At the same time as the fall election
Poland puts EU asylum compromise to vote
08/17/2023, 7:38 p.m
Poland’s conservative PiS government prevails. At the same time as the parliamentary elections, she is holding a referendum – also on the EU asylum decision. The opposition complained that the questions were “infinitely stupid, tendentious, ideologized and anti-European.” She suspects that the PiS is about something completely different.
Poland will hold a referendum on the EU asylum compromise and three other issues parallel to the parliamentary elections on October 15. Parliament passed a corresponding resolution with 234 of 451 votes. Representatives of the opposition accused the national conservative PiS government of wanting to use the referendum to influence the result of the election and to use state resources for the election campaign.
According to the PiS proposal, the referendum contains four questions. One of them relates to the EU asylum compromise and the mandatory admission of refugees. Specifically, it should read: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa under the compulsory admission mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?” The outcome of the referendum has no impact on the decision-making process within the EU.
At the beginning of June, the EU interior ministers agreed on a reform of the asylum policy. This stipulates that the acceptance of refugees should no longer be voluntary in the future, but mandatory. Countries that do not want to take in refugees would be forced to pay compensation. Poland’s government resists. When presenting the referendum questions in parliament, Minister of Education Przemyslaw Czarnek criticized what he saw as Germany’s “absurd migration policy”. He compared crime statistics from Western European countries with those from Poland. “They want women in Poland to be raped like in France, Belgium or Germany. The Poles will say ‘no’ to that,” he called out to the opposition.
Opposition accuses PiS of illegal campaign financing
The other issues in the planned referendum relate to the privatization of state-owned companies, raising the retirement age and fortifying the border with Belarus. All questions are formulated in a very suggestive way and actually only allow the answer “no”. So the question on privatization is: “Do you support the sale of state assets to foreign companies, which leads to the loss of control by Poles over strategic sectors of the economy?”
The questions are “boundlessly stupid, tendentious, ideologized and anti-European,” criticized MEP Joanna Senyszyn from the Democratic Left. The PiS is not concerned with the opinion of the citizens. “You want to illegally finance your election campaign with funds from the state budget that are being spent on the referendum.” Party leader Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz from the peasant party PSL accused the PiS of wanting to manipulate the parliamentary elections with the referendum.
The PiS, which has been in power since 2015, had recently come under pressure due to high inflation, strict abortion laws and various scandals surrounding nepotism. Against this background, party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski brought up the idea of a referendum parallel to the parliamentary elections in June. At first it was only supposed to be about EU migration policy, but then the number of questions grew to four. Since the end of communism in 1989 there have been referendums in Poland, for example in 1997 on the adoption of a new constitution and in 2003 on Poland’s accession to the EU. However, no referendum was held in parallel with an election.