In her first speech in front of the parliament, Italy’s new head of state Meloni reaffirmed her strict refugee policy: she does not want to tolerate migrant boats. In addition, the ultra-right politician states that she “never” sympathized with fascism. However, she once found words of praise for Mussolini.
Italy’s new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her government want to prevent boat migrants from entering the country via the Mediterranean. “This government wants to go down a path that has hardly been trodden until today: stopping illegal departures and finally breaking up illegal human trafficking in the Mediterranean,” said the party leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia in her first programmatic speech to the Chamber of Deputies in Rome.
In the evening, Meloni clearly won the first of two necessary votes of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies. Of 389 MPs present, 235 voted in favor of their government, 154 against and 5 abstained. Overall, the larger of the two chambers of parliament holds 400 MPs. On Wednesday, Meloni has to face the second vote in the smaller Senate.
“If you don’t want me to talk about ship blockades, I’ll say it like that,” said Meloni. During the election campaign, the 45-year-old had suggested tackling “mass immigration” with such a blockade. She went on to say that her right-wing government, in coordination with the authorities of the North African countries, wants to set up centers in the “hotspot areas” where international organizations will check whether people have a right to asylum. “We do not want to discuss the right to asylum for those who are fleeing executions,” said Meloni in her speech, which lasted more than an hour. They just want to prevent smugglers from deciding who is allowed to come to Italy.
Meloni’s statements are a bad signal for the civilian sea rescuers in the Mediterranean, who regularly take in hundreds of migrants who get into distress on their way from Libya or Tunisia to Italy. The “Humaity 1” of the organization SOS Humanity, sailing under the German flag, and the “Ocean Viking” of SOS Méditerranée, sailing under the Norwegian flag, are currently underway there. So far they have taken more than 250 migrants on board.
According to the Ansa news agency, the new Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi – an expert close to the Lega – instructed the police and port authorities to inform the flag states that the ships were not acting in accordance with European and Italian border security and control standards and those for illegal migration.
In her speech, Meloni also emphasized that she had never sympathized with fascism. She “never felt sympathy or closeness to anti-democratic regimes. For no regime, not even for fascism,” she said. “Likewise, I have always considered the racial laws of 1938 to be the low point of Italian history, a disgrace that will mark our people forever.” Under dictator Benito Mussolini, the fascists issued a number of ordinances in 1938 through which Jews in the country were harassed, persecuted and ultimately deported.
At the age of 15, Meloni joined the youth organization of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), a party founded by fascists after World War II. In 2012 she then founded the Fratelli d’Italia party, which still has a flame in its symbol, reminiscent of Mussolini’s grave. Meloni repeatedly emphasized that she was proud of the coat of arms.
As a teenager, she said in an interview on French television in the 1990s that Mussolini was a “good politician”. In her speech in Parliament, she now said: “The totalitarianisms of the 20th century tore the whole of Europe, not just Italy, for more than half a century in a series of atrocities that affected most European states. Atrocities and crimes, by whom however committed, deserve no justification and are not compensated by other atrocities and other crimes. There is no comparison at the abyss: one just falls into it.”
In addition to the Fratelli, the right-wing populist Lega, the conservative Forza Italia and a small center group are in Meloni’s coalition, which has also fueled concerns abroad that fascism will be played down. This Thursday marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the so-called “March on Rome”, with which Mussolini and the fascists seized power in Italy on the night of October 27th and 28th, 1922.
