{"id":1116,"date":"2026-04-13T04:53:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T04:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/1116\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T04:53:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T04:53:08","slug":"playing-with-electoral-rocket-fuel-how-polands-donald-tusk-hopes-to-weaponize-migration-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/1116\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing with \u2018electoral rocket fuel\u2019: How Poland\u2019s Donald Tusk hopes to weaponize migration \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The raw numbers don\u2019t look all that terrible. Poland is a country of almost 37 million and so far this year there have been\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wprost.pl\/kraj\/11824933\/kryzys-na-granicy-straznicy-wciaz-odpieraja-fale-migrantow-juz-26-tys-prob-w-tym-roku.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">about 26,000 attempts<\/a>\u00a0to illegally cross the border from Belarus \u2014 part of an artificial migration flow created by Belarusian dictator and Vladimir Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko as a way of attacking the EU.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s Polish presidential election.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s all about the president<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Reacting with fury to Duda\u2019s refusal to swear in ambassadorial nominees proposed by his government, Tusk on Oct. 10\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/donaldtusk\/status\/1844261289469862300\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">posted on social media<\/a>\u00a0that he could not wait for Duda\u2019s term to end. \u201cI know, there are only 299 days left, but that\u2019s 299 too many.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But Tusk\u2019s Civic Platform party is in a statistical dead heat with PiS, according to recent opinion polls. Although Warsaw Mayor Rafa\u0142 Trzaskowski, seen as the party\u2019s likeliest candidate, is ahead in presidential polls, PiS hasn\u2019t yet chosen its own candidate.<\/p>\n<p>Jaros\u0142aw Flis, a political scientist at the Jagiellonian University in Krak\u00f3w, underlined that every one of the last four presidential elections in Poland has taken a surprising turn in the final months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The raw numbers don\u2019t look all that terrible. Poland is a country of almost 37 million and so&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1117,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[694,1002,853,64,1003,1004,963,940,756,9,696,420,1005],"class_list":{"0":"post-1116","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-donald-tusk","8":"tag-andrzej-duda","9":"tag-asylum","10":"tag-belarus","11":"tag-donald-tusk","12":"tag-human-rights","13":"tag-immigration","14":"tag-jaroslaw-kaczynski","15":"tag-mark-rutte","16":"tag-migration","17":"tag-poland","18":"tag-polish-election-2023","19":"tag-polish-politics","20":"tag-the-netherlands"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}