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Who and how pushed the French government to turn against Italy

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Who and how pushed the French government to turn against Italy

What really happened in France on the migrant case with Italy

These are days of very high tension in relations between Italy and France . The "migrant crisis" led President Macron to threaten to withdraw the ambassador. A decomposed reaction according to many, starting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni who, at a press conference yesterday, said she was " very impressed by the aggressive reaction of the French government " which she deems "incomprehensible and unjustified". But why did they get so angry in Paris?

THE CASUS BELLI

The tension between France and Italy erupts because our country has refused to welcome the Ocean Viking ship which was carrying 230 migrants on board. For the Italian government, those people were economic migrants and not shipwrecked, which is why it refused them. So France, after being contacted by the NGO Sos Mediterranée which manages the boat, agreed to welcome the ship in the port of Toulon. The more than 230 castaways who have landed are not currently allowed on French territory , but placed in an "international waiting area". This is explained by the spokeswoman for the French Minister of the Interior, Camille Chaize . "France – said the Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin – will exceptionally welcome the Ocean Viking ship rejected by Italy and only one third of the passengers will be" relocated "to France".

A HURRY COMMUNICATION BEHIND THE BREAK

But why a country that only in August signed an agreement in which it said it was willing to welcome up to 3500 of the migrants who arrived in our country , is now putting its feet up for only 230 people? At the basis of the break between Giorgia Meloni and Emmanuel Macron there is a press release , published on 8 November on the Italian government website. In the note, published after the Sharm-El-Sheik summit between the Italian premier and the French president, our executive thanked France for the "decision" to share responsibility for the migration emergency. "We express our heartfelt appreciation for France's decision to share responsibility for the migration emergency – wrote the Italian government on Monday evening – until today it has remained on the shoulders of Italy and a few other Mediterranean states, opening ports to the ship Ocean Viking ". Nothing different from what happened just a few hours later.

THE ESCAPE OF NEWS THAT MADE MACRON ANGRY

In reality, as Repubblica writes, the French Ministry of the Interior was studying a plan to land the ship in Marseille . Not a willingly accepted alternative but an extreme choice that the French government wanted to avoid. "Let's put aside prejudices and collaborate for our mutual interests ", Macron seems to have said, proposing to disembark the migrants of the Ocean Viking in Italy and then take them in charge and take them to France also by making airplanes available. Something must have gone wrong in the communications, so much so that the press release issued by the Meloni government does not resort to rhetorical devices but speaks of a "sharing of responsibility" tout court.

THE RESENTMENT OF THE ELISEO

The resentment of the Elysée therefore comes from the "leak of news in the press" implemented by our government. An attitude interpreted as a hostile act . To which he responds with equally hostile acts by unilaterally suspending membership of the European mechanism for the relocation of disembarked people on which the Draghi government had worked. "Faced with Italy's incomprehensible choice, France has suspended the reception of 3,500 refugees currently in Italy," said Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin . And, even worse, France invited the other 22 partner countries, starting with Germany, to do the same. To date, this call for retaliation has failed .

AGAINST MACRON THE FRENCH RIGHT ARISES

President Emmanuel Macron's anger was amplified by the fact that the Italian government's note exposed him to flurries of criticism from opposite sides. On the one hand, the leader of the French far right Marine Le Pen (currently president of the parliamentary group of the Rassemblement National, RN) attacked Macron for the decision to welcome the Ocean Viking ship in the port of Toulon. For Le Pen, that of France is a failure: "by accepting for the first time that a ship disembarks migrants in a French port, Macron sends a dramatic signal of laxity ", the Rassemblement National group leader wrote on Twitter. "With this decision Macron will no longer be able to make anyone believe that he intends to put an end to massive and anarchic immigration ".

To this, however, he added that instead of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni he would have taken the same decision, that is, to refuse to accept the boat. Eric Zemmour, founder of Reconquete, also thundered against Macron's decision. "It is irresponsible , immoral and contrary to popular will and also to humanity which should dissuade these crossings at any cost," he wrote.

FRANCE DOES NOT BECOME THE LAMPEDUSA OF EUROPE

However, the most serious criticisms come from the internal front of the republican team. “By welcoming the Ocean Viking in Toulon , the French government becomes an accomplice of the traffickers – said Eric Ciotti , MP from the Maritime Alps and standard bearer of the conservative wing of Lr (Les Républicains) -. The ships must be sent back to their countries of origin. No French port must become the new Lampedusa of Europe ”.

ALSO THE LEFT ATTACKS MACRON

The French left had begun to grumble just hours after the Sharm-El-Sheik summit between Macron and Meloni. The president had remained 'guilty' of being too friendly with the Italian premier . Green party MP Sandrine Rousseau condemned Macron's "condescension to fascism and the far right." Macron was the first European head of state to formally meet the Italian premier. According to Rousseau: "Macron could have emphasized the fact that France does not cooperate with regimes that go back to the history of Mussolin I".

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/chi-e-come-ha-spinto-il-governo-francese-a-sbroccare-contro-litalia/ on Sat, 12 Nov 2022 09:01:06 +0000.