Migrant rescue row creates tension between Italy and France

Less than a month since taking office, Italy’s new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, “finds herself swept up in a major diplomatic crisis” – and it’s almost entirely of her own making, said Le Monde (Paris).

The row centres on the Ocean Viking, a rescue ship carrying about 230 migrants, which was stuck in Italian waters for three weeks, after the country’s authorities refused it permission to dock. Operated by the charity SOS Méditerranée, the vessel had picked up the migrants near the Libyan coast, 20 of whom were sick and 57 of whom were children.

France had hoped – in vain, it turned out – that Italy would respect international maritime law, which says that people rescued at sea must be taken to the nearest safe port. But Meloni, who was elected on a far-right platform, dug her heels in, and Paris eventually let the ship dock at Toulon. The standoff is a clear indication that Meloni’s assurances that she will play a constructive role in Europe are nonsense.

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France ‘as active a player in this row’ as Italy

That’s rich, said Carlo Galli in La Repubblica (Rome): France has been just as much an active player in this row as Meloni: a French spokesman dismissed her as a “big loser”. President Macron has also sought to fend off criticism from the French Right by getting his officials to suspend a previous deal made with Rome to take in 3,500 asylum seekers now in Italy.

Besides, Meloni is not wrong to argue that boats operated by NGOs unwittingly “incentivise human trafficking”, said Alessandra Bocchi on UnHerd. The efforts made by the Italian authorities to intercept boats carrying migrants and send them back to North Africa have actually resulted in a fall in disappearances and deaths at sea. NGO rescue boats may be “well-intentioned”; but the “perverse incentives” they create have led to “far greater loss of life down the line”.

Italy seen ‘sharp increase in migrant landings’

Still, the claim that Italy is being overrun by migrants isn’t borne out by the data, said Euronews (Lyon). Yes, this year Italy has seen a “sharp increase in migrant landings”, with almost 93,000 people arriving so far (up from 59,300 in the same period in 2021). Yet last year it admitted fewer refugees as a percentage of its population than France, Germany or Spain.

Which only goes to show that Brussels is no closer to resolving Europe’s migration problem than it was in 2015 when seeking to deal with the Syrian refugee crisis, said Bernd Riegert on Deutsche Welle (Bonn). For all the efforts put into establishing camps in Libya and disembarkation centres in Europe, illegal entries into the EU are still rising fast. “It’s a fiasco” – and it doesn’t look like being resolved any time soon.