Polish FM accuses Scholz of interfering in internal affairs, elections

Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau took to social media to respond to a recent statement by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on visa bribery allegations, calling on him to respect Poland’s sovereignty on the eve of important national elections.

Poland has been rocked for weeks by reports that its consular offices have issued some 250,000 visas to migrants from Asia and Africa since 2021 in return for bribes of several thousand dollars each.

In response to the scandal, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called on Poland to clarify the allegations, expressing concern that it could exacerbate his country’s migration problems.

“I don’t want Poland to just let (migrants) through and then have a discussion about our asylum policy,” Scholz told a rally of his Social Democratic Party on Saturday.

In response to Scholz’s words, the head of the Polish Foreign Ministry pointed out that the German Chancellor’s competence does not concern the ongoing proceedings in Poland and, in his view, violates Polish sovereignty.

“The recent statement by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz violates the principles of sovereign equality of states, which is the basis of good neighbourly relations and friendly cooperation with Poland”, Rau said in a post published on X on Sunday evening.

The statements, in this case, indicate an attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of the Polish state and the ongoing election campaign in Poland,” Rau wrote, adding that “in the interest of good bilateral relations, I appealed to the German chancellor to respect Poland’s sovereignty and refrain from making statements that damage the countries’ mutual relations”.

As for the visa scandal itself, the Polish Foreign Ministry issued a communiqué on 15 September stating that the director of the Foreign Ministry’s Legal and Compliance Management Office, Jakub Osajda, had been dismissed.

Rau’s ministry also announced that it had carried out an extraordinary inspection and audit of the Consular Department of the Foreign Ministry and all of Poland’s consular offices and had decided to terminate the contracts of all outsourcing companies entrusted with accepting visa applications since 2011.

However, for the minister, there is officially no such thing as a ‘visa affair’. A week ago, after arriving in New York for the 78th session of the UN General Assembly, Rau said in an interview that he did not feel “complicit” in the visa scandal.

Asked if he was considering resigning over the visa scandal, Rau said he was not.

“We issued less than two visas per thousand inhabitants of Poland. At the same time, our French partners issued 20 visas per one thousand inhabitants, and the Germans issued 10 visas,” Rau said, asserting that “there is no affair”.

(Charles Szumski | Euractiv.com)