Toti: “Let’s avoid proclamations on immigration. Macron remains a reference point for the moderates”

Between the messages that flutter and the French who get angry there is always a border line. This time it’s not subtle, but it’s made up of at least four thousand rather well equipped and deployed gendarmes above all on a border that is in Liguria and is that of Ventimiglia. The cheerful Italian who appears around the bend is not Gino Bartali, the one sung by Paolo Conte, he doesn’t have the sad nose of an Italian on a trip, but he has recently fixed a pair of elegant glasses on his nose, his name is John Toticarries forward the ideas of the moderates with Italy in the Center and with the Noi Moderati grouping, governs the Liguria Region and therefore the high voltage mess on the Italy/France border is indisputably his business.

The history of the newspapers that flew around (like at the Tour de France) has something to do with it, because basically the problem arises from their current declination and that is from social messages. The management of migratory flows in Italy and in Europe, their non-management, is not a problem of last week, but it has been going on for a while and it is very unlikely that it will stop. Just to talk about the routes that depart from Libya, it is an escalation that began with the assassination of the dictator Gaddafi at the end of 2011. So the argument exists, there was and there will be, but it only becomes a problem when for long story short, we talk too much.

The agreement between the French President Emmanuel Macron and the Italian premier Giorgia Meloni had already been sanctioned, only that first Matteo Salvini and then also the leader of the Brothers of Italy decided to sing victory on social media and then the French reply almost became ineluctable. This rather widespread and widely shared reconstruction has not actually been publicly supported, especially among the parties of the new centre-right majority. Instead, the moderate Toti does it. First with two posts on Facebook, a social network on which one can at least argue with a certain completeness, which is difficult due to the “judgments” or the outbursts of Twitter and Instagram. In fact, the governor starts from the pride of the French revolution, the Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen of 1789 (which he evidently knows) to arrive at the evident violation by the French of the Schengen Treaty and the related kilometers of queue that block the Ligurian border /Italian. Then the moderate Toti replies to the question: “On immigration policies, I think it is useful, I would say essential, to avoid proclamations. It applies to Macron, it applies to those who do the same in Italy. On the issue of refugees, Italy is left alone, this is a truth, I don’t think there is room for discussion, therefore Italy is right. Is the reason recognized in you? So I believe that using diplomacy, balance, fair play would always be more appropriate”. Then, since simple things are (often) the most beautiful, here is a phrase that responds to this Franciscan definition: “To govern means to solve the problems that arise, not to “monetise” consensus in terms of votes. It is valid in France, in Italy and in any democratic country”.

Then it becomes simple, objectively necessary, to worry about what is happening at the Ventimiglia border, to observe some signs of easing in the last few hours, but not to overlook the obvious inconveniences noted above all in the last weekend. The president of the Liguria Region explains: “At least this escalation did not take place in the summer, let’s think of how the queues, the inconveniences, the absurd difficulties for the Ligurians and for tourists from all over Europe would have increased if this had happened in the climax of the holiday period. The Schengen Treaty no longer exists, this is evident and we know, knowing it, that there are no sanctions for those who revoke it like France. A country has the right to revoke it in the event of a national emergency and no one can of course get the hang of the definition of emergency. For France it had happened after the Nice attack on the Promenade des Anglais, in 2016, today there are evidently new pressures on Macron from Marine Le Pen as well as from her Minister of the Interior. But it is clear that the dialogue between Italy and France must remain open, it is clear that the Mediterranean countries must know how to dialogue and unite many common needs in order to assert them with balance towards those like Germany and the Northern countries who bring forward different requests: it seems clear to me what has happened with regard to the measures for the energy crisis that we are all facing”.

One last thing: the Italian moderates, in the last electoral campaign, never disdained open references to the French President’s policies. Is Toti disappointed in Macron? “I appreciated and appreciate Macron as a model of balance for Europe”. Provided that he too remains moderate, ça va sans dire.