Salvini, Orban ready anti-migrant fight ahead of EU elections
ROME: Hungarian nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Italy’s hardline Interior Minister Matteo Salvini launched Tuesday an anti-migration manifesto aiming at next year’s European parliament elections, and countering their opposing camp led by the French president.
“There are currently two camps in Europe and one is headed by (Emmanuel) Macron,” Orban said at a press conference after holding talks with Salvini in Milan.
“He is at the head of the political forces supporting immigration. On the other hand, we want to stop illegal immigration.”
European Union (EU) countries are expected to go to the polls in May, and Salvini has aligned himself with the right-wing ‘ Visegrad’ countries: the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria and Hungary.
Salvini’s meeting with Orban came shortly after Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s more low-key summit with his Czech counterpart Andrej Babis, which also focused on migration.
“At the heart of the talks between the two prime ministers was a safer and fairer Europe as a common objective to work towards ... beginning with the key issues for European citizens: the fight against illegal migration, growth and work, and socio- economic stability,” a government statement said. Salvini has repeatedly shot barbs at the EU over immigration, accusing the bloc of having abandoned Italy as it struggles to deal with the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have arrived on its shores since 2013.
His antagonistic stance has drawn support from key fi gures of Europe’s hard-right including Marine Le Pen and Orban, who confi rmed Italian media reports that he called Salvini ‘my hero and fellow traveller’.
Salvini, who is also co- deputy prime minister and leader of the nationalist League party, has taken pot shots at ‘globalists’ like billionaire Hungarian philanthropist George Soros – one of Orban’s targets – and Macron.
The French president has sharply criticised countries who refuse to cooperate on migration saying those who benefit from the EU but ‘claim national selfinterest when it comes to the issue of migrants’ should have sanctions imposed on them.
Tuesday’s meeting in Milan came just days after Italy’s latest standoff with Brussels over immigration, which led to scores of migrants being held on a coastguard boat moored in Sicily for days until a relocation deal was struck enabling them to disembark on Sunday. — AFP