Open Arms Process:the problem with Salvini and the government's propaganda is that it works

Six years in prison.This is what the Palermo PMs asked of Matteo Salvini, Vice President of the Council and Minister of Transport and Infrastructure.The request came as part of the trial in which the leader of the League is accused of having kidnapped the passengers of the Open Arms ship in 2019.

The case has had and is having a disruptive effect on Italian politics, with the classic accusations against the "politicized judiciary" and the proclamations on the "defense of the borders".In reality it is a script that we have widely seen and seen over the years.The differences are in the seriousness of the tones and in the general context in which the case is placed.

The Open Arms case

In August 2019, the ship Open Arms of the NGO Proactiva Open Arms is prevented from disembarking in Italian ports for 19 days.These are the times of the first Conte government and the Security Decree bis.Decree in which the Minister of the Interior was given the possibility to act in concert with the Ministers of Transport and Defense to block the transit, stopover or entry of ships into Italian waters for "reasons of order and security" or when the violation of laws against irregular immigration.

A very good measure criticized by experts, as we highlighted at the time, but which was part of the "closed ports" strategy heralded in particular by the then Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.Behind this slogan, the idea of ​​having to defend the Italian borders from irregular immigration, with tones oscillating between security rhetoric and conspiracy theories about “ethnic replacement”. 

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It is in this climate and after the approval of that decree that, in the first days of August, the Spanish ship Open Arms carried out the rescue of 55 people, including two children, in Libyan waters.The same day, as reported Political report card, the interministerial decree is signed which prohibits the ship from entering Italian waters, based on the bis safety decree.

A tug of war arises in which the ship demands a POS several times (place of safety, or a safe place to conclude rescue operations), between Italy and nearby Malta, while finds himself rescuing other shipwrecked people in Maltese rescue waters:on 2 August he saved another 69 shipwrecked people, on 10 August another 39.Malta only agrees to the disembarkation of the latter, but however there is fear on the ship that this could create unrest between the various recovered groups, to the detriment of navigation safety.Meanwhile, some of these are transferred ashore for medical reasons.The evacuations take place both by the Italian and Maltese navies.

The tug-of-war also takes place on the ground, through lawyers and stamped papers.On August 14, the TAR, after an appeal by Open Arms' lawyers, suspended the interministerial decree of August 1, "in order to allow the entry of the Open Arms ship into Italian territorial waters (and therefore to provide immediate assistance to the rescued people most in need)".At the same time, however, the Ministry of the Interior prepares a new inter-ministerial decree, which however is not countersigned by the Defense Minister, Elisabetta Trenta, "in the name of humanity" and by the Transport Minister, Danilo Toninelli.But the ship is still not allowed to disembark.In fact, Interior Minister Salvini gets in the way.

Thus another tug of war was born, this time between Salvini and Prime Minister Conte, who clashed with each other over the possibility of letting the 27 minors off board:only on August 18th will they be able to disembark.Meanwhile the situation on the ship becomes difficult:some people, exasperated by that forced stay and by the hygienic-sanitary conditions, even go so far as to throw themselves into the sea with their life jackets, trying to reach Lampedusa.On August 17, Salvini agrees not to hinder the evacuation of what he calls "presumed minors".On the same day, the inspection by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Agrigento, the judicial police and the doctors of the USMAF (Maritime Health Offices, border area) also takes place.The following day the minors were disembarked.

Meanwhile, Spain offers a POS in the Balearic Islands, however the ship's captain refuses the offer because the conditions of the people on board made the journey difficult.This brings us to the epilogue of August 20th.After a new inspection, the Public Prosecutor's Office of Agrigento orders the preventive seizure of the ship, thus disembarking all the migrants on board.

What is Salvini accused of?

The crimes alleged against Salvini concern the period between 14 and 20 August.For those six days, Salvini is accused of kidnapping 147 people, with the aggravating circumstances of his role as a public official and because it was to the detriment of minors, and omission of official acts.According to the Palermo prosecutor's office, Salvini acted on his own initiative and in disagreement with the rest of the government.

As recalled by Paolo Valenti on The green light, to justify the entry ban Salvini relied on an interpretation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea:this allows the harmless passage of ships, while for Salvini in the case of the Open Arms this could not be applied.The ship's activity would instead have fallen within the cases indicated by one directive of the same ministry, in which the NGOs' operations at sea were described as "aimed at the transfer to Italian territory of irregular migrants in violation of current laws on immigration, also without identity documents and partly coming from foreign countries at risk of terrorism".

Thesis, however, rejected by the prosecutors, also because this type of purpose has never been demonstrated anywhere.And because Open Arms found itself applying the rescue obligation as required by international and maritime law.The principle is as basic as it is regularly called into question by the security management of migratory phenomena:saving lives at sea is mandatory, no distinction is made between one shipwrecked person and another ("you save it, you don't select it"), pushbacks are illegal and States should be guided by principles of cooperation and coordination.

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For his work as Interior Minister Salvini was accused of aggravated kidnapping in two other cases.The first dates back to August 2018 and involves the Diciotti ship of the coast guard, case in point Salvini was also investigated for abuse of office.Here too there was a rebound between Italy and Malta, and the ship was prevented from disembarking for several days, until an agreement was found for the distribution of the rescued migrants.Faced with the request for indictment, on 20 March 2019 the Senate denied authorization to proceed.

The second case concerns instead the military ship Gregoretti, who were prevented from disembarking in Lampedusa for four days, until an agreement was reached for the redistribution of the migrants on board with other countries.The episode occurred after the approval of the aforementioned security decree bis, which was not applicable for military ships.In that case, faced with the request for indictment, the Senate voted for authorize the process.Salvini reacted on the occasion by saying that he had defended the borders, and that he had chosen himself to go to court "trusting in the impartiality of the judiciary", despite the attempts of the left to "eliminate political opponents through the courts". Salvini was later acquitted in May 2021:according to the Catania prosecutor's office there were no details of the crime, and Salvini's choices had been "shared by the government".

For the Open Arms case, however, on 26 May 2020 the Senate Immunities Committee had authorization to proceed was rejected towards Salvini.However, authorization was given by the Senate two months later, on 30 July.Decisive the vote of the senators of Italia Viva, who had instead abstained in the Council.

Government propaganda and its dangers

With the Open Arms case, the current government found itself in its hands a minister and party leader on trial.This in a context where two other members of the executive are currently indicted, Daniela Santanché (fraud against the State and false accounting) e Andrea Delmastro (breach of official secrecy).With two important differences.The first is that Salvini was sent to trial before the current government was formed;the second is that the case concerns a key theme of the far right, that is, the "defense of borders" vaunted by migrants first of all by the League leader himself.

The response was therefore the opening of a frontal conflict with the judiciary, a conflict that was anything but unprecedented.Let's think for example about delegitimization campaign against judge Iolanda Apostolico, aimed at portraying her as a “communist judge”.All this in order not to admit the legal failure of the Cutro Decree, dismantled in those days by various court rulings, including that of Catania by the Apostolico itself.When faced with a problem, the logic of the government and the majority is rather linear in its dysfunctionality:close ranks while attacking the enemy.A line that finds its synthesis in continuous reporting of conspiracies. 

In Salvini's trial, the conflict was seen first and foremost with the declarations of the President of the I recommend Giorgia Meloni and various members of the majority, very similar to each other.Salvini is depicted as a person who acts according to "the mandate received from the citizens" to defend the borders and who risks 6 years for this.The conflict is political, and it is wanted by the judiciary.

It should be noted that this type of message was conveyed not only by the accounts of specific politicians, but also by that of the Interior Ministry, which relaunched Piantedosi's declaration of solidarity with Salvini.There should be a difference between the accounts of an institution and its representatives, since the former do not have a political colour, however as seen in the past this distinction often disappears with the current government, starting with the Ministry of the Interior.

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Then there was Matteo Salvini's video.Black background, monotonous speech and suit of a provincial undertaker, the leader of the League lines up all the frames of the case.“The left has decided that defending the borders is a crime,” Salvini says in the video, putting together two ideas dear to the far right.

The first is that keeping people saved from a shipwreck on a ship in extreme conditions, including minors ("presumed", Salvini said at the time, let's not forget), is comparable to defending the borders from an invader, thus giving a vision of migratory phenomena that goes beyond the security logic and leads directly to the militarization of society.This is in contempt not only of respect for human life, but of reality itself.Because as seen in the Open Arms, Diciotti and Gregoretti cases, whether they are NGO ships or state bodies the rhetoric is the same:the Italian people must be defended even at the cost of going against other representatives, if this serves to guarantee law and order.

The second idea is that "the left" is an enemy force of this law and order, and indeed contributes to weakening both.He did it by voting in the Senate authorization for the trial, it matters little if some of those votes came from the 5 Star Movement, Salvini's former government allies.But it does so through the control it would exercise over parts of the institutions, starting from the judiciary itself.We therefore have the paradox of a majority that on the one hand resorts to harsh force through increasingly repressive laws and decrees, even boasting of being able to send pregnant women to prison;on the other hand, however, he cries misery since he is unable to enforce them due to the fault of the left-wing judiciary.

✅ Finally prison for pickpockets who steal by exploiting small children or pregnancy:whoever makes a mistake pays, from words to deeds! pic.twitter.com/kEFhybyXAR

— Matteo Salvini (@matteosalvinimi) September 12, 2024

Salvini himself is emblematic of this apparent paradox, if we think of the ease with which he resorts to complaints against those who criticize him.In recent days he has in fact sued for the second time Roberto Saviano, for a post in which the writer accused him of lying about Carola Rackete.If Italy is at the mercy ofestablishment left-wing intellectual, politicized judiciary and NGOs that favor "invasions", what should a complaint like this represent?A gesture of hope so that a judge can be found in Rome instead of Berlin?

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But more than technical analyzes or even parodies for a certain underlying ridiculousness, the video should interest us for its purposes and recipients.Salvini wants to tell us that one cannot defend oneself from the accusations in the trial:the publication of the video took place on the day in which the prosecutors asked for a 6-year sentence against him, but also on the day in which he failed to appear in court.In short, if there is justice, it must be sought outside those classrooms.Furthermore, the use of English subtitles in the video makes it clear that the recipients are overseas.In fact, within a few days Salvini received the solidarity of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Elon Musk.That is, the most autocratic of the leaders of the European Union and an entrepreneur who after purchasing Twitter it opened the platform to supremacists, himself becoming the main far-right influencer internationally.

Bravo! https://t.co/T60YpqtxxJ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2024

The battle that the government is setting up is being played out more in Europe than in Palermo.What is especially worrying is the collapse of the political arc that should offer alternatives to the far right with regards to migration policies.With extremely unfortunate timing, in the same days in which Salvini and the majority were putting on yet another show, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, of the Labor Party, came to Italy to meet Giorgia Meloni and discuss how to implement the "Albania model” for the management of migrants, also attracting criticism from its own ranks. A political and communicative victory for Meloni, and a sign of terrible defeat for the progressive front, which goes hand in hand with the interest expressed by the Scholz's Germany and of an inexorable landslide at the European level.

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In this particular case, the convergence is even more worrying if we consider that at the end of July Starmer found himself faced with a baptism of fire for his newly installed government: xenophobic pogroms stirred up by far-right militants and neo-fascists.After the initial response to the riots, in which The mobilization of civil society also played a role, the Labor government's most important policy initiative has in practice resulted in the search for a modest amount of iron fist to brandish against migrants and asylum seekers. The invitations to a truth operation on how these categories have now become a scapegoat or a real target have not been accepted.From here we can understand why the far right, whether in opposition or in government, insists with terrifying zeal on the same script:because it works.

Preview image:video frame Il Sole 24 Ore via YouTube