Migration has been a central theme in the electoral campaign of extreme right parties, led by
the leader of Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, who could become the country’s first far-right
leader since Mussolini and who once said Italians needed to “repatriate the migrants back to
their countries and then sink the boats that rescued them”.
This summer, Meloni and another of her coalition leaders, Matteo Salvini, a former interior
minister who made high-profile moves to block the arrival of asylum seekers at Italian ports,
have rallied against what they described as fake refugees and portrayed the arrival of people
seeking asylum in Italy as an “invasion”.
Meloni, whose party has roots in neo-fascism, said that if she becomes prime minister, she
intends to put in place a naval blockade in the Mediterranean to stop migration to Italy
