“We have not come to highlight differences, we have come to weave consensus”, warned the Spanish delegation that accompanied Pedro Sánchez to the Chigi palace, the seat of the Italian Executive, where yesterday he had his first official meeting with Giorgia Meloni. Despite the fact that the socialist Sánchez and the far-right Meloni are located at the ideological antipodes of the political spectrum, the hour and a half meeting that both held ended with a mutual song of friendship between Italy and Spain, third and fourth economies, respectively, of the European Union.
After just five months as president of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic, in Moncloa they observe in the leader of the post-fascist formation Hermanos de Italia a clear desire for moderation in the meetings of the European Council, also before the war in Ukraine or in the immigration policy, far removed from the hard and disruptive line championed by Matteo Salvini. The Meloni who received Sánchez yesterday with an exquisite institutional treatment, highlighting “the convergences and harmony” between the two “Mediterranean and very close countries, which understand each other when speaking even if they speak different languages”, seemed to be light years away from the vehement leader ultra that wrapped Santiago Abascal in a Vox rally in Marbella last June.
And Sánchez himself acknowledged after the meeting that he felt very comfortable on his date with Meloni. Despite the fact that the leader of the PSOE has spent years warning, inside and outside Spain, of the danger that, in his opinion, the irruption of the extreme right has in European executives and institutions, the President of the Government avoided an ideological clash with Meloni, to put all focus on the priorities for the semester of the current Spanish presidency of the EU, which starts on July 1.
The relations between Spain and Italy, they emphasize in Moncloa, go far beyond their respective governments and their disparate political colours. And Sánchez claimed yesterday, after his visit to the Chigi palace, that his objective was not to confront or highlight his political differences with Meloni, but to try to “form alliances and find meeting points” with the Italian prime minister, as he also did the day before in his meetings with the leaders of Cyprus and Malta –within the plan of preparatory tours for the European semester that he has been leading in recent months–, to achieve progress in the different files opened with the majority of his EU counterparts. In this role, Sánchez admits that he must also respect the legitimacy of all the governments of the community club, whether they are more or less akin to his political positions.
Sánchez thus found “coincidences†with Meloni not only on the redefinition of European fiscal rules or on his open strategic autonomy plan, but even on the thorny European migration and asylum pact that he has as one of his great priorities. Despite the fact that the recent decree of the Italian Executive that restricts the activities of humanitarian migrant rescue ships clashes with the Spanish position, Sánchez highlighted the harmony between two countries of first arrival on the southern border of the EU.
“Italy and Spain share that what we have to do is talk less about the internal dimension of migration and talk more about the external dimension of migration,” he said. Border control, but also solidarity and more collaboration with the countries of origin and transit of irregular migration. The drastic reduction in flows on the Atlantic route, especially from Morocco to Spain, redoubles the migratory pressure in the eastern Mediterranean. But Italy is on the powder keg of Libya and Tunisia.
“When Italy and Spain work together, good things happen for both societies and we make Europe moveâ€, Sánchez celebrated before Meloni.
