adrian Zandberg, one of the Left’s leaders.
But Tusk’s attack on PiS’s confusing migration strategy has thrown the ruling party into disarray.
It’s still going forward with its referendum plans, but backed away from an earlier effort to ease migration rules.
“The initiative was clearly a mistake and has been stopped,” Kaczyński told the government-run Polish Press Agency.
Tusk’s videos have hit a sore spot in a country that is undergoing wrenching demographic change.
Until a few years ago, Poland was one of the most homogenous countries in Europe. A decade ago just 0.3 percent of people in Poland were born abroad. The vast majority was Polish and Roman Catholic — a legacy of the war that saw Germany murder most Polish Jews and post-war border changes and ethnic cleansing that left the country with vanishingly few ethnic minorities.
POLAND NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS
For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.
But that’s changed. Just a few years ago, a non-white face on a Polish street would turn heads; that’s no longer the case.
An increasingly wealthy Poland is becoming a magnet for migrants from across the world. It also hosts well over a million Ukrainian refugees, adding to the hundreds of thousands already living in Poland before the war. The Polish social security agency now estimates that about 6.5 percent of working people in Poland are foreign.
Although PiS often uses anti-migration language, the party has overseen an explosion in diversity.
A diverse country
In a record 2021, the government issued just over 500,000 work visas to foreign nationals — 24 percent more than in 2020 and eight times more than 2015. Last year’s number was only slightly lower at nearly 470,000 (the figures include some work permits granted to EU citizens).
And despite the PiS government’s pro-family rhetoric and generous social welfare payments, fewer and fewer Poles are being born. In April there were only 21,000 births, the lowest monthly total ever recorded. The social security agency predicts the country’s population will shrivel from 38 million now to 33 million in 2050 and 28 million in 2080.
But the country’s robust economy needs workers to continue growing, which is why PiS is under pressure to let in migrants — something that will be the case with any future government.
After the fuss following his first video, Tusk rowed back a little. In the next one he said: “We need politics in which everyone regardless of their place of birth, religion, color of their skin or their worldview enjoys full respect and rights.”
But he still hammered away at the increase in migration from Muslim countries and Africa.
“We need an efficient state that is able to control its territory and its borders. A state that carries out a sensible, responsible, and pragmatic policy of migration,” Tusk said.
