Former Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini wants to make the problem of illegal migration a key campaign issue for the snap parliamentary elections on September 25.

The party leader of the right-wing national Lega will therefore travel to the island of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost outpost in the Mediterranean, in the coming week.

Matthias Rub

Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.

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The reception center there, designed for 350 people, is again overcrowded with around 1,900 people, including several women with babies.

A good two weeks ago, the Interior Ministry in Rome had ordered the evacuation of the camp, which was overcrowded with almost 2,000 people, and had the boat migrants brought to Sicily.

Salvini announced that if the centre-right coalition took over government, an interior minister from the Lega would "block these uncontrolled arrivals".

During his tenure as interior minister from June 2018 to September 2019, Salvini had ordered all ports in the country to be closed to ships carrying rescued boat migrants.

Salvini accuses his non-party successor, Luciana Lamorgese, of not taking decisive action against illegal immigration.

Overcrowded reception center on Lampedusa

Because there is currently almost no wind over the central Mediterranean, a particularly large number of refugee boats are making the dangerous journey north from the coast of North Africa.

Around 900 boat migrants have arrived in Lampedusa since Monday, mostly on board smaller boats.

On Saturday, the Italian coast guard rescued 674 people, mostly young men from Syria and Egypt, from a completely overcrowded fishing boat and brought them ashore in Messina, Sicily.

The bodies of five men who had died of thirst on the crossing were also recovered from the wooden boat.

The rescue ship "Geo Barents" from Doctors Without Borders is waiting with 52 rescued people on board for the allocation of an Italian port.

The German rescue ship "Sea Watch 3" has taken 439 migrants on board in distress at sea in the past few days, and there are 387 people on the "Ocean Viking" from SOS Méditerranée.

According to the Ministry of the Interior, almost 37,000 migrants have landed in Italy after crossing the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year.

In the comparative period of 2021 there were 27,000 and in the previous year around 12,000.

During his campaign appearances, Salvini promised that new security decrees would stop illegal migration within the first hundred days of a centre-right government made up of Lega, Giorgia Meloni's post-fascist Brothers of Italy party and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Christian-democratic Forza Italia.

In the most recent polls, the three parties of the centre-right alliance are ahead of the left-wing parties.

However, around 40 percent of voters state that they have not yet decided which party and which political camp they will vote for on September 25th.