Italy at loggerheads with the EU over immigration

“Italy is done bending over backwards and obeying,” tweeted Italy’s hard-line interior minister, Matteo Salvini, last week. “This time THERE IS SOMEONE WHO SAYS NO.” And that tweet signalled the start of a new episode in Europe’s “intractable” refugee crisis, said Aryn Baker in Time (New York). Salvini was claiming credit for refusing to allow the rescue vessel Aquarius – run by Médecins Sans Frontières and SOS Méditerranée – to dock at an Italian port. He didn’t seem to care that the ship contained 629 exhausted passengers who had no food. Fortunately, Spain’s new socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, broke the stand-off, and offered to let the ship dock in Valencia, 1,500 kilometres away.

Salvini’s callous action drew condemnation from other EU leaders: “cynical and irresponsible”, France’s President Macron called it. But Salvini has a point. Italy has taken in nearly 640,000 migrants since 2014, while receiving virtually no help from the rest of the EU: it explains why infuriated Italians voted in large numbers for Salvini’s anti-immigrant League. European leaders have a nerve lecturing Italy about human rights, said Michael Braun in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). They happily shelter under the Dublin regulation, which hands responsibility for sheltering asylum seekers to the first European country they enter. They close their own borders and let Greece, Italy and Spain struggle unaided. Salvini may be an “arsonist” who gleefully starts fires in refugee policy, but the EU “gave him the matches”.

How nice to see Spain responding in a humanitarian way, said El País (Madrid). The recently ousted rightwing PM, Mariano Rajoy, would never have done so. “Well intentioned” it may be, said El Mundo (Madrid), but mass migration demands a coordinated response, not ad hoc decisions by individual states. Trouble is already looming for Spain: African migrants are rerouting westwards towards Morocco to avoid the dangers of crisis-torn Libya; as a result, the number coming to Spain is up by half on last year, whereas for all Salvini’s rhetoric, the number going to Italy has plummeted by 78%. But overall their number is rising, said Jacopo Barigazzi in Politico (Brussels): Greece has had a rise of 160%. The hope is that EU leaders will agree a major reform of the Dublin rules at their summit next week. But Germany’s Angela Merkel, mindful of the fury she unleashed when she tried to impose a refugee quota on her eastern European neighbours, knows that it will have to be agreed unanimously. Alas, the chances of that are almost nil.