President Meloni’s press statement with the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Denmark

Good evening everyone, thank you for being here.

I am very pleased to welcome the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, my friend Mette, to Palazzo Chigi once again. We last met here on 11 March, but we have also recently had the opportunity to meet on some other occasions, the latest ones being the European Political Community summit in Tirana and the March European Council meeting. We will be seeing each other again for the next European Council meeting in June.

I would like to say that, if there’s an aspect I like to highlight of the collaboration that has been established between Italy and Denmark, it is undoubtedly its concreteness. We are used to discussing many issues, but we like to be very concrete in our responses. With Mette, this is easy. She is not someone who likes to waste time chatting; she is a very action-oriented person. We have implemented this approach on many levels: at bilateral level, at European level and at international level. 

I believe the other very interesting aspect of this collaboration is that nations that, on paper, are geographically rather distant from each other in Europe, and two people who, on paper, should also be politically distant, actually then find common ground precisely on their concreteness, pragmatism and desire to provide their citizens with effective responses, working very, very well together.

I think our collaboration is so fruitful above all, and perhaps precisely, because our viewpoints are different but, in the end, we are driven by the same major goal: to provide our citizens with responses and ensure that Europe, too, is better able to respond to its citizens.

We are finding this to be the case on many issues, such as the war in Ukraine and its impact on the security of our continent. Denmark is a northern European nation where historically the Russian threat is felt particularly strongly; Italy, on the other hand, is a Mediterranean European nation and, here, we feel more the domino effect that the conflict in Ukraine is having on overall stability, which also involves the Mediterranean as well as Africa and the Middle East. This shows that our destinies are strongly interlinked; the concerns of one are also the concerns of the other.

In this regard, I think this evening’s meeting is an opportunity to update each other on the latest developments linked to the war in Ukraine. As always, we have together reiterated our commitment to reach a just and lasting peace. We reaffirm our support for efforts in this direction. As you know, a new round of negotiations is being worked on, and I believe the first thing we need to do is thank President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian Government for clearly demonstrating their sincere desire to pursue peace, also and above all over the last few weeks, by immediately agreeing to a request for a ceasefire and immediately agreeing to be available also for high-level negotiations. I am also saying this to point out that, from the other side, we have instead not seen Russia take any concrete steps forward for the moment. I believe it is worth remembering this, also to debunk a certain narrative that instead claims the Russians were open to peace. 

With Mette, we above all discussed another issue that we are particularly focused on together, which is the migration issue: defence of the European Union’s external borders, the fight against mass illegal immigration, migration management.

As you know, Italy and Denmark, together also with the Netherlands, jointly host and run regular meetings of nations committed to fighting irregular immigration and to the ability to come up with innovative solutions to address migration flows, which are held in the margins of each European Council meeting. This working group has enabled a lot of progress to be made, such as the European list of safe countries, the need to bring forward a number of steps, in particular from the Pact on Migration and Asylum, and the new regulation on returns; we have contributed to providing responses and we are also continuing to work on innovative solutions too, as you know.

This evening we are here, among other things, for the very reason of announcing a new joint initiative that Italy and Denmark have decided to pursue together, which also involves other countries and is addressed to all our partners, setting ourselves what is certainly a particularly ambitious goal. We want to open a political debate on certain European conventions to which we are bound, and on the ability of those conventions today, obviously decades after they were written, to be able to address the major issues of our time, starting precisely from the migration phenomenon.

The letter, which should also be distributed to the press, has already been signed, as well as by ourselves of course, by the leaders of Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the Czech Republic. We are clearly talking about nations whose leaders belong to different political families at European level, as is also the case for myself and Mette, and this shows to some degree how this issue resonates across different sensibilities and latitudes, in a cross-cutting way.

Let’s immediately clear up any potential controversy: the goal we are setting ourselves is not to weaken the conventions, nor to weaken the values they embody. Our goal is to strengthen them, in other words to make them more able to provide responses for the times we are living in and for the problems we are facing and that need to be managed today. So, to make them more relevant, avoiding some of the paradoxes we have seen in recent years.

In my view, the primary example of this regards those cases in which nations, applying the European Convention on Human Rights, have been prevented from taking action to defend the security of their citizens, for example by ordering the expulsion of immigrant citizens who have committed serious crimes. When faced with interpretations of this kind, we need to ask ourselves  whether the texts we are referring to and these interpretations are actually able to respond to citizens’ needs and also the values we want to defend.

This initiative is therefore obviously an initiative that is open to everyone’s contribution and endorsement; it is the launch of a debate. We want to initiate a serious and courageous reflection because, if there is something these times have taught us, it is that we must be able to think outside the box, without fear of addressing problems when we see them. This is clearly the only way to be able to take action and make the tools we have more effective.

I shall stop here and pass the floor to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.