Paweł Wroński, from the Polish foreign affairs ministry, said that consultations with Germany’s neighbors must be held before the decision is implemented.
Germany’s government announced plans on Monday to impose tighter controls at all of the country’s land borders in what it called an attempt to tackle “irregular migration” and protect the public from threats such as Islamist extremism.
The
controls are due to start on September 16 and initially last for six months, the German interior ministry said in a statement.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk hit back at Berlin’s decision, calling it “unacceptable” and a “de facto large-scale suspension of the Schengen area.”
Amid rising pressure on Germany’s ruling coalition government to take a tougher stance on its immigration policies, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Wednesday said her country could not find solutions “alone,” adding: “I am also saying this to our eastern European neighbors and partners.”
Under the rules governing the Schengen area, which also includes Germany, a member state has the right to temporarily reintroduce controls at its internal borders, but only if these measures are “necessary” and “proportionate”.
On Wednesday, MEP Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz from the Polish delegation in the European Parliament, submitted a proposal for a special meeting on the issue of Germany’s reintroduction of border controls.
Sienkiewicz warned against treating Germany differently to Hungary, which also attempted to go against EU agreements earlier this month.
“We cannot condemn Orbán and turn a blind eye to Germany,” Sienkiewicz told PAP.
Last month, the EU slammed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for going against the bloc’s migration policy and threatening to send buses with undocumented migrants to Brussels.
Sienkiewicz said that Germany should be transparent about its reasons for implementing border checks and speculated that the move is a reaction to the electoral defeat of the current ruling coalition in two states in eastern Germany, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)
won or came in as a close second.
“This is too important, too large a country in the EU to ignore such a drastic step by the German authorities. All the more so because there is a justified suspicion that it was not dictated by any particular influx of refugees, but simply by post-election political panic,” Sienkiewicz commented.
He added that if this suspicion turns out to be true, it will mean that the anti-migration AfD has already achieved success, although it has not yet won the elections.
