Giorgia Meloni, leader of Italy’s Right-wing Brotherhood, the party seen as the heir to Italy’s fascist movement, takes a hard line against undocumented immigrants. Ms Meloni is currently leading national opinion polls ahead of Italy’s September 25 election. During an interview with Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset television network, Ms Meloni called for a naval blockade to stop undocumented migrants crossing the Mediterranean and landing in Italy. “The problem of arrivals has to be dealt with upstream, with what we have always called a naval blockade,” he said. Ms Meloni said the European institutions should “negotiate directly with Libya on the possibility of stopping ship departures, opening hotspots in Africa, Libya or elsewhere and assessing who has the right to be a refugee”. “This is the only serious way to deal with the issue,” he said in the interview.
The Meloni proposal “is pure populism”
Ms Meloni’s right-wing allies, Matteo Salvini’s League party and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, appeared to distance themselves from her proposal to block, and her comments immediately drew the ire of centre-left opponents, including Laura Boldrini, the former Speaker of the Lower House. of the parliament. “Melony, do you know that under international law it is considered an act of war?” Ms. Boldrini tweeted over the weekend. “Do you know it will take more ships than the navy has? Do you know that the death toll would be greater than those rejected?’ Article 42 of the UN Charter states that a naval blockade should only be considered by the UN Security Council in response to a threat to the peace or an act of aggression. Osvaldo Napoli, from the centre-left Azione party, told La Stampa newspaper that the ban proposal was “pure populism” and likened it to “the wall that the evil Donald Trump thought would stop the arrival of migrants from Mexico”. However, Ms Meloni defended her position on Facebook saying the ban proposal was nothing more than what was proposed by the European Union in 2017. “Those who babble today that a naval blockade cannot be done because it is an ‘act of war’ demonstrate their complete ignorance of the issue of immigration,” he said. Matteo Salvini, a key Meloni ally and former interior minister who leads the anti-immigration League party, visited the Lampedusa migrant reception center on Thursday, where more than 1,000, mostly young men, were packed into a facility meant for 350 people. “All the proposals are valuable, but we blocked immigration with security orders,” a party source close to Mr Salvini told the Telegraph, referring to his previous stint as home secretary. Open Arms, the NGO that rescues migrants in the Mediterranean, accused the Brothers of Italy of spreading propaganda and said it would be impossible to introduce a naval blockade.
