French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s claim that the EU migration pact will mean illegal migrants will be transferred to Central Europe and will not go to France, has caused uproar on the Polish right.
“The migration pact introduces solidarity. We managed to force eastern countries to sign a document according to which they either accept migrants or pay,” said Attal during a television debate.
The leader of the Polish conservative Law and Justice (PiS), Jarosław Kaczyński, told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) over the weekend that his party would be calling for an emergency meeting of the Polish parliament to consider the remarks made by France’s Attal during a television debate.
Attal claimed that the French provinces are safe from being allocated migrants covered by the EU migration pact, as the migrants will in the first instance be sent to Central and Eastern Europe. Kaczyński contrasted Attal’s statement with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s claim that the migration pact will not affect Poland because it has taken in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.
“It seems that Tusk once again is saying one thing in the EU and another in Poland,” said Kaczyński.
Conservatives in countries like Hungary and Poland have long warned that the EU’s recently passed migration pact was a ploy to transfer unwanted migrants to countries like Poland and Hungary, despite the West claiming that more migration and diversity was always a good thing and a source of “strength.”
Kaczyński said the parliamentary session on the EU migration pact should receive detailed information from PM Tusk with regard to the circumstances in which his government had failed to block the EU migration pact on the reallocation of migrants entering EU states.
Senior PiS MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski told independent television channel TV Republika that the migration pact will act as “a pump for migrants from Africa” and the Middle East who will see the pact as an invitation to come to Europe.
Saryusz-Wolski reminded that EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson has admitted that Europe needs to have 4.5 million migrants coming every single year “to bridge the demographic gap, change society and provide the left with future voters.”
The Polish government did vote against the EU migration pact at a session of the Council of the European Union, the body in which decisions are made by qualified majority. Kaczyński and PiS have consistently argued that the decision on the pact should be made by the European Council, at which all decisions must be unanimous. In the Council of the European Union, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia voted against the migration pact, which will introduce migrant quotas, but the new law carried the day as most EU states backed it.
The most controversial aspect of the EU migration pact is the provision that should member states refuse to take their share of the reallocated migrants, they will have to pay up to €23,000 for every migrant refused.
