ROME – For years, Giorgia Meloni has criticized Italy’s migration policies, calling them overly lenient and saying they risk turning the country into the “refugee camp of Europe.”
Now that she is Italy’s presumptive next prime minister, migration is one of the areas where Meloni can most easily bring about radical change.
“The smart approach is: You come to my house according to my rules,” Meloni, of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party, said earlier this month in an interview with The Washington Post.
A far-right politician is about to become Italy’s first female leader
Their ideas, taken together, have the potential to significantly tighten the doors to one of the European Union’s front-line destinations for undocumented immigrants.
While in other areas, such as spending and foreign policy, Meloni would be more limited by Europe, EU countries have a lot of room to manage their external borders, and he has long made it clear that stopping the flows of people across the Mediterranean is one of his priorities.
But that doesn’t mean it’s free of complications.
Efforts to block the docking of humanitarian rescue ships in Italian ports could lead to legal challenges. And if Meloni blocks the routes to Italy, the volume of crossings would likely increase to other Mediterranean countries such as Spain, as happened three years ago when Italy was briefly led by an anti-immigration, populist government.
The election results in Italy established the first far-right government since Mussolini
“You can do things relatively quickly [on migration] this is draconian, symbolic and sends a clear message: we are here, we are doing something. But there are problems,” said Andrew Geddes, director of the Center for Migration Policy at the European University Institute in Florence.
“When you stop the crossings and divert them [elsewhere]that’s where you come into conflict with the EU,” he said. “It will revive an old conflict.”
Meloni’s party won more support than any other group in national elections on Sunday, securing a clear mandate to lead Italy’s next government and putting Meloni in the position of prime minister. During the short campaign, following the collapse of Mario Draghi’s unity government, immigration policy was low on the agenda, given rising energy bills, a looming recession in Europe and other serious issues stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine.
But immigration still strikes a chord with many right-wing voters in Italy, who feel their country has received too little help from Europe to meet the burden of accommodating and integrating newcomers. A surge in asylum seekers and refugees in 2015 and 2016 turned migration into a political touchstone for several years and helped spark a nationalist movement across Europe. While Meloni’s party did not immediately benefit from these sentiments, it later diverted votes from a rival far-right Italian group, the League, which soared in part due to the migration backlash.
What to know about Giorgia Meloni
Although millions of Ukrainians have taken refuge in Europe this year, taking advantage of special residence and work rights, immigration to the Mediterranean is nowhere near the figures of seven years ago. To the extent it has increased, compared to rates before and after the pandemic, politicians allied with Meloni blame the lax policies of recent governments, including Draghi’s.
Jude Sunderland, associate director for Italy at Human Rights Watch, said people were choosing to travel for other reasons, including rising food prices and deteriorating conditions in their own countries.
Meloni and the other two parties in his coalition said in a jointly published platform that they want to block rescue ships from Italian ports as a way to stop “human trafficking” from Africa. The move would be a throwback to the period in 2018 and 2019, when Italian politics was dominated by then-Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who vowed to stop the “invasion”.
Salvini’s first step was to close the ports to the large number of non-governmental groups that sail the Mediterranean and try to rescue immigrants from their fragile boats. Their movement led to prolonged and risky clashes in which boats with hundreds of migrants on board could not find a place to dock and sometimes spent weeks at sea as European countries negotiated how to distribute the passengers.
Captain who defied Italy and brought rescued migrants to port freed from house arrest
The practice landed Salvini in four court cases, one of which is still ongoing, where he faces up to 15 years in prison if found guilty of kidnapping for abuse of office. Two more cases were dismissed, and in one case the Italian senate used its power to prevent a trial. Meanwhile, the NGOs saw their ships seized and faced Italian legal challenges.
Some experts said that crossing the Mediterranean became more deadly under Salvini: the number of arrivals in Italy fell, but the death toll did not fall proportionately.
“We know it will be more difficult [again]. We know it will be tougher,” said Mattea Weihe, a spokeswoman for Berlin-based Sea-Watch, one of the NGOs handling the rescue efforts. Weihe said her group, with an eye on in the expected victory of the far right in Italy, he had bought a new rescue ship as a “way to bring a different game to the table”.
Italy’s far-right torchbearer is now in power and wants to keep anti-migrant promises
Meloni has also repeatedly called for a “naval blockade” of the Mediterranean. A spokesman for Meloni said on Monday that such a move could only be led by Europe and in cooperation with North African countries.
In his interview with The Post, Meloni said that “migratory flows must be managed,” because “nations only exist if there are borders and if they are defended.” He said Italy had given immigrants few legal avenues, while instead allowing migration to be dominated by “smugglers” and “slave drivers”.
“Is that a smart approach? No,” he said. “Letting hundreds of thousands of people in, then keeping them pushing drugs or being forced into prostitution on the fringes of our society is not solidarity.”
Interview by Giorgia Meloni in The Washington Post
He has suggested that Italy, in cooperation with Europe, should set up so-called hotspots outside the EU where asylum seekers and refugees can be screened, with only those who are approved allowed through. Politicians on the left and right have been talking about these ideas for a long time, but the obstacles are multiple: few countries want to host these centers and the possibilities of rights abuses are abundant. The UK is pursuing a related plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, but its rollout has been complicated by court challenges.
Within the EU, several countries over the years have taken significant steps to make it harder for undocumented immigrants to reach the bloc. Greece has been accused of intercepting migrants crossing from Turkey and turning them back into international waters, a violation of international law. And Italy, in a policy supported by both left and right, has worked to build and equip the Libyan coast guard to remove immigrants who want to cross the Mediterranean.
Fewer migrants arrive in Europe. Here’s why.
Even under Draghi, rescue teams faced obstacles, including delays at sea. But it was rare that they were denied access to port.
Rossella Miccio, president of Emergència, an Italian NGO that plans to launch a search and rescue mission in the Mediterranean next month, said that “there has been too much general homogeneity in Italian politics” that leaves out “the human rights priority.”
He thought the weather would deteriorate further.
“We are frankly concerned, not for our activity, but for the lives of people at sea who need to be rescued, rather than stopped and sent back,” Miccio said.