The head of Italian diplomacy on Friday demanded an apology from French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, whose comments on Giorgia Meloni’s inability to manage immigration sparked a new crisis between Rome and Paris, which is trying to calm the game.
“It’s a gratuitous and vulgar insult addressed to a friendly, allied country” and “when someone gratuitously offends another person, the minimum is that they apologize,” said Antonio Tajani in a daily interview. Il Corriere della Sera.
A meeting with his French counterpart canceled
Antonio Tajani canceled Thursday evening his first visit to Paris, where he was to meet his counterpart Catherine Colonna, after Gérald Darmanin’s statements on RMC accusing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of being “unable to resolve the migration issues on which she was elected”.
Catherine Colonna quickly published a message in Italian on Twitter, stating that “the relationship between Italy and France is based on mutual respect, between our two countries and between their leaders”. She immediately called Antonio Tajani. “Catherine Colonna called me twice, to tell me she was sorry, she was very cordial”, assured Antonio Tajani, while considering that the explanations from Paris remained “insufficient”.
“This is a cold attack, a stab in the back from a leading member of the French government. There are things that cannot be ignored. The rest of the Macron’s executive, however, certainly does not think like Darmanin,” insisted Antonio Tajani. Asked by AFP, the French Ministry of the Interior did not wish to comment on Friday on the requests for apologies from the Italian government.
French-speaking migrants
Immigration has been an ultra-sensitive subject in Franco-Italian relations for years. In November, the two countries experienced a strong outbreak of fever when the Meloni government, barely in power, refused to allow a humanitarian ship from the NGO SOS Méditerranée to dock, which ended up being welcomed by France in Toulon (south ) with more than 200 migrants on board.
The episode had angered Paris, which had called a European meeting so that this unprecedented scenario did not happen again. Since then, clandestine crossings by boat have increased with the development of a new maritime corridor between Tunisia and Italy, on the front line at the gates of Europe. According to the Italian Interior Ministry, more than 42,000 people have arrived via the Mediterranean in Italy this year compared to around 11,000 over the same period in 2022.
However, nearly half of them come from French-speaking countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Tunisia, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Mali), according to figures from the Italian Ministry of the Interior. “That’s why the tensions between the two countries are strong,” analyzed Friday the director of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (Ofii), Didier Leschi. French government spokesman Olivier Véran tried on Friday to put out the fire, assuring that there had been “no desire to ostracize Italy”.
“The Italians, we discuss, they love politics, but they assume the choices they have made and they want to be left to assume their choices”, he explained, “and that’s good because we have no intention of doing otherwise.”
“Common problem” in the European Union
Antonio Tajani subsequently also seemed to want to ease tensions. “The words spoken by the spokesperson for the French government go in the direction of someone who understood that he had made a serious mistake,” he said. Asked about these frictions on the sidelines of a trip to Florence, the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell recalled that the question of migratory flows is “a common problem” in EU countries which must be managed “with the maximum of ‘unit”.
“I am sure that these difficulties will be overcome,” he said. Next to the coronation of Naples in Serie A, the Italian press headlined Friday morning on this new quarrel between the two neighbors. La Repubblica, a center-left daily, evoked “the slap in the face of Paris”, while La Stampa recalled that “the fight against illegal immigration had been one of Meloni’s hobbyhorses during the electoral campaign” in the summer of 2022 .
“But having just arrived at Palazzo Chigi (seat of the head of government in Rome), the Prime Minister had to take note of the infeasibility of her project. And the French repented of having believed in it”, writes the Turin newspaper .