Italy: the Meloni method

Direction Italy with the security law and the question of immigration. What is the strategy of Giorgia Meloni, the president of the Italian Council?

Focus on Italy with Daniele Zappalà, Paris correspondent for the Italian daily Avvenire. Return to Giorgia Meloni’s security law, while the legislative project, already voted on by Italian deputies, proposes new offenses and heavier penalties.

franceinfo: Dthem topics for Italy, security law and immigration, can you decode the security law?

Daniele Zappalà: It is a new front, this policy of Giorgia Meloni, until now, had ultimately been a little against the grain compared to the extreme right reputation that is attributed to it at European level. There, it is true that this “security decree” aims to produce a turn of the screw to strengthen the Penal Code, and at the same time introduce new offenses and crimes.

Some, in particular, which target the right to demonstrate. There will be tougher penalties against demonstrators who damage, for example, public furniture, even those who engage in passive resistance during demonstrations against public projects considered strategic, notably for decades, the bridge project – a real snake of sea ​​– from the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and Calabria.

So there, the associations today are protesting against this “security decree”, because we believe that it is a means of destroying the right to civil disobedience, and even quite simply the right to demonstrate. And there is a whole series of tougher sentences against those who attack staff, in hospitals, public institutions, civil servants. But here, we believe that we have pushed a little too far in the toughening, and in particular in the narrowing of fundamental constitutional rights.

Regarding immigration in Italy, what is surprising is that Keir Starmer, the British Labor Prime Minister, visited Giorgia Meloni of Forza Italia to say: “But what are you doing with immigration?”

This happened in a very beautiful setting, Villa Doria Pamphilj. What was especially surprising were the great declarations of esteem by the British Prime Minister with regard to Giorgia Meloni’s migration policy. Keir Starmer, for his part, has the same problems in trying to find concrete solutions, and he praised the pragmatic side of the measures adopted in Italy.

And Italy highlights a figure, namely the quite spectacular drop in the number of migrant arrivals, minus 60% this year, from January to August, compared to 2023, at the same period. But it is also the result of a very controversial approach: for Giorgia Meloni, it is a question of decentralizing the reception of these migrants, and therefore there are in particular agreements with Tunisia, and also in Albania with the construction of two centers, a reception center and a sorting center, and even a detention center.

This is really the policy of outsourcing itself, outside the European Union area. And this implies a whole series of obstacles to the rights of migrants. For example, the lawyers who are supposed to defend these migrants must make the crossing each time.

There is also the prospect of gigantic costs associated with this outsourcing. But above all, there are the fundamental rights of those who could simply be people entitled to political asylum, who find themselves obliged to request this asylum in much more complicated conditions, and outside Italy.

Is Giorgia Meloni still popular in Italy?

It seems that it is perceived by most Italians as a last resort after the repeated failures of previous figures, left, center, center right. Even today, we give her credit, even if we have realized that she actually weighs much less at the European level than she wanted people to believe.