When the 27 leaders of the European Union met in Brussels this week, the migrant crisis was high on the agenda. In her opening remarks at the summit, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen drew attention to the deals agreed in the last 12 months between the bloc and countries such as Tunisia and Egypt. ‘These partnerships are working,’ said von der Leyen. ‘If you look at the Central Mediterranean Route, which we have been working on intensively, overall the arrivals are now down by minus 64 per cent.’
Macron has been a formidable obstacle to tackling Europe’s migrant crisis
The woman who deserves the credit for this dramatic decrease is Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy. As Nicholas Farrell points out in The Spectator this week, Meloni is the first leader of a western European nation to take the migrant crisis seriously.
Earlier this month, the Italian PM addressed the Atlantic Council in New York and told her audience that, ‘as a politician, you have two options: being a leader or being a follower…my ambition is to lead and not to follow’. Where Meloni leads, others now follow, among them Olaf Scholz of Germany, Donald Tusk of Poland, Michel Barnier of France and von der Leyen.
How times change. Two years ago, on the eve of the Italian election, von der Leyen issued what appeared to be a veiled threat to Meloni. The EU, she told an audience at Princeton in the United States, had ‘tools’ at its disposal in the event one of its member states elected a government that went off in a ‘difficult direction’.
Von der Leyen’s extraordinary remarks were emblematic of the progressive elite’s hostility towards Meloni, who was routinely likened to a latter-day Mussolini.
Perhaps Meloni’s greatest triumph is that she withstood this relentless criticism. By contrast, some of her conservative predecessors in Europe – David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel – were reluctant to crack down on migrants, or even rolled out the red carpet.
Meloni is made of sterner stuff. Her next challenge will be to take on the Italian judiciary, which on Friday ordered migrants sent to be processed in Albania to be returned to Italy. In response to the ruling, an angry Meloni declared that ‘Italians have asked me to stop illegal immigration, and I will do everything possible to keep my word and stop human trafficking.’
As Meloni’s star has risen, so her arch rival’s has fallen. She and French president Emmanuel Macron have barely exchanged a civil word since her election in 2022. Macron had himself recently been re-elected, but his power started ebbing away when his Renaissance party lost its absolute majority in the National Assembly.
Two years later, Macron is in office but not in power; this week, it was revealed that his Renaissance party is down to its last 8,500 members. When it was formed in 2017, it boasted 450,000 followers.
Macron has always been a formidable obstacle to tackling Europe’s migrant crisis, not to mention Britain’s, as Boris Johnson revealed this month in his memoir. In the seven years the president has been in power, legal and illegal migration has spiralled out of control in France.
In an op-ed in Le Figaro this June, Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti, the director of France’s Immigration and Demographic Observatory, disclosed that 323,260 first residence permits were granted to non-European immigrants in 2023, a 40 per cent increase on 2016, when France was run by a Socialist government.
In addition, explained Pouvreau-Monti, 825,000 first-time asylum applications have been registered since 2017, meaning that ‘France has welcomed the equivalent of a city like Marseille made up solely of asylum seekers’.
Macron is the most pro-migrant leader of any EU nation, as the Conservatives discovered. They handed over stacks of cash to the French and what did they get in return? More small boats.
Unlike the British, Meloni has been neither charmed nor intimidated by Macron. She has stood up to him, and he hates her for it. In November 2022, a diplomatic row erupted between France and Italy after Meloni refused to allow an NGO vessel, the Ocean Viking, to dock and unload 230 migrants.
France’s foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, declared that ‘Rome must be reminded of its duty of humanity’ and Meloni was told there would be ‘severe consequences’ for her intransigence. The Italian PM criticised the ‘aggressive reaction from the French government which, from my point of view, is incomprehensible and unjustified’.
A few French politicians took her side. ‘These moral lessons are exasperating,’ said Bruno Retailleau, who pointed out that Italy had borne the brunt of the migrant crisis for years. Retailleau is now France’s Interior Minister, and a man who makes no secret of his admiration for what Meloni has achieved.
Like Meloni, Retailleau is persona non grata in the eyes of Macron and the rest of Europe’s progressive elite.
Big deal! The balance of power in the EU has shifted in the last couple of years from progressives to ‘populists’, one of the favourite insults of the elite. What populist actually means is a leader who is popular. Macron should try it some time.
Comments