Right-wing Polish leader Kaczynski says migrants carry diseases to Europe

In this Sept. 30, 2015 photo Former Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski speaks at a news conference in Warsaw, Poland. Kaczynski shocked some in Poland when he said Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2015, that migrants who have arrived recently in Europe are carrying diseases that could hurt the local populations. Some of his left-wing opponents said his language is racist and reminded them of the scare tactics used against Jews in Nazi Germany. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski) (The Associated Press)

WARSAW, Poland – Former Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has shocked some in Poland by claiming that the Muslim migrants now arriving in Europe are carrying diseases that could hurt local people.

The comments sparked a sharp rebuke from some of his political opponents, with one left-wing politician, Janusz Palikot, slamming Kaczynski's statement as racist language that Adolf Hitler himself "would not be ashamed of."

Kaczynski spoke Tuesday ahead of Poland's Oct. 25 parliamentary election that his right-wing Law and Justice party is expected to win.

The current Polish government has agreed to take 7,000 refugees as part of an European Union resettlement plan, but many in heavily Catholic Poland strongly oppose taking in any Muslims, sentiment that is helping the Law and Justice party.

"There 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 parasites, protozoa, which aren't dangerous in the organisms of these people, but which could be dangerous here," Kaczynski told voters in Makow Mazowiecki.

"This doesn't mean that anybody should be discriminated against but one must check this," Kaczynski added.

Andrzej Celinski, a left-wing politician and former anti-communist dissident, said Kaczynski's language reminded him of the way that Nazi Germany associated Jews with typhus.

"Frightening (people) with parasites is the language of Nazism," Celinski said on TVN24. "Kaczynski has to know this; he is not an idiot."

Kaczynski on Wednesday lashed back at the Nazi comparisons as "absurd."

Opinion polls give Law and Justice a strong lead over the current pro-business ruling party, Civic Platform. However, Kaczynski, prime minister from 2006 to 2007, is not campaigning for that post this time, leaving that to colleague Beata Szydlo.