Why Giorgia Meloni is key to ‘stopping the boats’

Whatever Rishi Sunak does to ‘stop the boats’, the fight to prevent illegal immigration to Britain and Europe will not be won or lost in the English Channel. It will be decided in the sea between Italy and Africa.

At a recent EU summit in Brussels, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s new right-wing Prime Minister, warned that if the crisis-torn dictatorship of Kais Saied in Tunisia falls, then there will be ‘an invasion’ of Italy this year of ‘up to 900,000 migrants’. Tunisia has become a new major departure point for migrants coming to Europe. An Italian secret service report, meanwhile, warns that another ‘685,000 migrants’ are ready to cross to Italy from Libya.

Already in 2023, four times as many migrants have arrived in Italy from north Africa compared with the same period last year – increasingly from Tunisia. Italy’s record year was 2016, when 181,436 came across. Yet in the last ten days of March, more than 7,000 migrants have made the journey – and we are nowhere near the peak summer period. Even at this rate, a total 475,000 will arrive this year in Italy by sea. By comparison, Britain has so far this year taken in more than 4,000 who arrived from France by small boat.

This summer, in terms of numbers and political consequences, could dwarf that of 2015 when the then German chancellor Angela Merkel so disastrously allowed a million migrants into Germany from the Middle East. That led, among other things, to the EU being forced to pay Turkey a £5.2 -billion bribe to stop migrant departures.

Meloni insists that the EU should do something similar with Tunisia. Her government has been pressing the IMF to release a £1.5 billion loan it agreed in October to Tunisia, which is on the brink of defaulting on its debt repayments.