Polish PM slams German border controls

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Tuesday (10 September) sharply criticised Germany’s decision to tighten controls on all its borders, including the one it shares with Poland.

Germany will introduce controls at all its land borders from 16 September to fight against irregular migration, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser announced on Monday (9 September).

But Poland, which borders Germany to the east, did not react kindly to the announcement.

“This type of action is unacceptable from the Polish point of view,” Tusk told a press conference in Warsaw on Tuesday.

“It is the internal, political situation in Germany that is causing these steps to be taken and not our policy towards illegal migration at our borders,” the Polish prime minister added.

Germany currently has an uncharacteristically fragile coalition government made up of the centre-left Social Democrats, the Greens and the liberal centre-right Free Democrats.

Germany and the nine countries with which it shares land borders – France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland – are all part of the Schengen area, where passport checks at borders have officially been abolished. However, Schengen rules allow countries to temporarily reintroduce passport checks in case of a security threat.

“What Poland needs is not a strengthening of controls on our border, but a strengthening of the participation of states, including those such as Germany, in guarding and securing the external borders of the European Union,” Tusk added, referring to its shared borders with Belarus, Ukraine, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

Relations between Berlin and Warsaw were already strained before Faeser’s announcement. Poland’s recent refusal to accept a German request to arrest a Ukrainian citizen living on its territory suspected of being involved in the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Germany and Russia has soured relations.

“We will ask other countries affected by these decisions from Berlin in the coming hours to consult urgently with all the neighbours of the German state on action in the European Union on this issue,” the Polish prime minister also said.

Austria, which also borders Germany, had its interior minister, Gerhard Karner, tell reporters that his country would not take back migrants turned away by German authorities at the Austro-German border, according to the Associated Press.

For Denmark, the “decision would change very little for the Danish-German border,” a spokesperson for the country’s Justice Ministry told Euractiv, adding that there have already been controls and checks at the land and sea border between the two countries since 2016.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, leader of the largest party in parliament, the nationalist Party for Freedom, told the Dutch parliament on Tuesday that the Dutch should follow Germany’s example, Dutch broadcaster NOS reports.

As for Czechia, Interior Minister Vít Rakušan wrote on X on Monday that: “This is an extension of the current measures that have been in place at the German border for several months. This does not mean any fundamental change for the Czech Republic and its citizens at the moment.”