Published on
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday that the country would temporarily introduce border controls with Germany and Lithuania due to concerns over irregular migration.
Tusk’s government has been under pressure from nationalist opposition parties over irregular migrants being returned to Poland from Germany.
Recently, Polish far-right activists have been organising patrols along the border with Germany to protest against such returns.
“We consider the temporary reintroduction of controls necessary to reduce the uncontrolled flows of migrants across the Polish-German border to a minimum,” Tusk told a meeting of the Council of Ministers.
Tusk said he had spoken to Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz on several occasions and told him that Poland’s patience on the issue was “running out”.
Merz made tougher migration policy a pillar of his election campaign in February. After he took office in May, Germany stationed more police at the border and said some asylum-seekers trying to enter Europe’s biggest economy would be turned away.
Poland’s decision is irrevocable “regardless of the emotions in other countries’ capitals,” he added. The measures will come into force on Monday and will be implemented in a way that causes minimal disruption for Polish citizens, according to Tusk.
In a separate press conference, Poland’s outgoing President Andrzej Duda criticised the government’s lack of response to the issue of migrants being returned from Germany.
“We cannot allow the law to be broken and migrants to be forcibly pushed into our country,” Duda said.
“Germany created this migration problem and must deal with it on their own. We will not solve it for them.”
Just before Tusk announced the move, Merz told reporters in Berlin that his government was in very close contact with the Polish government to keep the impact of Germany’s border controls with Poland “as low as possible.”
“We know that the Polish government also wants to impose border controls with Lithuania in order to limit illegal border crossings from Lithuania to Poland,” Merz told a news conference. “So, we have a common problem here that we want to solve together.”
Read the full article here
