The Government of Italy has just decreed a state of emergency for six months in the face of an exponential increase in irregular immigration. Arrivals by sea have increased by 300% in recent weeks. Part of the boats come from Libya, whose state began to disintegrate after the overthrow of Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi twelve years ago now. Others leave Tunisia.
The figures for Spain are very different. The last fortnightly bulletin from the Ministry of the Interior recorded a 50.9% decrease in immigrants arriving by sea and land at the end of March. The decrease is especially pronounced on the Canary Islands route. The arrival of immigrants by boat has dropped by 63% compared to last year. Irregular transit to the cities of Ceuta and Melilla by land has decreased by 80.9%. It is now one year since President Pedro Sánchez's trip to Morocco to seal peace with King Mohamed VI after fifteen months of serious political and diplomatic crisis between the two countries.
In Libya, the state is broken. There is a government in Tripoli recognized by the UN and the African Union, headed by Abdul Hamid Dbeibe, a former senior Gaddafi official, who only controls the western part of Libya. We are talking about a basically desert country, with large hydrocarbon reserves, whose population is concentrated on the coast. Somehow Libya has returned to the times of the Roman Empire, when that strip of North African territory was divided into two provinces: Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.
The capital of Cyrenaica is Benghazi and here is another center of power that controls the east, through a parallel government headed by Fathi Bashagha, a former aviation officer. This parallel government is under the protection of General Khalifa Haftar, a strong man from Cyrenaica.
Both centers of power have locally-based armed militias that fight intermittently with the support of international forces. Türkiye protects the Government of Tripoli. Russia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates are the main allies of General Haftar. In the midst of this phenomenal hornet's nest, Italy tries to maintain the gas supply and does what it can to get local clans to help control immigration. It is expensive.
ENI, the powerful public hydrocarbons company, one of the strong powers in Italy, has managed to maintain the gas supply through the Greenstream submarine gas pipeline, the longest in the Mediterranean. Present in Libya since 1959, ENI has extended agreements for the exploitation of new deposits on the coast.
Immigration is not a flow of gas. They are people of different origins in the hands of traffickers related to the dominant clans. The Italian government suspects that Russia may be behind the new migratory wave as a punishment for the strong Atlantic affiliation that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni exhibits today. A few years ago, when she was a fierce commentator on television, Meloni had praised Vladimir Putin. The previous prime minister, the technocrat Mario Draghi, was already an unequivocal Atlanticist. Perhaps Moscow was expecting news in Rome, since Matteo Salvini, from the League, a confessed admirer of Putin, sits on the new Executive, and the third partner in the coalition is the party of Silvio Berlusconi, a personal friend of the Russian president. Be that as it may, things are going badly for a government that had promised to limit irregular immigration at the stroke of a pen. There is another factor to take into account: Tunisia. This country is facing a serious economic crisis, accentuated by the increase in grain prices. A great migratory wave is feared in summer in the direction of the island of Lampedusa. Everything indicates that this wave is already beginning.
Morocco has visibly strengthened the control of irregular immigration to Spain after having obtained a change of position from the Sánchez Government on Western Sahara. The numbers are clear. Immigration does not appear today among the great concerns of the Spanish and was barely mentioned three weeks ago in the motion of censure presented by Vox. The turn on the Sahara acquires its full meaning in the light of events in Italy. Interior sources do not rule out, however, that in summer the arrival of small boats from Algeria, a country that is very upset with Spain due to the pro-Moroccan turn, increases.
The Italian state of emergency is a measure of pressure on Brussels that also questions Spain. With the adoption of exceptional measures, the Meloni Government will try to divert flows to other European countries. In this context, a good diplomatic relationship between Spain and Italy, despite the antagonistic political sign of their governments, seems the most intelligent option, especially if Sánchez wants to crown the Spanish semester of the European Union with an agreement on immigration.
