"Words hurt" is a conclusion that some will draw from the current quarrel between Rome and Paris. The head of Italian diplomacy demanded on Friday (May 5th) an apology from French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin after his remarks on Giorgia Meloni's inability to manage immigration. The Quai d'Orsay plays appeasement, without visibly succeeding in calming the Italian ire.

"It is a gratuitous and vulgar insult to a friendly, allied country" and "when someone gratuitously offends another person the minimum is that he apologizes," said Antonio Tajani, Italian Foreign Minister, in an interview with the daily Il Corriere della Sera.

Antonio Tajani cancelled Thursday evening, May 4 his first visit to Paris, where he was to meet his counterpart Catherine Colonna, after the statements of Gérald Darmanin on RMC accusing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of being "unable to solve the migration problems on which she was elected".

Catherine Colonna quickly published a message in Italian on Twitter, saying that "the relationship between Italy and France is based on mutual respect, between our two countries and between their leaders." She called in the wake the head of Italian diplomacy.

"Catherine Colonna called me twice, to tell me that she was sorry, she was very cordial," said Antonio Tajani, while considering that the explanations of Paris remained "insufficient".

"This is a cold attack, a stab in the back by a leading member of the French government. There are things that cannot be ignored. The rest of Macron's executive, however, certainly does not think like Darmanin," Tajani said.

Asked by AFP, the French Ministry of the Interior did not wish to comment Friday, May 5, the requests for apology of the Italian government.

Migrants who speak French

Immigration has been an ultra-sensitive issue in Franco-Italian relations for years. In November, the two countries experienced a surge of fever when the Meloni government, barely in power, refused to let dock a humanitarian ship of the NGO SOS Méditerranée which had ended up being welcomed by the France in Toulon (south) with more than 200 migrants on board.

The episode had aroused the anger of Paris, which had convened a European meeting so that this unprecedented scenario would not happen again. Since then, clandestine crossings by boat have increased with the rise 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 about 11,000 over the same period in 2022.

But 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 tensions between the two countries are high," Didier Leschi, director of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII), said on Friday. French government spokesman Olivier Véran tried Friday, May 5, to extinguish 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 us to let them assume their choices," he explained, "and that's good because we do not intend to do otherwise."

'Common problem' for the EU

Antonio Tajani later seemed to want to ease tensions. "The words spoken by the spokesman of the French government are 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 issue of migratory flows is "a common problem" for EU countries that must be managed "with maximum unity". "I am sure these difficulties will be overcome," he said.

Next to the coronation of Napoli in Serie A, the Italian press headlined the morning of Friday, May 5 on this new quarrel between the two neighbors.

La Repubblica, a centre-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 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 it," writes the Turin newspaper.

With AFP

The summary of the week France 24 invites you to look back on the news that marked the week

I subscribe

Take international news with you everywhere! Download the France 24 app