Italy "must not be left alone" by its European partners in the face of the arrival of migrants via the Mediterranean, said Thursday 8 June German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, expected the same day in Rome.
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Italy, Greece and other Mediterranean countries face a huge challenge as the number of people arriving at their borders increases. We cannot leave Italy and other countries alone, we must adopt an approach of solidarity and responsibility," Scholz said in an interview with Corriere della Sera.
Significant number of arrivals
The chancellor is due to meet Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in the middle of the day. "We need a solidarity distribution of responsibility and competences between EU member states," Scholz insisted, recalling that his country has welcomed in 2022 "more than a million" Ukrainians who fled the war as well as "230,000 refugees from other countries".
Giorgia Meloni, head of a far-right coalition, has focused her election campaign in 2022 largely on the fight against illegal immigration but has seen the number of migrant arrivals increase significantly since the beginning of the year. According to Interior Ministry figures, about 52,300 migrants arrived in Italy between January 1 and June 7, compared to 21,200 during the same period in 2022.
Migration policy reform
Italy, the country of first entry where hundreds of thousands of migrants have arrived in recent years, criticises its European Union partners for a lack of solidarity in the distribution of migrants, even if many of them later leave the peninsula for other countries. EU interior ministers are meeting in Luxembourg on Thursday to try to unblock the thorny reform of migration policy, providing for solidarity in the reception of refugees between member states and an accelerated examination of certain asylum applications at borders.
The compromise proposal submitted by Sweden, the country holding the six-monthly presidency of the Council of the EU, provides for mandatory but "flexible" European solidarity. Member States would be required to receive a certain number of asylum seekers who have arrived in an EU country under migratory pressure ("relocations"), or failing to make a financial contribution to that country.