Salvini’s salvo will force Europe’s liberals to confront the refugee issue

Matteo Salvini’s decision to close Italy’s ports to boats rescuing migrants put to sea by North African people-smugglers is straight out of the populist political playbook. Donald Trump would be proud. It takes bold action to fulfil a campaign

promise; confronts Europe’s liberal mainstream’s failure to acknowledge a real issue and rouses his support base with a social media campaign built around the slogan #chiudiamoiporti – “we’re shutting the ports”.

Spain’s decision to accept the 629 migrants on this ship offers only a very temporary respite for the European body politic which finds populism spreading from its extremities to the vital organs.

Not unreasonably Mr Salvini declared “victory” yesterday, and having had a taste, Brussels can expect he will return for more, emboldened by the knowledge that to many in Europe (and not just in Italy) he is on the right side of the argument.

Naturally, Mr Salvini attracts scorn and anger from the liberal centre, but as with Mr Trump, they are playing the man and not the ball.

Just as Mr Trump has a valid point about German trade surpluses and Europe’s pitiful record on defence spending, so Mr Salvini has a point about the failure of the EU to tackle the pressures thrown up by migration.

The latest attempt to agree resettlement quotas and reform the Dublin rules that require front-line member states like Italy and Greece to register all migrants when they arrive ended in complete failure at a meeting in Luxembourg last month.

So in the absence of solidarity (Macron’s France is no keener to take migrants than Italy) strengthening the European Union’s external borders and cutting questionable deals with questionable governments in Turkey and Libya looks to be the only practical course.

With his Twitter campaign, Mr Salvini is doing for Europe’s sea border what Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, did for the land border when he erected fences along the border with Serbia in 2015.

Mr Salvini argues – just like Mr Orban – that getting tough will actually choke off the migrant “business”, which opponents say is fuelled by NGOS who, however well-meaning, provide rescue services that only fuel the smuggling industry.

And whisper it softly, but the liberal centre might not be so completely unhappy that Salvini is taking such a hard line – even as they condemn him.

When the Western Balkan Route was closed in 2015, creating a squalid transit camp at Idomeni in northern Greece, I once asked a British official when the EU would intervene to make conditions better. “We won’t. That’s the point,” he replied.

Mr Salvini’s gambit might be crude, but it might also yet inject a dose of reality into the discussion about migration in Europe.

If liberal leaders don’t like that they can, well, open their borders and show solidarity with the desperate people on the migrant boats, mindful of what happened in 2015 and what that did to coarsen European politics, as we are seeing in Italy.

Otherwise, talk is cheap.