The raw numbers don’t look all that terrible. Poland is a country of almost 37 million and so far this year there have been about 26,000 attempts to illegally cross the border from Belarus — part of an artificial migration flow created by Belarusian dictator and Vladimir Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko as a way of attacking the EU.
But the impact is big and growing. Germany has imposed temporary border controls and is sending thousands of migrants back to Poland. And Tusk cannot afford any political wobbles ahead of next year’s Polish presidential election.
It’s all about the president
Tusk is desperate to ensure that incumbent Andrzej Duda, an ally of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, is replaced by a friendlier president who will stop blocking key legislation.
Reacting with fury to Duda’s refusal to swear in ambassadorial nominees proposed by his government, Tusk on Oct. 10 posted on social media that he could not wait for Duda’s term to end. “I know, there are only 299 days left, but that’s 299 too many.”
But Tusk’s Civic Platform party is in a statistical dead heat with PiS, according to recent opinion polls. Although Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, seen as the party’s likeliest candidate, is ahead in presidential polls, PiS hasn’t yet chosen its own candidate.
Jarosław Flis, a political scientist at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, underlined that every one of the last four presidential elections in Poland has taken a surprising turn in the final months.