At least ten countries are reportedly prepared to join the deal
ON SEPTEMBER 23rd a group of five EU interior ministers agreed to a temporary scheme for the distribution of migrants who are rescued from the Mediterranean Sea. It is hoped that the deal will put an end to the spectacle of some of the world’s richest countries squabbling over which should accept responsibility for small numbers of tired, and often sick, asylum-seekers.
When Italy’s former interior minister, Matteo Salvini, leader of the hard right Northern League, closed his country’s ports to migrants last year, people fleeing rape and torture in Libya’s nightmarish detention centres sometimes languished offshore for days while countries bickered over which should take them.
The accords are heartily detested in states with a Mediterranean coastline. Those countries argue that they have been abandoned by their European partners. The resulting resentment has been fundamental to the rise of Euroscepticism and the populist right in southern Europe—and nowhere more so than in Italy, where last year voters handed a parliamentary majority of seats to two anti-establishment parties, the League and the Five Star Movement .
Without naming Mr Salvini , Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister, declared that the deal showed that “provocative and pointlessly litigious attitudes were counterproductive”. Perhaps. Mediterranean states had for years been demanding an agreement such as the one agreed on in outline this week.
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