Italy’s furious reaction to a border incursion by French customs officers has highlighted growing sensitivity over what many Italians perceive as French arrogance and double standards when it comes to dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis, reports FRANCE 24.
Hours after Italy’s March 4 election witnessed the surge of Eurosceptic forces, a concerned Emmanuel Macron said the results signaled a warning to all Europeans: that they must not pursue lofty ideals without taking into account the strains of immigration and the “suffering” of Italian citizens. Less than a month later, it appears his government has been found guilty of ignoring both – at least in Italy’s view.
Italian officials and media outlets have been fuming since gun-carrying French customs officers turned up at a railway station in the small Alpine town of Bardonecchia late on Friday to confront a Nigerian passenger suspected of carrying drugs. Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into the border incursion and the Foreign Ministry has summoned France’s ambassador in Rome over the “unacceptable” violation of Italian sovereignty.
French and Italian officials have since offered differing version of events, with France’s budget minister Gérald Darmanin, who is responsible for customs, arguing that the French officers were merely following procedures laid out in a 1990 agreement. Italy has countered that the office where the Nigerian passenger was compelled to take a urine test – which turned out negative – had been given to a charity that helps migrants, and that French authorities had been told not to enter it.
Darmanin said Sunday he would travel to Rome in the coming days to “explain himself in person”. But by then the Italian press was up in arms over the purported smugness with which the French government had treated the incident, including its pointed refusal to offer an apology – an attitude many south of the Alps regard as the latest evidence of a pattern of French contempt for its southern neighbour and for the principles of European unity and solidarity professed by Macron.
“France’s torpid reaction has been unbearable in its slovenliness,” wrote Carlo Bonini in a scathing comment piece published by La Repubblica, blasting the “disdain with which [France] downgraded the whole matter to a mere customs issue, as if we were discussing undue checks on a cargo of cheese”. He added: “Friday evening’s armed incursion was not an ‘unpleasant incident’, a ‘misunderstanding’ or a breach of etiquette. It was a macroscopic violation of sovereignty […] that revealed the true face of France’s Macron when it comes to national borders.”