While he has been tough on migrants from the Middle East and Asia, the Law and Justice-led government has issued the highest number of annual residence and work permits in the entire EU for most of his time in office.
Tusk’s coalition continued the policy of pushback and re-introduced the exclusion zone on part of the border. In July, following the death of a 21-year-old soldier who was fatally wounded by migrants at the border, the government pushed through parliament decriminalization of the use of firearms by security forces for self-defense under certain circumstances.
Public opinion polls show that a large part of the population supports a hard line: 86% of respondents support the use of weapons in self-defense by the security services.
Indeed, in October of last year, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Radoslav Sikorsky, called the tough migration policy of the Civic Coalition a key element of success in the elections.
“I don’t think we would have won if we hadn’t bypassed the then-ruling right-wing party on migration, if we hadn’t convinced the electorate that we would defend the Polish border as fiercely physically as the previous government. there was, so we neutralized that issue,” Mr. Sikorsky told an audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in September.
But human rights groups have expressed concern about the new government’s migration policy. According to NGO estimates, since the beginning of the crisis, more than 130 migrants have died on both sides of the border between Belarus and Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
“I’ve never seen Donald Tusk as a fighter for human rights, but this is a new low,” Malgazata Shuleka, a board member of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, told the BBC.
“There is a humanitarian crisis on the border, but it is also an open way for migration. We need to find a place for a rational discussion, not so populist,” she added.
