International concern about Italy’s new populist government has mostly focused on the challenge its plans for huge tax cuts and spending hikes might pose to the EU’s budget rules, and the risk it might even leave the euro altogether.

But the refusal by the interior minister, Matteo Salvini, this weekend to allow the Aquarius rescue ship carrying 629 migrants to dock in any Italian port makes it clear that the country’s first big clash with the bloc will not be over the common currency, but migration.

The Italian finance minister, Giovanni Tria, sought this weekend to reassure investors and EU officials, saying the coalition of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and far-right League intended to stay in the euro and would “avoid creating the market conditions” for an involuntary exit.

Matteo Salvini, the new interior minister and leader of the far-right League, was less emollient. “France pushes people back at the border, Spain defends its frontier with weapons,” he said, announcing that Italy’s ports were closed to the Aquarius.

“From today, Italy is also starting to say no to human trafficking, no to the business of illegal immigration,” Salvini – who campaigned on a pledge to round up and deport 500,000 migrants living illegally in Italy – added.

His intransigence, the first real evidence of the new government’s promised hardline stance, risks precipitating a full-blown crisis over EU asylum reforms, which the bloc has been trying to overhaul without success for the past two years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Interior minister Matteo Salvini declared last week he would not allow Italy to become ‘Europe’s refugee camp’. Photograph: Stefano Montesi - Corbis/Getty Images

Talks in Luxembourg aimed at establishing refugee quotas and a common system for member states to share responsibility for asylum-seekers ended in deadlock last week, with ministers pessimistic that any agreement can be reached by their self-imposed deadline of the next Brussels summit at the end of this month.

Salvini, who declared last week that he would not allow Italy to become “Europe’s refugee camp”, did not attend the meeting and has already dismissed the latest EU proposals as not doing enough to help Italy.



In an unusually outspoken intervention, Angela Merkel warned of the consequences of failing to reach an accord. “If we are unable to come up with a common response to the migration challenges, the very foundations of the EU will be at stake,” the German chancellor said. “Action is really needed.”



Belgium’s minister for asylum and migration, Theo Francken, said Europe “will end” unless member states could agree a joint approach. “At the moment, there is totally no consensus,” he said last week.

With xenophobia on the rise across the continent and hard-right, anti-immigration parties either in government or riding high in the polls in countries as diverse as Italy, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Austria and Sweden, immigration has become an issue of existential importance for the bloc.



Member states remain hopelessly divided over burden-sharing plans proposed by Brussels intended to ward off any repeat of the 2015-16 migration crisis.

Under current rules, refugees must claim asylum in the country in which they first enter the bloc – leaving so-called frontline states like Italy, Greece and Spain complaining, justifiably, that they are shouldering an unfair share of new arrivals.



Wealthier destination countries like Germany, France and the Netherlands, meanwhile, argue they are already hosting enough people who have moved northward, and hardline central European nations including Hungary and Poland have rejected out of hand all refugee quota schemes.

Faced with deadlock, Europe’s capitals are exploring alternatives. Germany has announced unilateral plans to tighten its asylum system. Austria has promised a “revolution” – abandoning quotas, tightening external border controls, and processing asylum claims outside the bloc – if no consensus can be found.

The coalition government in Vienna – which includes the far-right Freedom party – is also working informally with Denmark and the Netherlands on controversial plans to set up camps for rejected asylum seekers in countries outside the EU.

As fears mount that migrant flows – down sharply since 2016 after deals were struck with Turkey and Libya – may be about to rise once more, an EU-wide consensus was already looking difficult to achieve. Salvini’s intervention is unlikely to make it any easier.

• This article was amended on 12 June 2018 because Theo Francken is Belgium’s minister for asylum and migration, not interior minister as an earlier version said.