Last week, France’s youthful and dapper president Emmanuel Macron swaggered into a battle of wits with the inexperienced and much-mocked lugnuts who run Italy’s new populist government. Macron was humiliated. That very same Italian populist government, meanwhile, threw down a gauntlet before half a dozen of its European neighbors and won.
While everyone was paying attention to refugees from Syria tramping into Europe across Turkey and Greece, sub-Saharan Africans started crossing the Mediterranean from Libya and Tunisia into Italy on fast motorboats at the rate of 150,000 a year. There are more than 600,000 of them now in Italy’s cities and villages, and they are costing the Italian government, which is already dead broke, $5 or $6 billion a year in lodging and welfare. Negotiations are ongoing in Luxembourg over how other countries in the 28-member European Union might share the costs with Italy, but since this would likely mean sharing the actual refugees, the talks never go anywhere. Under the E.U.’s “Dublin accords,” the first country immigrants come in contact with is responsible for them. This is to keep migrants from flocking to the northern European countries that have the most generous welfare states.
Both of Italy’s new ruling parties, the anti-corruption Five Star Movement and the nationalistic League, got elected on anti-immigrant platforms. The League’s leader Matteo Salvini, now the interior minister, campaigned on a promise to halt the flow. He is leaving no doubt he will try to make good on it. In early June, he refused landing permission to the giant rescue ship Aquarius, run by an activist charity in Berlin and loaded with 629 travelers, arguing that the responsibility for the ship under the Dublin rules lay with the tiny island nation of Malta, also a member of the E.U.
Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat accused Italy of breaking international rules. Spain’s justice minister Dolores Delgado warned that Italy could be prosecuted under international law, and the new Spanish premier, Pedro Sánchez, offered to welcome the migrants in Valencia as a goodwill gesture. But it was France’s politicians who really hit the roof. Gabriel Attal, spokesman for Macron’s presidential movement, called for more sensitive language on such matters—“migrant” was a dehumanizing term and it would be far better to describe those on board the Aquarius as “people”—before adding: “The line of the Italian government makes me want to puke.” Macron himself then accused Italy of “cynicism and irresponsibility” and called Salvini a provocateur.
Years ago, Italy would have wrung its hands, explaining why its decision did not constitute racism or xenophobia. The Italians would have apologized. Now they told France to take a hike. Economics minister Giovanni Tria, one of the “moderates” imposed on the new government by Italy’s president, canceled a meeting with his French counterpart. In Rome the foreign ministry summoned France’s ambassador. Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio said of Macron’s accusation of hypocrisy: “He should talk.” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte appeared likely to skip a meeting with Macron planned for June 15. But Macron backed down. Conte announced that the meeting was back on and that his priority was to fix the Dublin rules that had been so unfair to Italy.
Italy won for three reasons. First, it was unified. Journalists and politicians have been slow to understand or admit that Italy’s government is something new in Western Europe. It represents a big anti-E.U. majority. It is considerably more skeptical about European institutions than Britain was at the time it voted to exit. Euroskepticism in Italy is of almost Hungarian intensity.
Second, Italy was right. For years, it is France that has been cynical. According to Salvini’s numbers (the European Union’s are similar), France promised in 2015 to share a small fraction of Italy’s refugee burden: It would take in 9,610 of the more than half-million Italy is now caring for. France has taken 640, well under 10 percent of its commitment.
Third and finally, the dynamic of political opinion is changing—all across the continent, and not just on the “right wing.” Marco Minniti, Salvini’s decidedly progressive predecessor at the interior ministry, himself considered closing Italy’s ports to migrants. In Austria, the new chancellor Sebastian Kurz closed a half-dozen radical mosques. In Germany, interior minister Horst Seehofer, a conservative ally of Angela Merkel, has threatened to blow up the German coalition government if harder rules on political asylum are not agreed on. Merkel herself has urged fellow European leaders not to leave Italy to shoulder its responsibilities alone.
Even the new and fragile Socialist government in Spain, which surely intended its welcome of migrants as a rebuke to Italy, has since moderated its tone. This is partly a tribute to the Italian government’s discipline. When Spain accepted the Aquarius, Salvini let the ambient insults pass and merely thanked Sánchez for having a “big heart.” But it is also a reflection of Spain’s vulnerability. Valencia can accept a boat with 629 migrants today. But there are 50,000 more migrants in Tripoli right now ready to cross the Mediterranean. There will be another boat tomorrow, and another the next day, and another the day after that. Sánchez and his aides were quick to insist that this generosity should not be taken as a precedent. It has not been lost on them that a la-di-da attitude on migration has become a reliable way to lose elections. In recent days it has finally dawned on Emmanuel Macron, too.
