With three days remaining before Poles go to the polls to elect a new parliament, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki warned his fellow countrymen on Thursday that the dramatic events unfolding in the Middle East after Hamas’ horrendous attacks on civilians mean they should expect a new wave of illegal migrants. In this situation, Morawiecki said to Polish voters, giving the opposition parties a majority on Sunday would mean opening the gates of Poland.
In late September, the Polish prime minister explained to voters in Lubin, in the southwest of the country, that Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO), which leads the liberals’ Civic Coalition (KO), was putting at risk the continued existence of the Schengen borderless area, and that the PO’s action will eventually lead to the closing down of the Schengen area.
Morawiecki was seemingly referring to the EU’s projected Migration Pact with its new relocation scheme supported by Tusk’s friends (just as they supported the first attempt to put an EU-wide migrant relocation system in 2015), when he said:
“After all, if they let illegal immigrants in, as they called for before 2015, where will these illegal immigrants want to live? In Germany. They will start moving to Germany en masse. Then Germany will indeed close the Schengen borders. The Civic Platform is the biggest threat to freedom of movement within the European Union.”
Germany has in fact reintroduced border controls with Poland in late September in the face of a recrudescence of illegal immigrants, many of them now making their way through the Balkan route via Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland, even though the vast majority is repelled at Hungary’s border with Slovakia. This is despite successive rulings by the Court of Justice of the European Union that have made push-backs and the temporary detention of asylum seekers more difficult, encouraging more to come and try to reach Germany and other countries of Western Europe through the Balkans.
Germany’s decision has had a domino effect in the region, with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria now having reintroduced border controls with Slovakia and the latter having announced its intent to do the same along its border with Hungary.
The Schengen area may not be dead yet, but it has indeed been suspended in Central Europe as in other places, like for example along France’s border with Italy, for similar reasons.
Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition and other parties that could form a coalition, should the liberals and the left get more seats than Law and Justice in the Polish parliament after the October 15 elections, are also not clear about whether they would leave in place or dismantle the barrier erected by the Morawiecki government along the border with Belarus, where migration pressure remains high too.