The Polish opposition is already sensing a turning point in the election campaign. On October 15, the right-wing national PiS party wants to win the parliamentary elections again, but now the opposition and media critical of the government are making serious accusations against Jarosław Kaczyński’s party. Foreign Ministry employees are said to have traded on Polish visas. They were reportedly sold by the hundreds of thousands to people from the Middle East and Africa.
The PiS government has been agitating against people from these parts of the world for years, and it won the elections in 2015 with this issue. In order to get illegal immigration via Belarus under control, the government built a 5.5 meter high steel fence along 185 kilometers of protected jungle on the border. There will also be a referendum on election day in which the government will subsequently ask about support for this fence and want to know whether Poles agree to the redistribution of refugees within the EU.
The story only became public when a deputy minister was fired
And now, according to the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza Up to 600,000 visas may have been sold – and, as the newspaper writes, to unverified people. The opposition is talking about 250,000 visas. The portal reported in the East African country of Uganda Uganda Watchdog in May about cases in which people in Kenya lost thousands of dollars while trying to get a Polish work visa. Kenyan websites arranging Polish Schengen visas can be found in abundance on the Internet.
The National Prosecutor’s Office and the Anti-Corruption Authority (CBA) have begun investigations. On Thursday they said at a press conference that seven people had been charged and three had been arrested. However, the public prosecutor’s office speaks of “several hundred visas” that were issued over the course of a year and a half. The investigations have been ongoing since July 2022.
The story got rolling when the PiS government announced on September 1st, in response to media inquiries, that a deputy foreign minister had been fired. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s succinct statement was that they were not happy with him. Shortly afterwards she brought Gazeta Wyborcza the first reports about the visa affair. Another State Department employee was fired on Friday. The government said it would now monitor all consular departments worldwide.
The Internet portal Onet.pl had previously reported that the dismissed deputy foreign minister personally sent lists of names to consular departments in Polish missions abroad. Several groups of people from India were posed as film crews for Bollywood productions, the report said. Accordingly, people would have paid up to $40,000 for a visa. Many traveled further to the USA, where the visas were noticed and the US authorities alerted the Polish ones.
The opposition unleashes a sensational video on the PiS
The largest Polish opposition party, Civic Platform (PO), led by Donald Tusk, immediately included the affair in its election campaign and had a new ad made accusing the PiS of lies and hypocrisy. However, the lurid video with its threatening music and language loaded with accusations also shows how close the two largest competing camps now are in their choice of words and demeanor.
Donald Tusk himself, who rarely speaks on Service X, accused the PiS there of to have unleashed “an anti-migrant hysteria” and at the same time to have earned “millions with visas”.. “Lukashenko is an amateur against them.” The Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko lured tens of thousands of people to Belarus with false promises, especially in 2021, and sent them on to the EU’s external borders.
The government is now trying to pin responsibility on Tusk’s PO party. Under Donald Tusk, who was Prime Minister of Poland from 2007 to 2014, consular departments were closed and private contractors were hired. They are said to be responsible for the incidents. A narrative that the state television broadcaster TVP is already adopting. The Gazeta Wyborcza writes on Friday that the visa affair could bring down the PiS government, but only “if people find out about it.”
According to the latest election survey by the opinion research institute Ibris, 33.3 percent of respondents would choose the Law and Justice party, or PiS for short, and its list partners and 26.4 percent would choose the multi-party list Citizens Coalition (KO) led by Donald Tusk.