Tribune. One cannot, seeing the barbed wire fences on the Polish border, not remember that they are installed by a country that made a major contribution thirty years ago to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe. Comparison is not right, but the symbol measures the distance traveled. It also highlights the contrast with the European reaction in 2015, when Viktor Orban’s Hungary built, in 2015, a similar fence on the border with Serbia in order to block what he called a “Invasion” of migrants taking the “Ottoman way” from Turkey to Europe. Europe was then deeply divided on the migration issue.
The President of the European Council, Charles Michel, expressed on November 10, in Warsaw, his solidarity with the Polish government, faced with what he denounces as a “Hybrid war” with the transport to the border of several thousand migrants from the Middle East. It is not, in fact, a migratory crisis as in 2015, but a trafficking in human beings organized by the Belarusian dictator in response to European Union (EU) sanctions imposed after the hijacking of ” a plane that connected the capitals of Greece and Lithuania [Athènes et Vilnius, pour arrêter le dissident en exil Roman Protassevitch et sa compagne].
Contestation eclipsed
This does not detract from the humanitarian drama unfolding on the Polish-Belarusian border. Criticisms are addressed, in Poland itself, to the authorities who refuse access to the border to those who want to help migrants. But this time the context is different. Faced with an attempt to instrumentalize migration, unity has been preserved: the populist and nationalist wave has passed through this, not only in the East from the continent. The migration issue is not the cause, but a revelation and an accelerator. No one wants to see the EU accused of naivety or powerlessness on such a file. As Angela Merkel leaves the chancellery, Germany may not be unhappy to see Poland blocking chanting migrants “Germany, Germany”.
The conservative government in Warsaw did not miss the opportunity to use the crisis to its advantage both at home and at European level. A month ago, the challenge of the power in place was in full swing on the question of the independence of the judiciary as on that of the new restrictive law on abortion. On October 10, a demonstration against an authoritarian and anti-European drift brought together 100,000 people in Warsaw.
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