Sławomir Mentzen, who is the presidential candidate for Poland’s right-wing Confederation party, has said that illegal migrants should be shot by border guards if they tred to force their way across the border between Belarus and Poland.
Mentzen also said his country should arrest German police who crossed the border trying to push back migrants they claimed had arrived from their eastern neighbour.
Speaking at the launch of his presidential campaign in Warsaw on August 31, Mentzen said: “We cannot tolerate illegal migrants coming across our eastern border. If someone attempts to force their way into Poland then they should be fired on.”
Poland has recently introduced legislation that enables troops on the border to open fire on those crossing illegally if they posed a physical threat to border guards but the law lays down strict conditions for doing so.
Mentzen also had advice about what should be done with regard to reports of German border guards and police transporting illegal migrants, who they believed came from across the border, back to Poland.
“And on our western border if we again see a German police van dropping off migrants on our territory we will arrest the German police officers and impound their vehicles.”
The right wing Confederation party became Poland’s first to name its candidate to contest the presidential election due in May next year.
Its choice of Sławomir Mentzen was viewed as a surprise by many, as Mentzen is a libertarian and economic liberal whose views make him less likely to attract votes from the Conservatives (PiS) but makes it more likely that the party can attract votes from the centrist Third Way Alliance and even Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO).
Mentzen was elected an MP at the last parliamentary election in 2023. He heads the libertarian faction of his party formerly led by the veteran Conservative maverick Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who was expelled from Confederation for his views on women and sex crimes.
Mentzen himself was mired in controversy when he stood for the European Parliament in 2019 and claimed that Confederation was a “political force that rejected Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes and the EU”.
He has since rowed back on that, arguing that his remarks were taken out of context and the Confederation party does not back so-called “Polexit”.
The party’s current political platform is marked by scepticism towards aiding Ukraine, the desire for radical tax cuts and opposition to European Union policies such as the Green Deal and the Migration Pact.
It criticised the previous PiS government for being what it said was too accommodating to the EU, for not doing enough to stop migration, a failed judicial reform programme and for high taxes and what it claimed was over-generous social spending.
Support for Confederation is on an upward curve. Since polling close to 8 per cent in the 2023 parliamentary election it managed 12 per cent in the EP elections in June this year and the latest poll by the State CBOS pollster has the party on 16 per cent.
