When the 27 leaders of the European Union met in Brussels this week, the migrant crisis was high on the agenda. In her opening remarks at the summit, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen drew attention to the deals agreed in the last 12 months between the bloc and countries such as Tunisia and Egypt. ‘These partnerships are working,’ said von der Leyen. ‘If you look at the Central Mediterranean Route, which we have been working on intensively, overall the arrivals are now down by minus 64 per cent.’
Macron has been a formidable obstacle to tackling Europe’s migrant crisis
The woman who deserves the credit for this dramatic decrease is Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy. As Nicholas Farrell points out in The Spectator this week, Meloni is the first leader of a western European nation to take the migrant crisis seriously.
Earlier this month, the Italian PM addressed the Atlantic Council in New York and told her audience that, ‘as a politician, you have two options: being a leader or being a follower…my ambition is to lead and not to follow’.
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