A former Prime Minister of Poland who said Middle Eastern migrants bring “types of parasite” as well as cholera and dysentery to Europe uses “Nazi” language, say critics.
With national elections in Poland taking place at the end of the month, the campaign rhetoric has gone into overdrive, reports EUobserver.
Addressing a rally of supporters near Warsaw, Poland’s former Prime Minister and chairman of the conservative Law and Justice Party turned to the heated issue of migration and raised the prospect of migrant-imported illnesses.
Former Prime Minister of Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński, said: “We have to find out if information about some kind of [European Union] deal to bring 100,000 Muslims to Poland is true… It’s also a question for the health minister.
“T
here are already signs of the emergence of very dangerous diseases which haven’t been seen in Europe for a long time: cholera on Greek islands; dysentery in Vienna; various types of parasite, protozoas, which aren’t dangerous in the organisms of these people [Middle East refugees], but which could be dangerous here. It doesn’t mean to discriminate against anyone. But we have to check it.”
There is no public suggestion that a deal has been struck on “100,000 Muslims”, however the centre-right Civic Platform prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, did U-turn on her initial objection to EU refugee quotas agreeing in late September to accept between 11,000-12,000 arrivals from Greece and Italy.
This led wSIECI, a conservative news weekly in Poland, to publish a front cover of their magazine depicting her in a burqa holding explosives (pictured below).
Mr. Kaczyński’s party, which in the European Parliament sits alongside David Cameron’s Conservatives in the European Conservatives and Reformists group, is doing well in pre-election polling.
According to the latest poll conducted by TNS Poland for the Polish television news channel TVN24, the Law and Justice Party is predicted to win the parliamentary election, unseating Civic Platform on 25 October. This would follow the party’s victory in May’s presidential election.
In response to the rally speech, Andrzej Cieliński of the centre-left Social Democracy of Poland party told TVN24 that Mr. Kaczyński’s language is “emblematic of the Holocaust”, adding:
“It used to be said that Jewish women carry typhus. Scaremongering about parasites is the language of Nazism. Kaczynski must know this. He’s not an idiot.”
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