WARSAW: Polish President Andrzej Duda on Wednesday condemned the government’s plan for a temporary suspension of the right to asylum for irregular migrants, calling it a “fatal mistake” and signaling he will not approve it.
Duda argued in a speech in parliament that the plan would block access to safe haven for Belarusians and Russians opposed to their governments in Minsk and Moscow. Prime Minister Donald Tusk replied that it would not apply to dissidents.
Tusk’s government on Thursday adopted the controversial plan intended to strengthen protection of Poland’s and the European Union’s eastern border from massive pressure from many thousands of unauthorized migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The EU says the pressure is sponsored by Minsk and Moscow as part of their hybrid war on the European bloc.
“Poland cannot and will not be helpless in this situation,” Tusk said in parliament.
Poland’s plan aims to send a signal that the country is not a source of easy asylum or visas into the EU.
It says that in the case of a ‘threat of destabilization of the country by migration inflow,” a temporary suspension of accepting asylum applications can be introduced on a given territory. The general rules of granting asylum in the EU member country will be toughened to prevent the procedure from serving as a gateway into all of the EU.
In many cases, irregular migrants apply for asylum in Poland, but before their requests are processed, they travel across the EU’s no-visa travel zone to reach Germany or other countries in Western Europe.
The plan, which failed to win support from four left-wing ministers in Tusk’s coalition government, still needs approval from parliament and from Duda to become binding. Duda has made it clear he will not back it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko “are trying to destabilize the situation on our border, in the EU, and your response to this is to deprive people whom Putin and Lukashenko imprison and persecute of a safe haven. It must be some fatal mistake,” Duda said in his emotional speech Wednesday.
Migration and Poland’s plan are to be discussed at the upcoming EU summit and on its fringes this week in Brussels.
Polish president criticizes government’s no-asylum-for-irregular-migrants plan as a ‘grave mistake’
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Polish president criticizes government’s no-asylum-for-irregular-migrants plan as a ‘grave mistake’
- Duda argued in a speech in parliament that the plan would block access to safe haven for Belarusians and Russians opposed to their governments in Minsk and Moscow
- Prime Minister Donald Tusk replied that it would not apply to dissidents
Italian general challenges Meloni from the right
- A career soldier with experience in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Vannacci shot to fame in 2023 with the publication of a controversial book, “The World Upside Down”
- Meloni’s party remains the most popular, polling at more than 29 percent support — more than it won in 2022 elections
ROME: A retired general who criticizes the EU, wants to send home illegal migrants and says Ukraine should accept a peace deal with Russia is challenging Italy’s hard-right government on its own turf.
Roberto Vannacci, 57, last month defected from the far-right League party, a partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government, and set up a new party he said is “proud of being right-wing.”
Opinion polls put the new “National Future” at around three percent support, most of it taken from the League, led by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, but also Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy.
Meloni’s party remains the most popular, polling at more than 29 percent support — more than it won in 2022 elections.
But the general offers “the first movement emerging on the right that isn’t aligned with the three main parties,” Lorenzo Castellani, professor of politics at Rome’s Luiss University, said.
A career soldier with experience in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Vannacci shot to fame in 2023 with the publication of a controversial book, “The World Upside Down.”
In it, he complained about a “dictatorship of minorities,” while saying Italian star volleyball player Paola Egonu, who is black, had features that “do not represent Italian-ness.”
He was suspended from his army job, with Defense Minister Guido Crosetto — a member of Meloni’s party — saying that his “personal ramblings ... discredit the army, the Defense Ministry and the constitution.”
But in the end, he was allowed to retire, and the controversy made him a celebrity on the far right.
Salvini, whose anti-immigration League has been losing ground to Meloni’s in recent years, invited him into his party and Vannacci was elected to the European Parliament in 2024.
But last month the ex-general struck out on his own, taking with him two League MPs and another who was independent but formerly in Meloni’s party.
He is targeting voters disenchanted with Salvini and also Meloni, who has radical far-right roots but in office has taken a more pragmatic approach.
National Future is “a party of the true right, pure, sincere, proud, unashamed of being right-wing,” and “not hesitant, not fearful,” Vannacci told the foreign press association Thursday.
Once a firebrand euroskeptic, Meloni has worked closely with the EU in office, while her flagship promise to cut illegal immigration has been tempered by a major boost in visas for legal migrants.
Vannacci has “a more extremist approach to issues like immigration, like security, where he explicitly talks about remigration,” Castellani said.
The ex-general highlights Italy’s Roman-Christian roots and has called for migrants to be returned to their countries of origin if they arrived illegally or committed a crime.
While Meloni has distanced herself from Italy’s Fascist past, Vannacci was accused of revisionism last year after a social media post defending the democratic credentials of dictator Benito Mussolini.
National sovereignty, meanwhile, is a priority, with Vannacci lambasting the EU as both overreaching member states’ rights and globally ineffective — not least in the current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
