A war of migrants is underway between Warsaw and Berlin, with the two governments that closed their respective common borders to avoid the internal flows between the two countries. The Polish executive has announced that starting from Sunday 7 July will restore borders checks with Germany and Lithuania, in order to “minimize uncontrolled flows”, said Prime Minister Donald Tusk during a government meeting.
Protests
At the weekend there were protests supported by the far right in some passes between Poland and Germany for the practice of the German authorities from preventing the entry of migrants. Tusk stressed that the operations conducted by Berlin have “clearly changed in the last month” with “the refusal of entry to migrants who are directed to Germany to ask for asylum or other forms of status”.
In Europe, the controls at internal borders return: what changes
The Polish premier openly criticized Germany for exerting “excessive pressure” on the nation he governed through his unilateral approach to border management. “The patience of Poland after Germany has formally introduced unilateral checks is running out,” said Tusk, complaining about the difficulty of establishing whether migrants rejected by Berlin really have to be readmitted to Poland according to European rules.
The German response
For his part, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz defended controls as a tool to protect the Schengen space “from the abuse by human traffickers”. In response to the Polish media reports, Merz said he wanted to clarify that Berlin has not rejected the asylum seekers who have already arrived. “Some claim that there is, so to speak, regular repatriation tourism from Germany to Poland. It is not so,” he guaranteed. “We have a common problem that we want to solve together,” he added.
The German commissioner for relations with Poland, Knut Abraham, said that, however, the path of the clash must be avoided. “The solution cannot be pushed the migrants back and forth between Poland and Germany or cement controls on both sides,” Die Welt told the newspaper.
For his part, the foreign minister Lithuanian Kestutis Budrys confirmed that Warsaw informed him of the decision, and hoped that the measures adopted do not compromise freedom of movement or common efforts to protect the external border of NATO and NATO. In fact, Warsaw continues to denounce a migratory crisis induced by Belarus and Russia since 2021, accuses that both countries have rejected.
A tendency that widens
More and more the member states of the European Union are suspending the free movement provided for by the Schengen system. In total 11 countries have made it 29 of the Schengen area (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden), mainly for reasons related to irregular immigration, terrorist threats, geopolitical instability and, in one case, health motifs (Slovakia).
