MOST interior ministers can hope for little more from their job than to avert disaster. Managing migration, crime, terrorism, policing and prisons is largely a matter of avoiding bear-traps rather than seeking glory. Jack Straw, who held the job in Britain for four years, called it “Life in the Graveyard”.

Not, though, for Marco Minniti, Italy’s interior minister. In the first half of 2017 a sharp rise in maritime migration from Libya spooked Europeans, still recovering from the refugee crisis of 2015-16. But crossings fell by 70% after Mr Minniti stepped in. Polls declared him Italy’s most popular politician. Some even spoke of him as a potential prime minister.

From his office in Rome, Mr Minniti sets out the steps of his strategy. First, last February, came a deal between Italy and Libya’s UN-backed government, which the EU quickly supported. Then, in April, Mr Minniti brokered an agreement between warring tribal leaders from Libya’s sparsely populated south, through which African migrants heading to the coast travel from Niger. The breakthrough came in July, when he convened a meeting of 14 Libyan mayors in Tripoli. “Agree to separate your city’s destiny from human smuggling, and we’ll create a different future,” he told them. Smugglers in coastal cities like Sabratha were told (and perhaps paid, although Italy denies funding criminals) to find other things to do. Meanwhile the Italians and the EU trained Libya’s coastguard to pull back migrants fleeing for Europe. The numbers, and deaths at sea, dropped precipitously. International organisations, like the UN’s refugee agency, now have space to function in Libya, Mr Minniti proudly notes.

Mr Minniti, who once oversaw Italy’s intelligence services, cultivates the reputation of a spymaster with mysterious contacts in every corner. But he also has a strategist’s mind. Sounding more like a foreign than an interior minister, dropping the names of philosophers and classical authors as he goes, he offers a vision of the intertwined destinies of Europe and Africa, based on security, demography and economics. His knowledge of the complex tapestry of militias, tribes, terrorists and competing power centres of Libya, to which he has been travelling for two decades, is “second to none”, says one EU official. Mr Minniti has suggested that his upbringing in Calabria, Italy’s toe, a baroque world of organised crime and political violence, may have given him a head-start in understanding Italy’s southern neighbour.

Once a card-carrying communist, Mr Minniti reinvented himself as a centre-left pragmatist. Today his security-first approach to migration irks other Italian ministers who hew to what an EU official calls “the moralistic school of policy”. Some ex-colleagues, such as Massimo D’Alema, Mr Minniti’s mentor and a former prime minister, have disowned him; NGOs hate him. But voters are fans. Mr Minniti was a “far-sighted interpreter of fast-changing Italian attitudes”, says Giampiero Massolo, a former intelligence head who worked with him. “He did things that would have been unthinkable for the left a few years ago.”

For many on the European left they remain so. But Mr Minniti suggests that is a sign of his comrades’ struggle to understand the politics of fear. “The left must stand beside those with fears in order to free them,” he says. “Populists do so to chain them.” Yet his critics claim that Mr Minniti is responsible for stoking rather than quelling those anxieties. However popular, his actions have hardly seen off the threat from anti-immigrant populists, as Italy’s election on March 4th will demonstrate.

Other worries centre on the conditions of detained migrants in Libya. Many are picked up and returned to shore by the coastguard, which Mr Minniti says conducted 22,000 search-and-rescue-operations last year. But 5,000 migrants moulder there in overcrowded official detention centres staffed by corrupt guards with a fondness for torture and sexual violence. The unofficial centres are doubtless worse, and no one knows how many they hold. Médecins Sans Frontières, an NGO, calls the system “rotten to the core”, and says Europe is complicit. “The problem is an old one,” says Mr Minniti. “The difference is that the UN [and other organisations] are now present.”

Then there is the murky role of Libya’s militias, which run the smuggling networks. Mr Minniti says that combating smuggling shores up Libya’s weak institutions. But Mark Micallef from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, a watchdog, says Italy may have fuelled instability in Sabratha and elsewhere by providing the militias with fresh ways to make money, and opportunities to launder their reputations. Aiding militias, even indirectly, does not foster stability in Libya, he says.

The road to Tripoli

Many observers seem unsure about Mr Minniti, praising his knowledge and competence—traits not abundant in Italian politics—while fearing a lack of follow-through. “I adored him,” says Maria Nicoletta Gaida, who as head of an NGO, Ara Pacis, helped him broker the deal in the south last year. But she and others say that the projects the tribal leaders were promised as alternatives to smuggling have not materialised. Others worry that the minister sees Libya only through the “dirty lens” of intelligence.

Libya’s instability makes it hard to bet that Mr Minniti’s deals will stick. Migrant crossings have started to creep up again, amid a fresh surge in fighting. In the long term, Mr Minniti says, he has created space for Europe to do more for Africa. But the EU’s ambitious plans in countries like Niger have already been hampered by dozy bureaucracies and Brussels turf wars.

Still, Mr Minniti has shown that governments need not be helpless bystanders when neighbours are unstable. His own days in office may be numbered—although his popularity could inoculate him against dismissal, even with a change of government. Either way, if the rest of Europe genuinely cares about Libya, it should walk through the door he has opened.