A visa trafficking scandal that traces back to the government has fueled the election campaign ahead of October’s parliamentary elections in Poland. The opposition accused the bitterly anti-immigrant government of recruiting “hundreds of thousands of migrants” from Africa and the Middle East.
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According to media reports, the Polish Foreign Ministry is at the center of this influence peddling scandal, which Donald Tusk, leader of the main opposition party, described as “the biggest scandal in Poland in the 21st century.”
At the end of August, a deputy minister, Piotr Wawrzyk, was officially dismissed from his position for “lack of cooperation.”
According to private radio RMF FM on Friday, Mr Wawrzyk was hospitalized the day before after attempting suicide with a knife.
According to the news portal Onet.pl, citing anonymous sources within the ruling party and the ministry, this deputy minister was actually fired because he “contributed to the creation of an illegal immigration network from Asia and Africa” through consulates and external companies paid for this human trafficking.
In particular, journalists claim that the deputy minister and his colleagues sent the consulates lists containing hundreds of names of people to whom these administrations had to issue visas quickly and often without verification.
Bollywood
Onet.pl cites in particular the case of Indian nationals who posed as Bollywood filmmakers and received multiple-entry Schengen visas after the intervention of the deputy minister. These allow you to enter and leave the Schengen area as often as you like during the period of validity.
According to the same source, the Polish authorities were alerted to the affair by intelligence services of other countries, which the Polish executive denies.
The deputy minister would also be the author of a draft decree intended to pave the way for at least 400,000 visa applications, mainly from countries in Asia and Africa. After the opposition revealed it, the project was buried.
The nationalist populists in power are trying at all costs to downplay the issue. According to them, the case only involves “a few hundred visas”.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, which is investigating “influence peddling” that may have made it possible to speed up the visa process, seven people were arrested in this case.
The public prosecutor’s office said there were no state officials among those arrested.
The Polish Foreign Ministry on Friday acknowledged “identified irregularities in the issuance of visas” and announced the resignation of the head of its legal department.
referendum
For the ruling party “Law and Justice” (PiS), which has been using strong anti-migrant rhetoric for years, the affair is more than embarrassing. In 2015, he won parliamentary elections by stoking fear of foreigners.
Poland last year completed construction of a steel wall along its border with Belarus to deter migrants from crossing the border and deployed thousands of soldiers to protect them.
Warsaw accuses Minsk and Moscow of orchestrating this influx as part of a “hybrid” attack aimed at destabilizing the region, which Minsk denies.
The migration issue is one of the main issues of the government, which has decided to hold a national referendum on October 15, the day of the general elections, which will, among other things, address this issue.
In particular, Poles will be able to say whether they want to “remove the barrier on the border with Belarus” and whether they support “the entry of thousands of illegal immigrants” into the country, according to a relocation mechanism proposed by the EU.
After the revelations about this scandal, the opposition does not mince words and conjures up a “visa mafia”.
In a video published online, PiS accuses its main rival, the Civic Platform (PO, liberal), of having taken in “250,000 migrants from the Middle East and Africa,” adding: “The referendum is a lie.”
“First they made them (the migrants, editor’s note) a threat, then they decided to take advantage of this and shamefully violate the law,” wrote Agata Diduszko on X (ex-Twitter). Zyglewska from the New Left.