PiS uploaded a video to the X platform on Tuesday that used photos of dark-skinned migrants and video footage of incidents involving foreigners at various locations across Poland.
The footage is intercut with images and video of Tusk promoting his migration policy. “Poland will be a beneficiary of the Migration Pact,” he says, in reference to the EU’s ‘New Pact on Migration and Asylum’ which provides for the relocation of migrants from their country of entry.
The rules also involve a ‘mandatory solidarity mechanism’ which would see member states paying for migrants they refuse to accept.
“We will not pay anything and will not accept migrants,” the prime minister says in the clip, which ends with an image of Tusk and the slogan “Why aren’t you smiling?”
Many internet users took exception to the move, accusing PiS of racism and inciting race-related violence.
Witold Zembaczyński, an MP of Tusk’s ruling center-right Civic Coalition grouping, wrote on X: “The first person who suffers harm through this racism will be [the subject of] a notification to the prosecutor against the creators and propagators of this content.”
One lawyer accused PiS of “preying on racism.”
“You are playing dirty,” he wrote. “When someone somewhere takes this spot too seriously, you will have blood on your hands.”
Criticism also came from surprising sources. Konrad Wernicki, a journalist with the right-wing and usually pro-PiS Tygodnik Solidarność, accused the party of shirking responsibility for Poland’s migration situation.
“Do you really want to tell people that migrants are in Poland because of Donald Tusk and before October 15 2023 [the date of the last general election] Poland was ‘white’?” he tweeted. “Do you take people for idiots who don’t leave their homes? Who have never seen migrants on the street before?”
Tusk also took to the platform to lambast his political arch-rivals, comparing them to Putin’s Russia.
“Russia organizes and finances campaigns of hate and fear in many countries of Europe based on lies and disinformation, causing internal conflict and chaos,” he tweeted. “In Poland it doesn’t need to organize anything. There is PiS.”
The political spat comes a week after PiS politicians used the issue of migrants to attack Tusk’s government.
Janusz Kowalski, a former deputy minister in the previous PiS-led government, posted pictures of dark-skinned people on X accompanied by the text: “This is not funny. Such a future is being prepared for Poles by Donald Tusk, [Warsaw mayor] Rafał Trzaskowski and [parliamentary speaker] Szymon Hołownia. Polish women will be molested on Polish streets. Poles will be afraid to go out after dark. Crime will rise. Machete attacks will become commonplace. It has started.”
