‘This Type of Action is Unacceptable’: Warsaw, Berlin Clash Over New German Border Controls

Germany’s largely unanticipated introduction of new controls at all of its land borders is already rankling neighboring Poland, as across Europe Berlin’s move is making political antennae go up. On Monday Germany’s interior minister Nancy Faeser announced the new measures would take effect on September 16, with a view to managing irregular immigration — which has dominated German politics in the wake of a surge in migrant-related crime and since the stunning gains of the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland party in two state elections earlier this month.Polish hackles are now officially raised. Prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, told reporters at Warsaw on Tuesday that “This type of action is unacceptable from the Polish point of view.”“It is the internal, political situation in Germany that is causing these steps to be taken and not our policy towards illegal migration at our borders,” he added.Germany at present is running on what the German press are calling a “traffic light government,” a shaky coalition government composed of the center-left Social Democrats, the Greens, and the liberal but center-right Free Democrats.What Germany does with its borders does not happen in a vacuum. The nine countries with which it shares land borders — France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Switzerland — are all part of the Schengen area, where passport checks at borders have long been uniformly scrapped. However, the Schengen rules, as tangled as they may seem to those unfamiliar with the inner workings of the modern EU geography, do allow countries to provisionally reintroduce passport checks in the case of what are assessed as security threats.Despite Germany’s recent travails, Warsaw isn’t convinced that Berlin has all the reasons to cut this rogue step on the Euro border dance floor, so to speak.“What Poland needs is not a strengthening of controls on our border, but a strengthening of the participation of states, including those such as Germany, in guarding and securing the external borders of the European Union,” Mr. Tusk also said — a reference to its shared borders with Belarus, Ukraine, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.Relations between Berlin and Warsaw were taking a frosty turn even before Ms. Faeser’s announcement. Mr. Tusk has already called off a trip to Germany he had planned for later this week. Chancellor Scholz was due to give a speech in honor of a press freedom award that the Polish prime minister was scheduled to receive at Potsdam, but Herr Scholz canceled too. Some of the dissension is related to Ukraine. Poland has refused to accept Germany’s request to arrest a Ukrainian citizen living on its territory who is suspected of being involved in the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Germany and Russia. In the meantime, Mr. Tusk seems not to mind ratcheting up tensions with its Teutonic neighbors next door. “We will ask other countries affected by these decisions from Berlin in the coming hours to consult urgently with all the neighbors of the German state on action in the European Union on this issue,” he stated at Warsaw.Interior minister of Austria, Gerhard Karner, told reporters that Austria will not receive migrants who are turned away by German authorities at the Austro-German border.In the Netherlands, leader of the largest party in parliament, the nationalist Party for Freedom, Geert Wilders, told the Dutch parliament on Tuesday that the Dutch should follow Germany’s example, the Dutch broadcaster NOS first reported.The Czech interior minister, Vít Rakušan, seems unfazed by Germany’s new direction. He wrote on X that “This is an extension of the current measures that have been in place at the German border for several months. This does not mean any fundamental change for the Czech Republic and its citizens at the moment.”One country that does not border Germany but that will be following developments closely is Hungary. Budapest has frowned on the EU’s new migration and asylum pact, which aims to share the burden of processing asylum requests across members of the bloc. Brussels is fining Budapest heavily for breaking the rules. This plot is set to thicken. Hungary is now midway through its turn at the helm of the presidency of the Council of the European Union. In that capacity Prime Minister Orbán is set to address the European Parliament at Strasbourg next week.Mr. Orbán could not ask for a better opportunity to challenge the cadres of Brussels elites, impugn “woke” culture as is his wont, and give a huzzah to Hungary’s maverick approach to migration. On that score, and to the apparent chagrin of Warsaw, Berlin and Budapest appear to be moving toward a kind of fresh accord.

‘This Type of Action is Unacceptable’: Warsaw, Berlin Clash Over New German Border Controls

‘This Type of Action is Unacceptable’: Warsaw, Berlin Clash Over New German Border Controls

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