Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni are no strangers to having a spat. The first was last autumn, about migrants; this time they have fallen out over Ukraine.
The Italian prime minister made no secret of her irritation with the French president last week on discovering he had invited Volodymyr Zelensky to Paris. It was, declared Meloni, ‘inappropriate’ for Macron to host the Ukraine president for dinner last Wednesday at the Elysee. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz received an invite too, which evidently antagonised Meloni even more.
‘There were two European leaders, there were 25 missing,’ reflected the Italian PM. ‘When it comes to Ukraine, what interests us above everything else is to give a message of unity.’ Macron later justified the intimate dinner – held the day before Zelensky addressed an EU summit in Brussels – saying France and Germany had a ‘particular role’ in the Ukraine, on account of their role in brokering the Minsk agreements in 2014.
Macron’s belittlement of Meloni is both incomprehensible and unwise
Macron, though, hasn’t always been quite so matter-of-fact about EU nations acting of their own accord. What fundamentally pits Meloni against Macron is the migrant crisis: he rather favours free movement and she does not, because so much of the movement is into Italy.
Last November, Macron’s government accused Italy of lacking solidarity with their European partners in refusing to allow an NGO vessel carrying 234 African migrants to dock. Meloni retorted that she had recently accepted three other migrant ships but this cut no ice with France, who ‘shouldered its responsibilities’ and directed the vessel to Toulon.
This French haughtiness did not go down well in Italy, which since 2011 has been on the front line of Europe’s migrant crisis. Last year alone, 105,129 migrants landed on Italian territory; Germany and France promised they’d accept 7,000 in line with the voluntary solidarity mechanism. They reportedly took just 207.
A growing number of migrants are making their way north from Italy to France where some remain and others hope to continue on to England. Many are minors – or at least they claim to be.
In 2014, there were 174 young arrivals in France; in 2019 it was 1,871. Last year nearly 5,000 minors crossed into France from Italy. How many actually are juveniles is a moot point; officials in the Savoie department questioned 270 ‘minors’ in a 12-month period and concluded that 167 were actually adults.
Nonetheless, each one on average costs the French taxpayer €50,000 (£44,5000) a year to accommodate, feed and educate. The majority come from Mali, Tunisia, Guinea and the Ivory Coast and, according to the French press, they are being trafficked by the Albanian mafia. This is their latest manoeuvre to exploit the credulity of the EU, instructing every young man who steps ashore in Europe to claim he is under 18, no matter how bushy his beard.
The centre-right newspaper Le Figaro published a forthright editorial on Wednesday declaring that ‘France cannot allow itself to be overrun any longer’. The paper understood why Meloni is fed up with Macron, and the other posturing EU heads of state. For a decade they have offered little support to Italy in dealing with the migrant crisis; far less have they offered any solutions to the million and more migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean since 2015.
Macron’s belittlement of Meloni is both incomprehensible and unwise. Perhaps his Gallic nose has been put out of joint by a recent poll that revealed Meloni is the most popular leader in Europe? Meloni’s election triumph this week in Italy’s two most populous regions, Lombardy and Lazio, underlines how dominant Meloni is becoming domestically. So too is she carrying more clout internationally, as Italy’s recent gas deal with Libya worth £6.7 billion demonstrated.
Zelensky’s presence at last week’s EU Summit dominated the headlines but there were other important issues on the agenda aside from the war in Ukraine. The migrant crisis was one, and there was plenty of robust rhetoric from the bloc’s leaders.
‘It’s important that we, as Europeans, decide who enters our countries, not the human traffickers,’ announced Ireland’s PM, Leo Varadkar. ‘Those who gain refugee status have the right to remain but others don’t, and they should be returned.’ Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer declared that ‘we need to “pull the brake” on illegal migration in the EU’.
Europe’s leaders have been saying this for years and yet nothing gets done. In his State of the Union address in 2017, the then-EU president, Jean-Claude Juncker, said: ‘I would like to repeat that people who have no right to stay in Europe must be returned to their countries of origin. When only 36 per cent of irregular migrants are returned, it is clear we need to significantly step up our work.’
In the same speech Juncker praised Italy’s ‘tireless and noble work’ in accommodating the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants in the previous three years, but he also spoke of his sadness ‘that solidarity is not yet equally shared across all our Member States’.
So one can forgive Meloni if she is sceptical that anything will change in the light of last week’s EU Summit. History has shown it probably won’t.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy warned at last week’s summit against implementing any measure that might turn the continent into ‘Fortress Europe’. ‘People move because in their countries there is not a future, there is no peace, there is no stability,’ he said.
The naivety of that remark is troubling. The population of Africa is forecast to double to 2.5 billion people between now and 2050; how many will decide that Europe offers them more future and stability than Africa?
Europe need not become a ‘fortress’ but it does urgently require those in power to recognise that the continent can no longer cope – logistically, financially and socially – with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of predominantly young men each year. Presidents and prime ministers should channel their energies into formulating a coherent and courageous response to the migrant crisis which, this year, has already cost the lives of 130 migrants in the Mediterranean.
Answers, not egos, are what Europe needs from its leaders.
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