Immigration: Rome demands apology from Darmanin, Paris tries to calm the game

Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: Andreas SOLARO, Ludovic MARIN / AFP 20:03 pm, May 05, 2023

Italy's top diplomat on Friday demanded an apology from French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, whose comments on Meloni's inability to manage immigration have provoked a new crisis between Rome and Paris, which is trying to calm the game.

"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 in an interview with the daily Il Corriere della Sera.

A meeting with his French counterpart cancelled

Antonio Tajani cancelled Thursday evening his first visit to Paris, where he was to meet his counterpart Catherine Colonna, after the statements of Gerald 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 Antonio Tajani. "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 on the requests for an apology from the Italian government.

Francophone migrants

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 to extinguish the fire, saying 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" in the European Union

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 Friday morning 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.