Alex Lantier
French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday traveled to Rome to discuss refugee policy and the Libyan war. Both presidents met Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
The visits had the character of a political outreach of the European Union’s (EU) traditional Berlin-Paris axis to Italy’s new government. The fall of Conte’s previous coalition government between his Five-Star Movement (M5S) and the neo-fascist Lega of former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, and its replacement two weeks ago by a M5S-Democratic Party (PD) coalition, improved the climate of relations between Berlin, Paris and Rome. Macron and Steinmeier tried to smooth over violent diplomatic conflicts that erupted, particularly between Paris and Rome, over Libya.
The agreements made in Rome show, however, that the removal of the neo-fascists from the Italian government has not produced any shift towards a less militaristic and anti-refugee policy. Rather, the three largest euro zone powers are trying to reach a settlement to divide up the spoils from the plundering of Libya and a common agreement on a policy of intensifying repression of refugees across Europe.
On Wednesday night, Macron and Conte declared that they had come to an agreement in principle for an “automatic mechanism” to distribute refugees among the different EU countries. Currently, the Dublin Accords force refugees to request asylum in the EU state where they first arrive, so that southern and eastern European states like Italy or Greece process a large number of asylum requests from refugees fleeing imperialist wars in the Middle East or North Africa. Other EU states have refused to welcome any refugees at all.
Conte and Macron’s plan is not, however, to let refugees travel to countries of their choice, but rather to use the EU’s machinery to process and expel them more quickly from Europe. The centerpiece of their proposal was a demand for a “more effective” method to expel refugees to whom the EU refuses asylum. Under conditions where many EU countries are expelling even Afghan refugees back to their war-torn country, this is a blank check for mass expulsions of refugees across Europe.
Paris and Rome, Macron said, will now defend “a common position so that all the (EU) countries will participate in one or another form” in housing refugees “or be punished financially.” He added, “The European Union did not show enough solidarity with states of first arrival, especially Italy. And France is ready to shift its position on this issue and reconsider the Dublin Accords. And I want us to work together to find a stronger, fairer solution.”
Conte and Macron pledged to jointly defend this proposal for a new refugee policy at a planned meeting of EU interior ministers scheduled for Monday in Malta.
Conte insisted that Italy “will not let people traffickers decide who comes onto our territory” but that, in contrast with Salvini’s previous attempts to simply prevent any boat carrying refugees from the Mediterranean from reaching Italy, it was necessary to “manage the problem” more skillfully.
With this visit, the Macron goverment was signaling that it has no significant differences on refugee policy with the previous Conte-Salvini government. It primarily considered Salvini’s methods too ham-handed and likely to provoke popular opposition. His refusals to allow refugee boats into Italy prompted mass protests in Italian cities, and legal confrontations with ship captains who ignored his orders and landed refugees in Italy in defiance of the ban.
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