Poland’s ruling party primes migration vote to coincide with election

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Poland’s rightwing ruling party is pushing ahead with a divisive referendum on EU migration reforms, timing the vote to coincide with this autumn’s national elections in an attempt to blindside its liberal rival Donald Tusk.

Borrowing a plebiscite tactic used by Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the governing Law and Justice party (PiS) aims to drive migration and anti-EU views to the top of Poland’s election agenda to unsettle an opposition led by Tusk, a former European Council president.

Jarosław Kaczyński’s PiS party has been working on options to frame the referendum, exploring questions relating to a draft EU deal to share responsibilities for hosting asylum seekers in Europe.

Poland and Hungary in June angrily denounced a diplomatic breakthrough after years of fraught negotiations between EU member states, claiming it violated their national interests. The agreement between EU member states, which must still be negotiated with the European parliament to become law, includes payment mechanisms to share the cost of hosting refugees between EU countries.

Even if PiS also gets support from other conservative parties, it remains uncertain whether a Polish referendum will take place. The opposition led by Tusk’s Civic Platform party is promising to scuttle a project that requires parliamentary approval. 

Tusk has also moved to shore up his position, issuing a video earlier this month calling for Poland to “regain control” over its borders as he questioned the arrival of more Muslim workers into the country.

“Tusk’s comments might have upset liberal commentators, but they are not the people who will decide the vote,” said Marcin Kędzierski, a professor of public policy at the Krakow University of Economics. “He understands that migration could be important in this election.” 

The planned referendum comes after years of deterioration in Warsaw’s relations with Brussels. Poland cannot block a migration deal that was agreed by a qualified majority of member states but the referendum could raise other problems, particularly if the government must choose between upholding EU law or the result of the Polish vote.

Poland’s prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki argued this month that combining a national election with a referendum would “reduce the costs”, a claim the opposition has pilloried. President Andrzej Duda is yet to announce the date of the election but it is expected to be held either in October or early November. 

Poland won international plaudits last year for welcoming many Ukrainians escaping Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The government argues it should receive more EU financial compensation for hosting Ukrainians, rather than be forced to take refugees from other parts of Europe.

Polls suggest most Poles oppose the EU reform if it would require relocating asylum seekers in Poland. Respondents are almost evenly divided over whether to hold a migration referendum. 

Jan Wójcik, a migration expert at the Opportunity Institute for Foreign Affairs, a Polish think-tank, noted that the polls suggested the migration debate was mostly boosting PiS’s rival and more rightwing Confederation party, which has no government track record to defend and can therefore appear “more credible” to voters particularly worried about Muslim refugees. 

Some PiS politicians have recently suggested voters could also be asked another referendum question, such as whether Poland is justified to demand Germany pay €1.3tn in reparations for crimes committed by the Nazis during the second world war, which Berlin has rejected. 

“If the polls continue to show that migration is helping Confederation, I think PiS could drop the referendum, or at least dilute it by adding another question,” said Wójcik.