The decision by the German government to introduce tighter border controls as measure to curb migration is “unacceptable,” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on September 10.

The apparently temporarily tightened border control regime kicks in on September 16, including along the nearly 500-km long Polish-German border. The border is an internal EU border covered by the free movement regulations, commonly known as the Schengen rules.

Poland watches over hundreds of kilometres of EU’s external borders with war-torn Ukraine and hostile Belarus and Russia. Those borders should be Germany’s focus, Tusk said.

“What Poland needs is not a strengthening of controls on our border [with Germany], but a strengthening of the participation of states, including Germany, in guarding and securing the external borders of the EU,” Tusk told a press briefing in Warsaw.

“It is the internal, political situation in Germany that is causing these steps to be taken and not our policy towards illegal migration at our borders,” Tusk also said. 

The PM thus referred to the political situation in Germany after an attack - claimed by a Syrian asylum-seeker - on a festival in the town of Solingen that left three dead. 

The anti-immigration rhetoric helped the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to win the regional vote in Thuringia and come runners-up in Saxony at the beginning of September.

While all of Germany’s borders are internal borders of the EU falling under Schengen rules, the same rules make it possible to tighten controls temporarily to boost security.

Tusk also said Poland will seek consultations with Germany's neighbours whether Berlin's decision should elicit a reaction from the EU.

Poland itself had instituted temporary controls along its border with Slovakia, citing the need to combat illegal migration along the so-called Balkan route, where migrants try to enter the EU from the non-EU countries such as Serbia through member states Hungary and Slovakia. 

In what might be a sign on cooling Polish-German relations, Tusk also cancelled his trip to Germany, where he was due to receive an award for his pro-democratic and media freedom stance.

The spat over border controls also comes in the wake of Germany’s pointing to Poland as a key actor in sabotaging the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. 

Poland has recently told Germany to “apologise and keep quiet” about Nord Stream, which Poland says was the central element of Russian influence in Germany and the EU, and refused handing over a Ukrainian suspected of direct involvement in the attack on the pipeline.