Dan Davison reports that the Tusk government is doubling down on anti-migrant policies in Poland
As of 29 July, both chambers of the Polish Parliament have voted to exclude soldiers and other officers from criminal responsibility when using firearms against migrants at the border in certain circumstances. These circumstances include “repelling a direct and unlawful attack” that threatens “the life, health, and freedom” of the officers or other parties.
This follows Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s statements on 11 May that he would strengthen Poland’s eastern border infrastructure to deter irregular migrant crossings from Belarus. He has pledged to invest 10 billion złotys (around €2.3 billion or £1.96 billion) “to make Poland’s border a safe one in times of peace, and impenetrable for an enemy in times of war”. On 28 May, a migrant stabbed a Polish soldier through the border barrier. The soldier died from his wounds on 6 June, increasing calls for migrant deterrence on national security grounds. On 13 June, Poland created a 200-metre-wide buffer zone along about 60 kilometres of the border, designed to keep out all non-residents, including journalists and humanitarian groups.
Since 2021, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has encouraged migrants to reach the EU by journeying to Belarus and crossing into Poland. These migrants are mostly Middle Eastern, Central Asian and sub-Saharan African. The hard-right, Catholic nationalist Law and Justice party was then the ruling party in Poland. The Polish government responded to the migrant crossings with pushbacks. Then, in 2022, it spent €353 million (£306 million) building a 5.5-metre-high wall along 115 miles of the Poland-Belarus border, framing the migrant crossings as a “hybrid war” waged by Belarus and the border wall as a defensive measure against this. Hundreds of migrants were left trapped in the borderland’s Białowieża Forest, unable either to proceed into Poland or to return to Belarus. The critically acclaimed 2023 drama film Green Border provides a harrowing but hopeful depiction of the lives of those caught in this “exclusion zone” – one that predictably attracted the ire of Polish government officials.
Tusk became prime minister in December 2023 after Law and Justice lost its parliamentary majority in the October general election and did not have enough prospective allies to form a coalition government. The main force in Poland’s new coalition government is Civic Coalition, a political alliance around Tusk’s liberal-conservative party Civic Platform, who had previously governed Poland from 2007 to 2015. The coalition government also includes the Third Way, which is a neoliberal-conservative alliance formed between the Polish People’s Party and Szymon Hołownia’s Poland 2050, and the New Left, a party formed from the fusion of the old social-democratic Democratic Left Alliance and the social-liberal Spring party led by Robert Biedroń. In other words, the current ruling coalition contains some liberal and (ostensibly) left-wing forces, but is very much dominated by the neoliberal centre-right.
Tusk’s electoral victory was mostly greeted with jubilation as a blow against the far right. However, on immigration and asylum, the new governing coalition is very much continuing the draconian anti-migrant policies of the previous government – in some respects even ramping them up.
Numerous civil society organisations providing humanitarian aid on the Poland-Belarus border have put out a joint statement condemning the increased violence and ruthlessness seen from the Polish Border Guard and Polish Army. Since the new government was sworn in, more than 4000 people have been “escorted back to the border line”. In their pushbacks, Polish forces have beaten migrants, kicked them, stripped them naked, tear-gassed them, and thrown them to the ground. Since 2021, such pushbacks have led to at least 55 deaths. Between the start of 2024 and the middle of May, more than 1800 people asked the Grupa Granica human rights coalition for assistance, including 193 women and 178 children (as many as 131 of whom are unaccompanied minors). More than 1000 people reported the experience of violence at the hands of Polish uniformed services.
Despite its strong criticisms of the new government’s continuation of the previous government’s policies, in certain respects, the civil society organisations’ joint statement gives Tusk far too much credit. It states that “when Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his current coalition partners were in opposition, they did not shy away from criticizing the previous Law and Justice government for violating the Constitution, the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the Criminal Code and the resulting violence against refugees and migrants at the border”.
This downplays how, during the 2023 general election campaign, Civic Coalition effectively adopted the Law and Justice government’s racist framing of immigration and asylum. It simply presented itself as offering a different way of “fixing the problem”. Tusk himself put out campaign videos attacking Law and Justice for assuring the public that it protects Poland from Muslim migrants while quietly granting them permits. He even ended one video by echoing a notorious Brexit slogan: “Poles must regain control over this country and its borders”. Tellingly, in his May announcements about expanding the border infrastructure to deter migrants and strengthen national security, Tusk adopted the same “hybrid war” framing of the migrant crossings that Law and Justice used to justify building the infamous border wall in the first place.
The Polish experience thus provides a chilling lesson for the left in the UK and elsewhere around the world: if we don’t challenge anti-migrant politics head-on, then the ideological frames set by the hard right will continue to justify deeply reactionary and lethally violent policies on immigration and asylum, even when a more liberal government succeeds a hard-right one.