Foreign

BOATS leaving the North African coast carrying migrants should be blocked at sea, Giorgia Meloni, the head of the Italian populist party leading the pre-election polls, said on Monday.

“The best solution to this problem is to prevent the departures and not the arrivals.

A blockade of the departures would be more efficient,’’ the leader of the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) said in a radio interview with RTL 102.5.

According to current polling, Meloni’s party enjoys support equivalent to that of the League, headed by right-wing populist Matteo Salvini, and Forza Italia of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, taken together.

The three parties formed an alliance to contest the Sept. 25, elections, while the political forces on the left and the centre are currently in disarray.

Meloni and Salvini have made migration and refugees a key issue in their campaigning, as the number of arrivals from North Africa continues to be high.

The migrants were often brought ashore by private rescue operations or the Italian coastguard.

Meloni called for camps, or hotspots, to be set up in North Africa to check the migrants before they leave the continent.

“We could certainly talk to the Libyan authorities about this,’’ she said.

In a controversial opinion piece in the Corriere Della Sera daily on Monday, Meloni contrasted the current wave of migration into Italy with Italians migrating abroad in decades past.

Meloni said Italians had gone in search of work, whereas the current migrants aimed to live off the state. (dpa/NAN)

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Tags: Giorgia Meloni Matteo Salvini