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Four weeks out from Poland’s parliamentary election on October 15, the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party would appear to have fallen into its own trap.
The ruling right-wing populists have for years been agitating against refugees from Muslim-majority countries. Not only is one of the party’s campaign slogans “A secure future for Poles,” it also claims to be the only party capable of saving the country — and Europe — from being “flooded” by illegal migrants from Africa and Asia.
Indeed, no less than two of the four questions in the referendum that will take place on the same day as the parliamentary election — and which was organized by the government in an attempt to garner more support — are about migration.
However, recent revelations made by independent Polish media are casting a shadow over the government’s credibility. It is alleged that there have been irregularities and corruption in relation to the issuance of visas in Polish consulates outside Europe.
Cracks are beginning to appear in the image of the party that likes to portray itself as the only guarantee for secure borders.
Poland’s deputy foreign minister sacked
When Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Piotr Wawrzyk, who was among other things responsible for overseeing Polish consulates around the world, was suddenly sacked on August 31, only a handful of insiders knew the real reason for his dismissal.
It was only in the second week of September that it became known that the Public Prosecutor’s Office had launched investigations into irregularities associated with the granting of visas back in March.
So far, seven people have been arrested, three of whom are still in custody.
Opposition accuses government of hypocrisy
With the election fast approaching, the opposition immediately sensed an opportunity to accuse the PiS, which is running on an anti-migration platform, of hypocrisy.
“PiS has betrayed its own ideals, its own values. It promised security and created a threat,” said Michal Szczerba, a lawmaker for the largest opposition party, Civic Platform (PO), on the television channel TVN on Monday.
Last week, opposition leader Donald Tusk announced that there were question marks over about 250,000 Polish visas issued to people in Africa and Asia over the past 30 months.
Schengen visas for fake Bollywood film crew
According to reports on the news portal Onet and in the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Deputy Foreign Minister Wawrzyk fostered a system that allowed visa procedures to be fast-tracked in exchange for bribes. It is also alleged that he put pressure on consular heads to expedite the issuing of visas to people he had selected.
According to Onet, about 36 Indian citizens got Schengen multiple entry visas in this way by posing as people working in the Bollywood movie industry. Onet says that the group even gave the title of the film it was supposedly working on. Upon closer examination, however, it was established that the “choreograph” couldn’t dance and the “make-up artist” had never worked in the movie business.
Schengen multiple entry visas are particularly sought-after because they allow the holder to travel not only within the Schengen Area, Europe’s visa-free zone, but also to Mexico, from where it is easier to be smuggled across the border to America. Onet claims that 21 of the 36 members of the “film crew” in question did just that.
A major scandal or just a ‘stupid idea?’
Initially, the government tried to play down the affair and sit it out.
“Tusk speaks of hundreds of thousands. That’s a lie, a lie, a downright lie,” said PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski at an election rally in Torun last Saturday, launching a counterattack on his biggest rival in the election.
“There is no scandal, not even a little scandal, just a stupid idea with a criminal background,” he claimed.
Government accuses opposition of exaggeration
Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro announced that investigations had been opened into exactly 268 cases — not 250,000. He also reported that the public prosecutor was investigating consulates in India, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Ziobro claimed that the Polish secret service had uncovered the corruption. Polish media that are not close to the government, however, claim that the Polish authorities were warned by intelligence services abroad — in particular in the US.
“No scandal? No little scandal? Then maybe just a tiny scandalette,” commented opposition leader Tusk on X, formerly known as Twitter, in response to Kaczynski’s claims.
‘No visa scandal’
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau rebuffed opposition calls for him to resign. “There was no visa scandal,” he told journalists in New York on Monday.
He stressed that his ministry has over the past two years issued almost two million visas, most of which were granted to citizens from Ukraine and Belarus. He went on to say that most of what was being discussed in the public domain was “a cascade of fake news.”
All Polish consulates to be audited
Nevertheless, the measures taken by the government in Warsaw on September 15 show that the scandal is certainly not seen as some kind of minor transgression.
The head of the legal department at the Foreign Ministry, Jakub Osajda, a close associate of the sacked deputy minister, was dismissed with immediate effect.
Audits were also launched in the consular department of the Foreign Ministry and in all Polish consulates around the world. In addition, all contracts with private companies that acted as intermediaries in visa matters were canceled.
Will Poland be ejected from the Schengen Area?
The media controlled by PiS did not report on the cash-for-visas scandal at all for quite some time. Instead, TVP, the national broadcaster, reported on the high numbers of migrants recently arrived on Lampedusa.
In order to break through this wall of silence, PO politician Tomasz Grodzki gave a live address to the nation on prime-time television last Friday. As the senate speaker, Grodzki has the right to do so. “This is the biggest scandal we have faced in the 21st century,” he said.
The next day, PiS politician and speaker of the lower house of parliament Elzbieta Witek hit back: “The lies cannot go unanswered,” she said. She used her television address to attack the opposition, warning that “Tusk means Lampedusa in Poland.”
Some Poles are now worried that Poland could be ejected from the Schengen Area because of the cash-for-visas scandal.
“If the allegations are confirmed, Poland will be thrown out of the Schengen Area,” warned Poland’s former ambassador to Latvia and Armenia Jerzy Marek Nowakowski.
In a poll published on Monday by the daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita, 30% of those surveyed said that the visa scandal would damage PiS’s chances in the election, while just under 40% said that the right-wing populists would survive the scandal.
This article was originally published in German.
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