It was one of the most daunting items in her in-tray when she was appointed Italy’s prime minister just over two years ago.
Giorgia Meloni had been elected on a promise to stop the boats that brought tens of thousands of migrants and refugees from North Africa to Italy with metronomic regularity every year.
When she assumed office in October 2022, the numbers were sky-high.
By the end of that year, 105,000 migrants had reached Italian beaches, and in 2023, the influx was even higher – 157,000 asylum seekers and economic migrants made it across the Mediterranean from North Africa.
Her pledge to address what she described as “an epochal challenge” appeared to ring hollow.
But slowly, a raft of measures adopted by her government started to take effect.
By the end of 2024, 66,000 migrants had arrived – a dramatic reduction on the previous two years.
Confirmation of Italy’s success in reducing boat arrivals came this week from Frontex, the EU’s border agency, which reported that the number of asylum seekers who managed to cross the Mediterranean from Tunisia and Libya last year dropped by 59 per cent compared with 2023.
So how did she do it? How has Italy managed to stop so many migrant boats? It comes down to cold, hard cash.
Rome drew inspiration from the deal struck between the EU and Turkey at the height of the migration crisis in 2015-2016. In return for blocking refugees and migrants crossing by land and sea from Turkey to Greece, Ankara was given €6 billion (£5 billion).
Italy took the Turkey model and applied it to North Africa, pledging hundreds of millions of euros to Tunisia and Libya, the main departure points.
“It came down to money,” said an EU migration policy adviser who asked not to be named. “There was also a lot of diplomatic pressure, as well as promises of other types of co-operation. But money was key.”
“Stopping the boats on the beaches is the most effective way,” said the EU official. “Once they set out, there is not much you can do. You have a lot fewer options. The deals with Tunisia and Libya have proved to be very effective.”
Flurry of overseas trips
The accords were the culmination of a flurry of overseas trips made by Ms Meloni.
They took her from Tunis and Tripoli to Benghazi in eastern Libya, which has been run by Khalifa Haftar, a military strongman, since the country split in two following the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan president, in 2011.
Ms Meloni’s coalition gave funding, training and equipment to the Tunisian and Libyan coastguards to improve their ability to stop migrant boats.
It is a policy that has been highly controversial – the Libyan coastguard is accused of being an unscrupulous, brutal outfit, which fires shots at migrant boats – but the prime minister was building on efforts by previous Italian governments, including one led by the centre-Left, which dated from 2017.
In the summer of 2023, Ms Meloni travelled with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and Mark Rutte, prime minister of the Netherlands at the time, to sign a deal with Tunisia.
In return for more than €1 billion of aid and investment, the Tunisians pledged to step up the fight against irregular immigration. The EU package consisted of €105 million to enhance Tunisia’s border control capabilities, €150 million in direct budgetary support and the promise of €900 million in macro-economic loans.
It was just one of several trips that Ms Meloni made to Tunis. Since being elected, she has made official visits to Africa around a dozen times.
The Italians insist they are adopting a holistic approach – the Meloni government has come up with something called the Mattei plan, which aims to spur economic development in Africa as a means of reducing migration.
On a visit to Tunisia in April last year, she said it was essential to combat what she called “the slave traders of the third millennium, the mafia organisations that exploit the legitimate aspirations of those who would like a better life”.
In a meeting with Kais Saied, the authoritarian president of Tunisia, she hailed what she called a “new approach” to stopping the boats. She said Italy and Tunisia had “shared priorities” – both wanted to see African migrants repatriated to their home countries.
Ms Meloni has adopted a “transactional approach” that has led to mutually beneficial deals for Libya and Tunisia, according to Jonathan Fenton-Harvey, a researcher and journalist focused on conflict and geopolitics in the Middle East and North Africa.
“Libyan authorities in Tripoli have, to an extent, leveraged the EU’s concerns over irregular migration in order to gain more economic and political benefits, while Kais Saied also seeks external support to boost the country’s struggling economy,” said Mr Fenton-Harvey.
“Arguably, Meloni has done more to engage diplomatically with the authorities in both Tripoli and Tunisia, and proven more willing to provide them with support, with the main pre-condition being stemming migration without other ‘strings attached’,” he added.
Meloni lobbied EU to provide funds
The Italian prime minister has managed to lobby the EU to provide financial support for Tunisia and Libya.
“Beyond just throwing cash at Tunisia and Tripoli’s authorities, it’s more of a layered strategy – combining both diplomacy and targeted financial support. And while Meloni has signed various co-operation agreements over various sectors with Libyan and Tunisian authorities, a prominent aim of this is to boost Rome’s favour with the two countries,” Mr Fenton-Harvey added.
Hans Leijtens, the executive director of Frontex, said: “The drop in irregular migration along the central Mediterranean route reflects better co-operation with North African countries, especially Tunisia.
“Our focus is on breaking the business model of criminal groups involved in people smuggling and strong partnerships are key to that effort. While irregular crossings to Europe have decreased, the risks haven’t gone away. New routes, new challenges, or even the use of migrants in political games could emerge at any time.”
The Meloni government has also clamped down on the humanitarian NGO vessels that, in the past, rescued thousands of migrants from sinking boats.
In a decree introduced in December 2022, shortly after her election, rescue vessels were told that as soon as they pick up a single boatload of migrants, they must head for a port in Italy. They are banned from remaining in the area looking for other migrants in distress, even if they have room on board for them.
And they are assigned ports, often in northern Italy, which are many days sailing from the central Mediterranean – a measure they say is another attempt to hobble their operations. The captains of boats that violate the rules can be fined €50,000 and have their vessels impounded.
Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, has expressed interest in Italy’s approach. But trying to replicate the Mediterranean strategy in the Channel is fraught with difficulties.
France is not a developing country in desperate need of economic aid and investment. Nor would it adopt the morally and legally dubious practices of the Tunisian and Libyan coast guards.
For the Meloni government, the sharp drop in arrivals is a political success story. She has the support of 30 per cent of voters, which may not seem stratospheric but puts her far in front of the next most popular political force, the Democratic Party, on 22 per cent.
“Usually, after two years of a government, Italians are very dissatisfied with the prime minister. But Meloni remains popular,” said Luca Barana, a senior researcher from the International Affairs Institute in Rome.
“There’s the perception that she is doing something concrete to tackle the migration problem, even though she is continuing a lot of policies that were implemented by other governments in the past.”
Human rights organisations say, however, that the accords with Libya and Tunisia are pacts with the devil and a calamity for refugees and migrants.
They say asylum seekers in Libya are held in squalid detention centres where smugglers beat them to force their families to send more money for their passage across the Mediterranean.
The Tunisian authorities are accused of rounding up migrants in cities such as Tunis and Sfax, driving them into the desert and dumping them. The women are often raped, it is alleged.
“The shift towards anti-migrant policies in Tunisia is unprecedented and very dramatic,” said Susanna Zanfrini, Italy director for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian NGO.
“Some migrants are repatriated but others are just taken to the border with Algeria or Libya and left in the desert.”
Past experience shows that clamping down on one migration route tends to transfer the problem to another route, a phenomenon likened to the game whack-a-mole.
This week’s Frontex report showed that while numbers were down by 59 per cent on the central Mediterranean route, they were up 14 per cent in the eastern Mediterranean and by 18 per cent on the Atlantic crossing from West Africa to the Canary Islands.
“Migration routes are constantly shifting,” said Ms Zanfrini. “Crackdowns won’t stop migrants; they just force people on to more dangerous routes. Smugglers and traffickers open up new routes.
“So these agreements struck with Libya and Tunisia won’t solve the situation. They don’t tackle the root causes of migration. They are not a sustainable solution.”
For now, Ms Meloni is jubilant, having grasped a problem that has bedevilled so many previous Italian governments.
The drop in migrant arrivals was “the result of the hard work that our government has undertaken in recent years”, she said this week, hailing the Frontex figures as good news. “We’re witnessing a shift.”
But with irregular migration such a dynamic, evolving phenomenon, there is no guarantee her success will continue.
“The accords, the financing and the support for the Libyan and Tunisian coast guards have had a strong effect, at least in the short term,” said Mr Barana.
“But let’s see if it will continue to be effective in the long term. Similar measures were introduced in 2017. In the short term, the number of boat departures decreased, but by 2020 the numbers started climbing again.
“So there’s a big doubt about how long the current trend can last.”
