A widening visa scandal has piled pressure on Poland’s right-wing government ahead of elections next month, fuelling opposition claims that it has failed to curb illegal migration.
The centre-right Civic Platform party, led by former prime minister Donald Tusk, has accused the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party of tolerating a corruption scheme that illegally sold Polish visas at consulates around the world, despite trumpeting tough anti-immigration measures.
The government has admitted that hundreds of visas were sold illegally, but argued that the figures were much lower than those claimed by the opposition. It has also sacked deputy foreign minister Piotr Wawrzyk over the affair, and Polish prosecutors have charged seven people with corruption, three of whom have been jailed.
In an effort to appeal to right-wing voters, Tusk used tougher anti-immigration rhetoric during the election campaign, questioning the effectiveness of the government’s policies to curb migration from Muslim countries. Poland has also been vocal in condemning the actions of neighbouring Belarus, whose leader Alexander Lukashenko has lured migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere with the promise of allowing them to cross the EU border into Poland.
Senate speaker Tomasz Grodzki, a lawmaker from Tusk’s opposition, on Friday urged PiS voters to treat the illegal visa scheme as the biggest fraud scandal of the century, which has also tarnished Poland’s global reputation. Grodzki argued that fraud “at the highest levels of government” was “a direct threat to all of us”.
Senior government officials have denied any prior knowledge of an illegal visa scheme.
Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau said the investigation focused on just 200 cases, compared with 2 million visas issued by Poland in the past 30 months. In response to Grodzki, Rau said that “if it is the scandal of the century, I would rather talk about the flood of fake news”.
According to the latest polls, PiS is still leading with around 37 per cent, but has lost support ahead of the 15 October election, dropping seven points since the last election. Civic Platform is in second place with 30 per cent of the vote, meaning that each would have to seek the support of other parties to form a coalition government.
“The government created a national hysteria that Poland was threatened by a flood of Muslims, that women would be raped by Arabs, that people would be afraid to go out on the streets,” said Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, one of the key figures in Poland’s transition from communism to democracy.
But instead of responding with a very selective and restrictive migration policy, Michnik added: “They gave out a lot of visas themselves … visas for money.
