Renzi breaks away from PD, backs govt

Malta, Rome clash over migrants

ROME, Sept 17, (RTRS): Former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi announced on Tuesday he was leaving the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) to set up a new party, in a move that raised tensions in the new ruling coalition and could undermine its stability.

Renzi, who led a PD government from 2014-2016, had a leading role in forming the coalition this month after Matteo Salvini’s hard-right League walked out of an alliance with the 5-Star Movement in the vain hope of triggering an early election.

Renzi stressed that his new party would continue to back the government, but his former colleagues and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte were still dismayed by a decision analysts say may threaten the government’s medium term prospects.

“I have decided to leave the Democratic Party and to build a new house together with others”, Renzi wrote on Facebook.

The 5-Star/PD coalition will now have to rely for their majority on a new party with its own agenda, complicating policy negotiations.

“This is not a mortal threat to the government yet, but it increases fragmentation and makes its prospects less rosy,” said Francesco Galietti, head of political risk consultancy Policy Sonar.

The spread between yields on Italian benchmark bonds and German Bunds widened to 140 basis points from 133 on Monday.

Conte, a technocrat close to 5-Star, said he was “puzzled” by Renzi’s move, which altered the political balance in parliament and was badly timed just after the government was formed, according to a statement issued by Conte’s office.

However, in an interview with la Repubblica daily, Renzi said his new party would enlarge the government’s majority.

Earlier this week two PD deputies close to Renzi said he could attract lawmakers from Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party, whose support has plunged since 2018 elections, leaving space in the political centre-ground.

Renzi’s supporters hope to fill that room ahead of a widely expected proportional reform of the electoral law which is seen enhancing the bargaining power of small parties.

Renzi said he would take some 30 lower house deputies and senators with him. The coalition, which also includes the leftwing LEU party, is just eight votes above the minimum threshold in the upper house Senate, where the PD has 51 lawmakers.

It has a much more comfortable majority in the Chamber of Deputies, where the PD has 111 seats.

“We are sorry, breaking up the PD is a mistake”, PD leader

region said the migrants being removed from Tuesday from the town of Grande Synthe include an unspecified number of children with their families. Local media say the migrants include many Kurds from Iraq.

A court this month ordered the migrants removed, to stem violence and human trafficking in the neighborhood. The spokesman said the migrants are being taken to temporary shelters and allowed to apply for asylum. (AP)

Migrants keep out:

patrol along a razor-wire fence on Slovenia’s border with Croatia, catch migrants trying to climb over, hand them to police and make sure they are swiftly sent out of the country.

The 47-year-old former Slovenian army soldier, dressed in camouflage trousers with a long knife hanging from his belt, is one of the vigilantes who call themselves “home guards”

– a mushrooming anti-migrant movement that was until recently unthinkable in the traditionally liberal Alpine state. The name of the self-styled group evokes memories of the militia that sided with fascists during World War II.

“I would prefer to enjoy my retirement peacefully, but security reasons are preventing this,” Zidar said as he embarked on yet another of his daily foot patrols together with his wife near their home village of Radovica nestled idyllically among vineyards and lush green forested hills.

Zidar complained that he had to act because Slovenian police aren’t doing their job of guarding the borders from the migrant flow which peaked in 2015 when hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, fleeing wars and poverty, crossed from Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia via Hungary or Croatia and Slovenia toward more prosperous Western Nicola Zingaretti, who is from the PD’s left, wrote on Facebook.

Culture minister Dario Franceschini, one of the PD’s most influential figures, compared his former leader’s breakaway to the political divisions that led to fascism in the 1920s.

5-Star leader and Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, who has always had acrimonious relations with Renzi, made light of his move, telling the Ansa news agency it was “no surprise.”

Renzi has had an abrasive relationship with his former party, especially those on the left, and there were persistent rumours he was planning to set up a new movement.

“There is a cultural faction in the Italian left who see me as an intruder”, he told la Repubblica, describing the PD as “a bunch of factions” unable to face Salvini’s populist challenge.

As premier, he faced internal criticism when he tried to liberalize the job market and carry out a constitutional reform which was finally rejected in a referendum. It remains to be seen whether Renzi can expand the centre-ground in an increasingly polarised political landscape.

He normally comes near the bottom of opinion surveys measuring politicians’ approval ratings, and pollsters told Corriere della Sera newspaper on Tuesday his new party would be unlikely to get more than 5% of the vote.

Meanwhile, Malta refused on Tuesday to accept 90 migrants rescued by an Italian Coast Guard vessel in its search and rescue zone, setting up a potential standoff with the new Italian government.

The Italian Coast Guard said on Tuesday it had picked up the migrants from a sinking boat off Libya at the request of the Maltese rescue coordination centre.

The Coast Guard said its vessel was taking the migrants to Maltese waters, but Malta had refused to send a vessel to transfer them.

The Maltese Armed Forces had been surveilling the situation and the Italians got involved, an armed forces spokeswoman said. She gave no further comment.

Malta has repeatedly insisted that migrants should be taken to the closest safe harbour, which in this case was the Italian island of Lampedusa.

The incident comes ahead of a meeting in Malta next week of European Union interior ministers to discuss a new migrant distribution mechanism.

Meanwhile, the Ocean Viking charity vessel, run by SOS Mediterranee and Doctors without Borders, said on Twitter it had rescued 48 migrants from a wooden boat off the Libyan coast.

European states. (AP)

Italy arrests three men:

Italian prosecutors on Monday ordered the arrest of three people suspected of torturing migrants in a detention centre in north-west Libya.

The men, a 22-year-old Guinean and two Egyptians aged 26 and 24, are believed to be part of a group that kidnapped and mistreated dozens of people, the judicial order seen by Reuters said.

Prosecutors collected testimony from several migrants detained in the former military base of Zawyia, who said they recognised their former jailers among residents of a migrant registration centre in Sicily.

“I have been beaten several times. I suffered real torture that left scars on my body ... I was whipped with electric wires,” one of the migrants told magistrates, according to the judicial document.

The migrants said the prison was surrounded by high walls and had a blue gate at the entrance. People were separated according to their sex or ethnic group and guarded by armed men.

The head of the centre was described as a short, balding Libyan man called Ossama, who was feared for his brutality. (AP)

France offers 60m euros:

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Monday Paris would offer 60 million euros ($66 million) in financial assistance to Sudan.

France will immediately disburse 15 million euros via special institutions, Le Drian told a joint news conference with his Sudanese counterpart Asmaa Mohammad in the wake of his meeting with Abdulfatah Al-Burhan,

president of the sovereign council.

France, he added, would help Sudan normalize its relations with international financial institutions and solve its debts’ issue.

He said France “supports Sudan in this sensitive transitional period in the country’s history.”

He supported efforts to achieve comprehensive peace in Sudan, citing a recently-signed agreement between the Sudanese government and the armed movements.

Le Drian arrived in Khartoum earlier today on a short visit aimed at exploring means of supporting the Sudanese government.(KUNA)

Sanchez is lying:

Spain’s centreright Ciudadanos party said on Tuesday it would vote against Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez becoming prime minister unless he explicitly promises to meet conditions Ciudadanos formulated earlier.

In a statement, Ciudadanos qualified a written response by Sanchez, in which he said earlier on Tuesday that the Socialist party already complied with all its demands and Ciudadanos had no reasons to block his investiture, as “a collection of lies”.

Stowaways ride trains:

The unassuming freight train rumbles across the countryside in northern Greece, but a moving shadow cast on the ground reveals human figures hiding between its wagons.

Migrant stowaways crouch on the couplers. The monotonous clickety-clack of the wheels speeding over the iron tracks makes them drowsy, or it could be the heat and wind in their faces.

Most in this group are from Afghanistan. They are trying to cross the border into North Macedonia, and eventually reach Germany or France. (RTRS)