The Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has already revealed her cards. After months of talking about her ambition to turn Italy into the bridge that unites Europe with African economies, the leader of the Brothers of Italy presented this Monday her ‘Mattei Plan’, a cooperation initiative with African nations that will feature an initial allocation of 5.5 billion euros to invest in the continent and which is intended to help control, ultimately, migratory flows towards the Italian coasts.
If Meloni won the 2022 elections by promising to stop migrant arrivals, since taking power he has adopted a more realistic perspective and seen how migratory pressure increased in 2023 with more than 157,000 migrants reaching Italy. For this reason, the premier brought together in Rome this Monday some 25 African heads of state and government, as well as several other ministers and institutional representatives, in the Italian Senate, the scene of the launch of the so-called ‘Mattei plan’, named after the founder of the energy company ENI known for promoting the development of African countries.
“Illegal mass immigration will never stop, traffickers will never be defeated, if we do not face the causes that push someone to leave their own home. That is exactly what we intend to do, on the one hand declare war against traffickers, and on the other work to offer African people an alternative of opportunities, work, training and legal migration,” Meloni assured at the opening of the conference between Italy and Africa that takes place this Monday.
The first pilot projects of this plan are a vocational training center on renewable energy in Morocco, other educational initiatives in Tunisia or for access to health in Côte d’Ivoire. In total, 3 billion will be allocated from the Italian Climate Fund and another 2.5 billion from the Development Cooperation Fund, including credits, donation operations and guarantees. “We believe that it is possible to write a new chapter in the history of our relationship, a cooperation between equals, far from a predatory or charitable imposition towards Africa,” added the Italian Prime Minister at the opening of the summit, to which they have also attended by the highest representatives of the European institutions, the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen; that of the European Council, Charles Michel; and that of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola.
Initially the conference was to be held in October, but it was postponed due to the tension in the Middle East, and it has ended up being proposed as the first major event within the framework of the Italian presidency of the G7 in 2024. Von der Leyen, who in the In recent months she has demonstrated an evident personal harmony with Meloni, she has expressed her delight with Rome’s initiative, ensuring that Europe must cooperate with Africa so that young people have more job opportunities and do not have to resort to human traffickers to reach Europe. The leader of the community Executive has shown her willingness to offer more opportunities “to come to Europe legally so that people can move, learn and bring their new knowledge home”, defending that “mobility must be managed by law, not by the traffickers”. “And the better we are at legal migration, the more convincing we will be in preventing irregular migration,” she added. On the other hand, the president of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki, has applauded the intentions but stressed that they would like to have been consulted during the preparations.
According to sources from the Italian Government, in a first phase the ‘Mattei Plan’ initiative will focus on these pilot projects, while later it will be extended to other nations on the continent. Rome wants to intervene in areas such as education and training; health, water and hygiene; the Agriculture; infrastructure and energy. In fact, Italy aspires to become a pole for transferring African energy to Europe on the path to independence from Russian hydrocarbons. Italy, Meloni has stressed, wants to be “a natural center for the energy supply of all of Europe, a goal that we can achieve if we use energy as a key to the development of all.” According to the premier, Italy seeks to help interested African nations to produce enough energy for their needs and to export the surplus to Europe, “combining two needs: the African need to exploit this production and generate wealth and the European need to guarantee new energy supply routes.”
Some skeptics, however, distrust that a country with a debt as high as Italy is capable of competing in Africa with powers such as China or Russia. The plan is also not liked by the Italian opposition, who have criticized it as a “gigantic propaganda operation” and “neocolonial” approach. Peppe Provenzano, spokesman for the Democratic Party, has also regretted that, as the funds already came from items destined for climate and development, “it does not have a single euro more than the already existing funds.”
In addition to this approach to the entire continent, in recent months Meloni has promoted individual agreements on migration matters with countries like Tunisia, where the EU will pay to stop the departures of migrants; or Albania, with which the Italian company has reached a controversial pact to build migration centers in the country to transfer migrants intercepted at sea, to which the Albanian Constitutional Court has just given the go-ahead after having frozen it due to reluctance. of the opposition. All while it has made the work of NGOs that carry out rescue operations in the Central Mediterranean much more complicated, who must navigate for days to disembark in ports far from Sicily, arguing that the island’s centers are already saturated.
