Anti-Migrant Disinfo Hits Polish Presidential Campaign
False claims about migrants have spread online in the run-up to Poland’s presidential election, with right-wing and far-right candidates attacking the ruling pro-European government’s migration policy.
Ahead of first-round voting on May 18, Germany has been accused of sending Muslim and black migrants to Poland while Ukrainian refugees have been criticised for supposedly exploiting the social benefits system.
Karol Nawrocki, backed by the nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS), and Slawomir Mentzen, candidate for the far-right libertarian Confederation, trail behind pro-European Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski in the polls.
But they still command hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, which has become a sounding board for false claims targeting foreigners.
One example of footage claimed to show street prayers “in Warsaw” when it was actually filmed in Italy.
Another purportedly presented a group of young migrants in a Polish village during “Easter 2025” but is an old photo taken several months ago.
A video shared thousands of times at the beginning of the year, including by PiS and Confederation politicians, ostensibly showed German police deporting a migrant to the Polish border.
AFP’s fact-checking journalists debunked the claim and determined the man was in fact a Polish homeless person.
– ‘Manipulation’ –
Anti-migrant disinformation has been thriving for years in Poland, which has taken in large numbers of Ukrainian refugees since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and is facing migratory pressure.
“What’s new is that it is now combined with anti-German rhetoric, which feeds on anti-German and anti-European phobias,” said Anna Mierzynska, an independent social media expert.
Sometimes the two phenomena converge.
Nawrocki has accused Donald Tusk’s government of having “abdicated” to Germany on this issue while Mentzen called on the Polish police to “arrest German police officers” who deposit “illegal migrants” on Polish soil.
But according to migration experts, the reality is much more nuanced.
“We are not seeing a particular increase in the number of migrants entering Poland. Neither through the eastern nor the western border,” Marta Kindler, a researcher at the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of Warsaw, told AFP.
“The Tusk government’s migration policy is, in some respects, more restrictive than that of its PiS predecessors,” she added.
In March, Poland introduced a measure limiting the right to asylum on arrival at its border with Belarus.
Kindler said Poland is currently “seeing mainly Asian people arriving, such as Filipinos, Indians and Nepalese, and South American nationals, notably Colombians — and fewer migrants from Africa”.
One figure has been circulating widely: that of 10,000 migrants –- purportedly from the Middle East and Africa -– claimed to have been sent back to Poland by Germany.
In fact, these are cases of entry into Germany being refused in 2024, 60 percent of which were Ukrainians, mainly due to a lack of valid passports, as clarified by the Polish interior ministry.
“This is manipulation of figures for political gain,” said Monika Szulecka, a researcher at the Centre for Migration Studies.
– Stoke fear –
Ukrainian refugees are also widely targeted by disinformation circulating online.
One example was a video with doctored audio, supposedly showing an “ungrateful Ukrainian woman” dissatisfied with the food parcels she received in Poland.
Another video that went viral — claiming to show a refugee collecting passports to accumulate benefits –- was originally a satirical clip, according to the Polish fact-checking website Konkret24.
These publications echo the rhetoric pushed by the Confederation, which regularly attacks what it says are the million “ungrateful Ukrainians” living in Poland.
“The ongoing effects of the war (in Ukraine) and the 2021 migration crisis are still present and are feeding fear,” said Lukasz Olejnik, an analyst and researcher at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
The disinformation is also fuelling anti-migration protests, with the next demonstration scheduled for May 10 in the capital, Warsaw.
“The aim of this campaign is to stoke fear,” said Katarzyna Bakowicz, a professor at the SWPS University in Warsaw and coordinator of CEDMO, an anti-disinformation observatory in which AFP participates.
“Disinformation is simply a tool to achieve this.”
Source: AFP