The suspension, he explained, is meant to be temporary and limited to areas under hybrid attack from Belarus and Russia. If approved, it would mean that Poland is following in a policy pursued by Finland, as Tusk himself said:
"The temporary suspension of asylum applications was introduced in Finland in May. It is a response to the hybrid war declared on the entire Union (including, above all, Poland) by the regimes in Moscow and Minsk, which consists of organizing mass transfers of people across our borders. The right to asylum is being instrumentally used in this war and has nothing to do with human rights. Border control and Poland's territorial security is and will be our priority."
Tusk's tough line on migration may come as a surprise since he leads a pro-European coalition that ousted the populist and Eurosceptic Law and Justice party, which often used overt anti-immigration rhetoric. Indeed, Poland's own progressives, such as film director Agnieszka Holland, whose film Green Border about the migration crisis was attacked by the then-governing Law and Justice as unpatriotic and anti-Polish, argued that she sees no difference in the migration policies of the former and current administrations.
While Holland may be exaggerating, since the current administration has clearly departed from stigmatizing migrants and the death toll at the border has fallen, it is clear that Tusk prioritizes border security, investing in a border fence designed to keep people out. Following the death of a soldier stabbed by an immigrant attempting to cross the border, the current coalition also passed a law that allows the use of firearms against civilians in life-threatening circumstances.
In other words, Tusk is certainly not a dove when it comes to migration. There are two essential reasons why Tusk and his coalition maintain a hard stance on the issue. First, Tusk has drawn lessons from the migration crisis of 2015 and its political consequences. Second, he is aware of Polish domestic sentiment, which has turned clearly sceptical on migration in recent years.
Tusk happened to be EU Council president when, in the hot summer of 2015, over a million migrants arrived on Europe's southern shores, mostly in Italy and Greece. The migrants did not cross the sea in often hazardous conditions -- 3,771 were killed at sea -- to seek a new life in Italy's South or on the Greek islands. They formed several human columns and walked on foot towards Europe's prosperous north, in particular towards Germany and the Scandinavian states. There is no doubt that this crisis was massively mismanaged by the EU, with dramatic consequences for the stability of European liberal democracies.
Overwhelmed by often dramatic images of human suffering, including the deaths of children, European leaders reacted in an uncoordinated and often emotional manner. According to European regulations, the migrants' asylum applications should have been processed by the first-receiving nations. But Greek and Italian border guards were both overwhelmed and eager to send the migrants up north. Meanwhile, Chancellor Angela Merkel only poured oil on the fire when she claimed that Germany "can do it" when asked if she was ready to accommodate the migrants. Following these words, there was a dramatic increase in the number of migrants seeking a new life in the EU's largest nation.
However, soon the flow of migrants became so massive that Germany and many other EU member states reintroduced border controls, threatening the freedom of movement cemented by the Schengen agreement. The Germans, Scandinavians, and other nations chosen as final destinations by the migrants then called for European solidarity in migrant burden-sharing and demanded that migrants be relocated across the entire EU in a system of compulsory quotas.
The whole affair was one giant mess which allowed populist anti-migration parties to grow, eventually propelling the end of the liberal consensus in Europe. Following the crisis, new populist formations sprang up in Italy, Spain, and Greece, with existing populist parties like the Alternative for Germany or Le Pen's National Rally becoming mainstream parties capable of challenging the pro-European consensus.
In 2015, Tusk's homeland of Poland saw Law and Justice win a strong parliamentary majority with the ability to govern on their own. Clearly, the migration crisis was not the only reason and perhaps not even the main reason why Law and Justice (PiS) defeated Civic Platform—Tusk's party—but it certainly didn't help that the Civic Platform government was forced to accept compulsory quotas of migrants, a move that PiS criticized. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's hard line on migrants -- he erected a wall to stop the movement via Hungary -- won him another electoral victory with a massive majority in Parliament.
Tusk's position on migrants is not new. As the EU Council president, he was deeply critical of the quota system and argued that migrants should be processed by the first receiving country rather than be sent north. Had this been the case, there is no doubt that the flow of migrants would have been smaller at the time.
Ever since the 2015 crisis, the mood in Europe and the United States has turned sour towards migration. Poland is no exception. Although Poland has been very open towards the arrival of refugees from war-torn Ukraine, the same is not true when it comes to migrants imported by Lukashenko's and Putin's regimes and deployed at the EU borders.
In 2021 and 2022, when migrants started to pour into Poland via the Belarusian border, 52% of Poles were already in favor of suspending the right to asylum for those migrants. In 2024, this number grew to 67%. Although Tusk's announcement might have shocked his liberal and progressive supporters at home, there is no doubt that he's been reading public sentiment correctly.
