Polish voters face immigration issue

Referendum sought alongside election

WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s ruling party wants to ask voters in a referendum whether they support accepting “thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa” as part of a European Union relocation plan, the prime minister said Sunday, as his conservative party seeks to hold onto power with parliamentary election in October.

Mateusz Morawiecki announced the referendum question in a new video published on social media. It indicated that his party, Law and Justice, is seeking to use migration in its election campaign, a tactic that helped it take power in 2015.

Poland hosts more than a million Ukrainian refugees, who are primarily white and Christian, but officials have long made clear that they consider Muslims and others from different cultures to be a threat to the nation’s cultural identity and security.

EU interior ministers in June endorsed a plan to share responsibility for migrants entering Europe without authorization, the root of one of the bloc’s longest-running political crises.

The Polish government wants to hold the referendum alongside the parliamentary election, scheduled for Oct. 15. Morawiecki said the question would say: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa under the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?”

The video announcing the question includes scenes of burning cars and other street violence in Western Europe. A Black man licks a huge knife in apparent anticipation of committing a crime. Party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski then says: “Do you want this to happen in Poland as well? Do you want to cease being masters of your own country?”

An opposition politician, Robert Biedron, reacted by saying the migration question is pointless because participation in the EU mechanism is not mandatory and can be replaced by other forms of shared responsibility, while Poland could be eligible for support or for a waiver of its contribution because of the high number of Ukrainian refugees.

Biedron, a European Parliament member for the Left party, posted on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, a letter from EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson. In it, she sets out the terms of the relocation mechanism and the grounds for seeking an exemption.

Leaders have announced two other questions in recent days. One will ask voters for their views on privatizing state-owned enterprises and the other will ask if they support raising the retirement age, which Law and Justice lowered to 60 for women and 65 for men.

The questions are set up to depict the opposition party, Civic Platform, as a threat to the interests of Poles.