French President Emmanuel Macron will meet Italy’s new premier Giuseppe Conte for a working lunch Friday, just days after sparks flew between the two leaders over Rome’s rejection of a rescue ship carrying hundreds of migrants.
Despite efforts by both sides to play down their testy exchanges, the clash underscores the deep divides in Europe on how to deal with another summer surge in migrant arrivals from across the Mediterranean.
“It’s time for collective action,” Macron said Thursday during a trip to Rochefort, in western France.
“Sometimes finding solutions involves legitimate tensions when people disagree, but they disappear when people are willing to work together,” added the French president.
Yet there are few signs that European leaders are anywhere near being ready to formulate a common response to the hundreds of people arriving daily – mainly on the coasts of Italy and Greece.
The issue of how to share the migrant burden is expected to dominate an EU summit at the end of June, which is supposed to be the deadline for an overhaul of the bloc’s “Dublin rules”.
The rules say migrants hoping to apply for asylum must do so in the first country they enter, a policy that has placed a huge burden on countries like Italy and Greece.
The influx has encouraged the rise of far-right and populist parties – leading most recently to Conte’s nomination as prime minister in Italy’s new anti-establishment and Eurosceptic government.
This week Conte’s powerful interior minister, the hard-right League leader Matteo Salvini, teamed up with his German and Austrian counterparts as part of an “axis of the willing” to combat illegal immigration.
Their announcement was seen by many analysts as an implicit snub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s efforts to find an EU-wide response.
Other countries meanwhile, such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, have either refused outright or resisted taking in refugees under a contested EU quota system.