“EU won’t impose migrant quotas on us” pledges Tusk after member states approve migration pact

The European Union’s proposed new asylum and migration system has been approved despite Poland voting against the so-called migration pact in its entirety.

Following today’s European Council vote, Prime Minister Donald Tusk reiterated his previous pledge that the government would strive to ensure that Poland “will not have to accept any migrants, that the EU will not impose any migrant quotas on us”.

The main aim of the pact is to standardise rules for asylum seekers reaching Europe. The most controversial part has been a so-called “solidarity mechanism” to provide support to member states on the frontline of migration.

It would require other member states to accept relocated migrants from those states, to pay €20,000 for each migrant they do not accept, or to negotiate some other form of support for the frontline country in question.

Poland’s former national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government last year declared strong opposition to that element of the plans, and that has been continued by the new government led by Tusk, which took power in December.

Speaking this morning, finance minister Andrzej Domański, who represented Poland in the vote, said that the pact in its current form “does not take into account the specific situation of countries bordering, for example, Belarus, countries that are facing the growing pressure of the so-called hybrid war”.

That latter term refers to the crisis Poland has faced on the border with Belarus since mid-2021, when the Belarusian authorities began encouraging and helping tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers – mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa – to try to cross into the EU.

Domański blamed the previous PiS government for failing to negotiate the EU pact in a manner that would be beneficial for Poland.

After today’s vote, Tusk noted that “Poland has taken in hundreds of thousands of migrants due to the war in Ukraine, but also migrants from Belarus”.

He added that, as such, he would seek to ensure that, despite having opposed the pact, “Poland will become a beneficiary of it”. Last year, the EU’s home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, argued that Poland would indeed benefit from the pact due to its status as a frontline migration state.

“We will not pay for anything, we will not have to accept any migrants from other directions, the EU will not impose any migrant quotas on us,” said Tusk today, quoted by broadcaster RMF. “We managed to obtain such provisions that make the pact less threatening to Poland than at the beginning.”

As of the end of March, Poland was home to 955,520 refugees from Ukraine, the second highest number in the EU after Germany, Eurostat data show.

However, former PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who was in office during most negotiations on the pact, warned today that, contrary to Tusk’s reassurances, Poland will be forced to “take in illegal immigrants or pay millions in fines”.

“[Tusk’s Civic] Platform failed to block the migration pact,” Morawiecki wrote on X. “It is the government’s duty to challenge the migration pact at the European Court of Justice, referring to the conclusions of the 2018 European summit, where I negotiated the principle of Poland’s voluntary participation in the relocation mechanism.”

Meanwhile, Patryk Jaki, a politician from Sovereign Poland (Suwerenna Polska), a junior coalition partner in the former PiS government, reminded Tusk that, when in opposition, he had accused PiS of being unable to form alliances with EU countries other than Hungary.

“Tusk promised that he ‘had the capacity to build alliances in the EU’ and for Poland he would block this mechanism. His promise was one worth as much as all the previous ones,” he said.

According to Polish media reports, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia were the only countries to vote against the pact in its entirety, while Euronews reports that the Czech Republic chose to abstain from voting on the majority of elements while Austria voted against a section on managing crisis situations.

The migration pact did not need unanimity among member states to move forward. Only a so-called qualified majority of member states were required to support it.

Now that the pact has been approved, the European Commission will present an implementation plan next month, after which individual member states will have until January to submit their own national plans

Note: this article has been corrected after initially stating that Poland and Hungary were the only countries to vote against the entire migration pact. It now acknowledges conflicting reports, with some suggesting Slovakia also voted against the entire pact.

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Main image credit: Óglaigh na hÉireann/Flickr (under CC BY-NC 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.