The migrant crisis: Salvini’s “war with Brussels”
An “outlaw” in charge of a “pirate ship”. That’s what Italy’s far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, called the young German captain of the Mediterranean migrant rescue vessel Sea Watch 3, said Michael Braun in Die Zeit (Hamburg). Carola Rackete had defied the Italian government by forcibly docking the ship at the port of Lampedusa, colliding with a police patrol boat in the process. She was arrested on the quayside as a mob howling insults surrounded her. But a court last week accepted that she’d acted to save lives and has ordered her release. Even so, Salvini remains unmoved. German politicians have denounced the treatment of Rackete and the French government Salvini’s “hysterical” anti-migrant policy. Pope Francis has held a mass for the refugees. But Salvini knows the public is behind him: in a recent poll, 61% favoured harsh treatment of refugees.
And it has to be said that however well meant, the rescue operation was a provocation whose only result has been to further radicalise opponents of migration, said Bernd Riegert in Deutsche Welle (Bonn). It has also fuelled to Salvini’s war with Brussels. He is now upping the ante by trying to send the 40 Sea Watch migrants on to other EU states without first determining their identity: a clear breach of EU rules. What he fails to recognise is that international law allows ships to dock without permission when lives are in danger, said Kim Son Hoang in Der Standard (Vienna). It also says they must be landed at a “safe place”, so that ruled out returning the refugees to Libya, even though it was closer at the time of the rescue. In Libya, migrants are at risk of torture, slavery, rape and murder.
But Salvini didn’t initiate the crackdown on migrants, said Sandro Benini in Tages-Anzeiger (Zurich). It was the previous centre-left government that made a pact with Libya to prevent them leaving. In fact, at root, Salvini’s migration policy is much the same as the EU’s: to encourage repatriation agreements with African countries and to get the EU to fund the creation of streamlined asylum procedures in countries of first arrival. But Europe is so “fragmented” it’s hard to get agreement on such things. That doesn’t excuse the way Salvini has used the “media megaphone” to spread anti-immigrant propaganda, said Massimo Nava in Linkiesta (Milan). Italians have been so swayed by it, they’ve lost the ability to be “sympathetic or generous, or even simply civil”. It has also distracted attention from more pressing concerns – Italy’s demographic decline, the “brain drain” and zero growth. This episode is an indictment of an Italy that “has lost its pride as a great European country”.