Italy will maintain border controls with Spain for another fifteen days. The Interior Minister, Matteo Piantedosi, decided this Tuesday to again extend the partial suspension of Schengen, which affects air and sea borders between the two countries, and communicated the measure to the European Commission and the other EU Interior Ministers. Almost immediately, the Spanish Interior Ministry announced that it would also maintain the same measure for travelers coming from Italy by air and sea.
The Giorgia Meloni government thus maintains the measure introduced last August 1, after the massive arrival of migrants to Ceuta from Morocco, which had already been extended once at the end of August. The Italian government considers that there are still “significant risks to internal security,” as well as a possible threat linked to potential terrorist infiltrations.
The decision comes despite the fact that in recent weeks Rome had acknowledged the efforts made by Spain and the European Union to normalize the situation. Piantedosi himself had assured that no one was interested in maintaining controls “one day longer than necessary” and had opened the door to lifting them if the measures adopted by Madrid and Brussels proved effective. But his position ended up clashing with Meloni’s more intransigent line, who favors maintaining the controls.
The controls have been a source of tension from the start between the governments of Meloni and Pedro Sánchez. Spain responded to the Italian decision by reinstating, reciprocally, controls on passengers coming from Italy. Now Madrid’s response to the new Italian extension is awaited, and it is most likely that the Spanish government will also decide to extend its controls for another fifteen days.
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According to the latest data provided by the Italian Interior Ministry, since the introduction of the controls more than 180,000 people have been identified and several rejections at the border and arrests have occurred. However, there is no record that any of the detained persons had arrived in Italy from Ceuta, whose situation was precisely the argument that led the Italian government to introduce the controls at the beginning of August.
Rome argues that the measure has also had a deterrent effect and maintains that its goal remains to return to normality as soon as the security reasons that motivated its introduction disappear.
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