Commentary
The flag of the European Union waves to the right
While Trump puts deportees in handcuffs and loads them onto planes, we put them in hand restraints and prefer ships. We also built our overseas prison and we will fill it all the same.
The 600 who have already drowned in the Mediterranean in the first three months of the year will never know this news. But it will affect the migrants who have been turned back in the middle of the sea, most of them returned to torture cells in Libya, and all those who, even though they managed to land in Italy – in Europe – are waiting to know what will become of their asylum claims.
Last week, the Union Border Police said that there had been fewer of them in 2024, in absolute numbers. And everyone was happy at the news, and happy ignoring the fact that arrivals have decreased because of the increase in deaths en route and in the number of prisoners detained in the camps that are popping up continuously at Europe's borders, with Europe's money and with the torturers flown back to their jobs by state flight. There certainly aren’t fewer reasons to emigrate, which are the same as: wars, persecution, exploitation, famine, floods.
And the news only offers ice-cold clarity: it will be increasingly easy for EU states to say no to applications for asylum and humanitarian protection. Rights that were once held sacred are now destined to apply only to a minority of migrants. And they will be a dead letter for those who would need them the most. The European Commission is proposing to extend the (already established) fiction of deeming countries “safe” even when they are demonstrably not so, and to speed up the procedure for rejecting applications as much as possible. There is nothing to suggest that the European Parliament or member states will be willing to deviate from this line. Giorgia Meloni's Italy is already claiming it as its own, with Meloni expressing her pride, on the day she got an audience at the White House, for having charted the course of the new migration policy of the continent. Shamefully, she is right.
And still, the Italian Constitution has not changed, the Refugee Convention solemnly signed in Geneva after the Second World War has not changed, nor has the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union: everywhere, the right of asylum remains carved out as a cornerstone principle of international law and of civil life itself. And if we are to be sticklers for detail, neither has the majority in the European Parliament that confirmed Ursula von der Leyen's Commission changed.
But the policy on migrants – that is, against migrants – is being reversed one piece at a time. That’s the current direction of things, and while Trump puts deportees in handcuffs and loads them onto planes, we put them in hand restraints and prefer ships. We also built our overseas prison and we will fill it all the same. It goes against humanity, law and even logic, but it serves propaganda, and so it will be done.
And from now on, it will be done in perfect harmony with the European Union. Too bad Meloni can no longer make time to join the demonstrations waving the blue flags with stars. But there will be other occasions, and the von der Leyen Commission will not fail to keep a steady course as the gateway for right-wingers and the worst reactionary policies. We don’t want to fall into excessive optimism here, but maybe at some point, little by little, even the PD will realize the mistake it made in voting for it. That would be news in its own right.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-bandiera-dellunione-sventola-a-destra on 2025-04-17