Why Poland doesn’t want refugees

WARSAW — The right-wing Polish government is under pressure from the EU to finally begin accepting asylum seekers. But it’s the country’s leading opposition party that’s paying the political price.

Poland, along with Hungary, has refused to take in any refugees under a 2015 deal that was supposed to allocate 160,000 people among EU member countries in order to take the load off Greece and Italy.

Warsaw shrugged off the threat. “In agreeing to take in refugees, the [previous government] put a ticking bomb under us,” Interior Minister Mariusz Błaszczak told reporters in Brussels. “We’re defusing that bomb.”

But the pressure from Brussels is forcing the opposition Civic Platform party into increasingly dramatic contortions.

Grzegorz Schetyna, the leader of Civic Platform, first told a reporter that his party was against accepting refugees — something of a problem since it was the previous Civic Platform government (in which Schetyna served as foreign minister) that agreed to accept 6,200 asylum seekers from the EU pool.

Within days Schetyna scrambled back, saying Civic Platform was against “illegal migrants” but that he favored accepting “the few dozen people who want to come to Poland.”

“A good Christian is someone who helps, not necessarily by accepting refugees” — Elżbieta Witek, chief of the prime minister’s cabinet office

Both Schetyna and former Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, who agreed to the EU deal, say that Poland won’t accept any EU-mandated top-down allocation of refugees, and that countries have to be in full control over who they accept.

Keep them out

The party’s verbal gymnastics make sense politically. Opinion polls show that about three-quarters of Poles are against accepting refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

It’s not just Civic Platform that’s uncomfortable about being too pro-refugee. The leader of the Polish People’s Party, Civic Platform’s junior coalition partner when it ruled from 2007-2015, is similarly cautious.

“We’ll never close the door to orphans,” said Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, adding “but let the young men fight for the freedom of their countries.”

The ruling Law and Justice party tapped into that unease during the 2015 parliamentary election campaign, which was also the peak of the migration crisis that shook the EU. Jarosław Kaczyński, the party’s leader and Poland’s de facto ruler, warned that migrants carry “all sorts of parasites and protozoa, which … while not dangerous in the organisms of these people, could be dangerous here.”

After the election, the new government immediately backtracked on its predecessor’s promise to take in asylum seekers and has held fast to that stance.

The reason given is that Muslim migrants could be a problem for Poland’s homogenous society.

Kaczyński reiterated his antipathy toward refugees in an interview with the Gazeta Polska Codziennie newspaper published Monday, warning that Poland “would have to completely change our culture and radically lower the level of safety in our country.” He also said that Poland “would have to use some repression” to prevent “a wave of aggression, especially toward women” on the part of asylum seekers.

Błaszczak warned that EU pressure on Poland to accept refugees “is a straight road to a social catastrophe, with the result that in a few years Warsaw could look like Brussels.”

There’s a similar dynamic in Budapest, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has explained his defiance of Brussels in politically popular terms of defending European and Christian civilization against an onslaught of outsiders.

Poland is one of the most homogenous countries in Europe — overwhelmingly Polish and Roman Catholic. That wasn’t the case until the Second World War. Before 1939, about 10 percent of the population was Jewish, and there were large Ukrainian, Belarusian, German and other minorities — ethnic Poles only made up two-thirds of the country.

The blood-drenched harrowing of the war, followed by post-war border shifts and ethnic cleansing, created a racially pure Poland for the first time in history — fulfilling the dreams of earlier generations of extreme nationalists. Despite being in the EU, there’s little appetite in Poland to create a West-European style multi-ethnic society.

That creates a conundrum for the opposition, which wants to stake out a more strongly pro-EU position than the government in a bid to appeal to the country’s more liberal urban electorate, but doesn’t want to offend traditionalists.

The reason is that Muslim migrants could be a problem for Poland’s homogenous society.

It also puts it at odds with Donald Tusk, the founder of Civic Platform and former prime minister who is now president of the European Council. Civic Platform’s recent resurgence in opinion polls was spurred by the government’s failed attempt to block a second term for Tusk, which created a wave of sympathy for him and for his old party.

Tusk isn’t amused

But Tusk has made it pretty clear he wants Poland to fall in line with the rest of the bloc and fulfill its obligations to accept asylum seekers. Even Austria has said it will start accepting refugees, leaving only Hungary and Poland resisting.

If the Polish government doesn’t take part, “it will come with inevitable consequences,” he warned in Polish last week.

The government reacted with fury, suggesting holding a referendum over whether Poles would agree to accept refugees.

“There’s a risk that we’ll see the [European Commission] in court” if it tries to impose financial penalties on Poland, Konrad Szymański, the deputy foreign minister, told the Radio Zet station.

While the government’s stance on refugees is popular with its base, it’s creating discomfort in parts of the hierarchy of the powerful Roman Catholic Church as it differs radically from the pro-refugee position of Pope Francis. Polish bishops have called on the country to help refugees.

While the government’s stance on refugees is popular with its base, it’s creating discomfort in parts of the hierarchy of the powerful Roman Catholic Church.

Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, from the more liberal wing of the Church, told the Rzeczpospolita newspaper that accepting a few hundred asylum seekers isn’t much of a problem for a country of 38 million.

“Not accepting refugees practically means resigning from being a Christian,” he said. “I’m ashamed of those who don’t want to do their duty not just as Christians but as human beings.”

Critics also point out that Poles were massive beneficiaries of refugee policies in the past when thousands of people fleeing the military regime in the early 1980s were allowed to settle in Western Europe.

But the government, whose top officials are ostentatiously pious and which finds strong backing from the conservative wing of the Church, is no more willing to listen to the admonishments of Rome than of Brussels.

“The Polish government will not change its mind about the refugees. It’s a final decision,” Elżbieta Witek, chief of the prime minister’s cabinet office, told TVP, the state broadcaster. “I’m a Christian and a Catholic and I try to be a good person, and the Polish government acts in the same way … A good Christian is someone who helps, not necessarily by accepting refugees.”

This article has been updated with new comments on accepting refugees from Jarosław Kaczyński published Monday.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated Mariusz Błaszczak’s position. He is interior minister.