The paradox of a government that asks for help from the NGO that is sending Salvini to trial

The government flexing its muscles with bombastic announcements about sci-fi naval blockades, the illusion of zero starts, with zero tolerance for NGOs and demanding closed ports, ended up ask for help from the same NGOs to save migrants at sea. A spin that is a bath of reality for the executive of Giorgia Meloni, in particular for her minister of Infrastructures, Matteo Salvini, the ideologue of the hoax of ports closed for months on trial in Palermo for his reckless war on NGOs. It happens then that in general silence last July 6, the Italian Coast Guard expressly asked the NGO Open Arms to carry out not one, but six rescue operations. Showing a level of coordination not seen since at least 2018, the General Command of the Port Authorities of Rome and the humanitarian ships found themselves together to save people. “A situation of normality”, as Veronica Alfonsi, spokeswoman for the Spanish NGO, defines it in the newspaper. A normality you don’t expect, from whom, even after the massacre of Cutro last February, had puffed up his chest making it clear that the government had no intention of giving in to the collective emotion aroused by the death of at least a hundred people. The decree that followed, that of the “hunt for traffickers throughout the globe”, also provided for the rule for NGOs to carry out only one rescue at a time and then quickly return to the port assigned by Rome. But now things seem to have changed. The migratory pressure, especially from Tunisia, is so high as to make it impossible to respect the equation “one mission, one rescue”.