The Polish government accuses Germany of unilateral and unfair action in its “unacceptable” plans to introduce temporary controls at all nine national borders in the passport-free Schengen area. Warsaw sees this as a violation of European law.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Germany had introduced a “de facto suspension of the Schengen Agreement on a large scale” after Interior Minister Nancy Faeser announced Berlin’s decision to tackle “irregular migration” by introducing random checks along Germany’s 3,700-kilometer border following a wave of suspected Islamist attacks.

Tusk called for “urgent consultations” with Germany’s other neighbours.

The new rules are set to come into force next Monday and will initially apply for six months. The decision comes amid a heated political debate in Germany over migration following recent deadly attacks in which the suspects were rejected asylum seekers. In addition, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which campaigns strongly against migration, became the first far-right political party to win a state election in Germany since the Nazi era this month.

Austria’s Interior Minister Gerhard Karner also voiced his objection on Tuesday as the dispute between the EU member states threatened to escalate. He said Vienna was not prepared to accept migrants who were turned away at the border with Germany. “There is no room for maneuver here,” he said.

Tusk said on television on Tuesday that if Germany turns away migrants at the border with Poland, Warsaw will be forced to deal with them. “From the Polish point of view, such measures are unacceptable,” he said at a meeting of ambassadors.

Poland has been battling a migration crisis on its eastern border since 2021, widely seen as choreographed by Belarus and Russia, and has accused Berlin of not providing the country with sufficient support. Tusk said Poland needs “the full support of Germany and the entire EU when it comes to helping organize, finance and arm the eastern border, including in relation to illegal migration.”

The announcement of the border controls came ahead of a second round of talks at a crisis summit on German migration policy between the coalition government, opposition parties and the federal states. However, Germany’s opposition CDU party announced on Tuesday evening that it was leaving the talks, claiming that the talks had “collapsed” and that Olaf Scholz’s government had failed to keep its promise to carry out “systematic deportations” at the German border.

The CDU/CSU’s withdrawal was seen as a sign that Faeser’s announcement had done little to solve the government’s domestic problems. Alexander Dobrindt of the Bavarian CSU accused Scholz’s coalition of being “incapable of introducing effective measures to reduce irregular immigration.” He said their “complete inability to act” endangered Germany’s “order and social cohesion” and amounted to “capitulation.”

Faeser said after the summit that the government was urgently trying to implement measures that were “legally secure” and would reduce irregular migration. She said the government had “paved the way” with the expansion of border controls and other measures that were “effective and compatible with European law”.

A series of corresponding security measures will be presented to the Bundestag on Thursday, she said.

The measures are just some of many new rules that Germany has introduced in recent years after large numbers of migrants arrived in the country. Many of them have fled war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. Non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International warned on Tuesday that the proposed measures risk undermining the right to asylum.

In a joint appeal to the federal government, it was said that seeking protection from human rights violations in Germany and Europe was, after the experiences of the Second World War, “part of the DNA of democracy”. “The misdeeds of individuals must never lead to people being stigmatized across the board and labeled as not belonging to society,” the appeal states.

Faeser’s announcement was seen as an attempt to regain control of a debate that has dominated recent state election campaigns. The opposition and far-right and far-left candidates have capitalized on voters’ concerns about integration, security and overburdened public services, including housing and education.

Most of the attention was focused on a knife attack in which three people were killed at a festival in the western city of Solingen last month. The terrorist group “Islamic State” claimed responsibility for the attack. The main suspect was a man from Syria who was to be deported to Bulgaria, where he had applied for asylum.

An 18-year-old Austrian armed with a rifle and fixed bayonet was shot dead in Munich last week in a square near the Israeli consulate and a Nazi documentation center. The man, of Bosnian origin, who is believed to have been radicalized, had crossed the Austrian border into Germany.

Three months ago, a suspected Islamist from Afghanistan who had been rejected but not deported stabbed and killed a police officer in Mannheim.

Last year, authorities in Germany and France were able to thwart several Islamist attacks and dozens of arrests were made across Europe.

Migration remains the top issue on voters’ agenda ahead of elections in the northern state of Brandenburg in less than two weeks. The centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), of which Scholz and Faeser are part, are battling for control of the state, with the outcome seen as likely to determine the future of Scholz’s government, especially ahead of federal elections in a year.

Tensions over the issue have been building for nearly a decade. In 2015, Angela Merkel’s government allowed about a million people, most of them fleeing Syria and Iraq, to ​​enter the country under a so-called “open door policy.” It recently granted automatic asylum to an estimated one million Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion in 2022 – at a time when Germany was grappling with an energy and cost-of-living crisis.

Last year, stricter controls were introduced at Germany’s land borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. These and the existing controls at the border with Austria have led to the return of around 30,000 people since October 2023, the government announced on Monday. According to its own statistics, asylum applications fell by 22 percent between January and August, which was due to the stricter measures.

It has also focused on implementing existing deportation rules and resumed the repatriation of convicted criminals of Afghan nationality, despite human rights concerns following the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. A recent operation to repatriate a plane full of Afghans was widely publicized, which was seen by German voters as a sign that the government was taking action.

The countries of the Schengen area, which includes all EU member states except Cyprus and Ireland, are only allowed to introduce border controls as a last resort to prevent threats to internal security. Germany has regularly introduced the controls in connection with sporting events, such as the recent UEFA European Football Championship.

Questions are being raised about how Germany can adequately control the border it shares with Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland in the long term. Police chiefs have expressed concern about a lack of staff and resources.