Migration, Mattarella against Denmark: seizing migrants’ goods recalls the Nazi period

Rome – “In view of so many children drowned in the sea, day after day, offending migrants’ dignity taking into consideration the possibility of seizing the goods they were able to save when fleeing their homeland is cruelly sardonic – still, this is something one of the EU Member States is planning to do. This measure recalls the most obscure moments of Europe.” Even though the President of the Italian Republic did not mention it explicitly, Mattarella was talking abut Denmark, where there is the project for a law allowing officials to seize valuables from migrants for ‘compensating’ welfare expenses. The other reference is obvious: during the Nazi period in fact, this kind of “State theft” was common against those taken away from their lives to be then literally caged into concentration camps, Jews first.

The Danish initiative, associated to Hitler’s madness by the President, is for Mattarella just the umpteenth symbol of the wrong way in which migration flows are currently handled. A symbol just like “walls and barbed wires”, condemned by Mattarella as an attempt to “close people in”. On the contrary, President Mattarella said a united Europe is the “minimal dimension” to be successful in tacking the challenges of both migration and terroristic threats, which “needs to be defeated with the weapons of civilisation that we’ve built so far,” not “allowing others to distort us.”

Once more then, Mattarella urged everyone to keep up with the path towards European integration. The call was reiterated during the excerpt dedicated to the “serious episodes” connected with the rescue of four Italian banks, Cari Chieti, Cari Ferrera, Banca Marche and Banca Etruria. The President in fact said that “after having responsibly found mediations and compromises for having shared solutions, Italy must ask – as the Government did – to have the commitments included in the Banking Union project fulfilled.” A nudge for Germany, which is still unconvinced by the adoption of the third pillar of the Banking Union (a common guarantee scheme for deposits). “Resigning ourselves to an incomplete and weak Banking Union, as the European Commission and the ECB highlighted, would expose the entire Union to systemic risks,” warned Mattarella.