Italian party leader promises to deport half a million migrants

A RIGHT-WING politician who hopes to be the next prime minister of Italy has pledged to expel half a million migrants if his party wins the coming election.

Matteo Salvini, the head of the Eurosceptic Northern League, said he aims to repatriate 100,000 migrants in his first year in power, followed by another 400,000 during the rest of his fiveyear term in office.

“There are half a million irregular migrants in Italy. All of them need to be sent home,” Mr Salvini told La Repubblica newspaper.

The remarks came as the Catholic Church warned that political parties risked fomenting a “climate of fear” by campaigning on immigration issues.

The Northern League has struck up an alliance with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and two smaller Right-wing parties. As campaigning intensifies for the March 4 general election, the bloc is expected to win around 36 per cent of the national vote, putting it well ahead of the centre-left and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement.

The key question is whether it will be Forza Italia or the Northern League which garners the most votes and is therefore able to choose who becomes prime minister. Mr Berlusconi cannot put himself forward because of a ban on holding public office as a result of a tax fraud conviction. He has yet to say who his candidate for premier would be.

Mr Salvini dismissed suggestions that his party was xenophobic, arguing that he was trying to prevent the rise of racism by tackling the problem of illegal immigrants.

“The only antidote to racism is to control, regulate and limit immigration. There are millions of Italians in economic difficulty. Italians are not racist, but out-of-control immigration brings [some] far from positive reactions. We want to prevent that,” he said.

Whether the League, even if it won power, would be able to expel so many migrants is open to question, given the legal and logistical difficulties that past governments have wrestled with.

Immigration is one of the key issues in the election campaign. Last year, 120,000 migrants and refugees reached Italy from the coast of Libya, while in 2016 the total was 180,000.

Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, the head of the Italian Bishops Conference, said parties risked encouraging xenophobia, “evoking debates on race that we thought we had buried for good”. He pointed out that this month marks 80 years since Mussolini introduced discriminatory race laws which resulted in thousands of Italian Jews being rounded up and sent to Nazi death camps.

Last week, a senior member of the Northern League warned that “the white race” in Italy was in danger. “We have to decide if our ethnicity, if our white race, if our society continues to exist or if it will be cancelled out,” said Attilio Fontana, the League’s candidate for governor of Lombardy.