Italy has felt the possible appointment of a Spaniard to a post that it had already assumed would be its own, the representative of the Atlantic organisation for relations with the countries of the southern Mediterranean, as a blow to the blow of the blow. On Friday, the appointment of the post to the Spanish diplomat Javier Colomina was leaked and the reaction of Giorgia Meloni’s government has been furious. Its permanent representative to NATO, Marco Peronaci, has sent a letter to the secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, in which he indicates that “the Italian authorities have learned of the timing of the decision with great surprise and disappointment” and underlines “the absence of adequate consultation with the allies.” According to the newspaper The Fogwhich published the letter, Italy learned the news on Wednesday.
The Meloni administration considers the decision a personal initiative by Stoltenberg, which is also controversial because he will leave office on October 31 and will be replaced by the Dutchman Mark Rutte. Along the same lines, Italy has opposed six other appointments also made at the last minute. For this reason, it believes that Colomina’s choice only has provisional value and that the issue remains open until it is definitively closed in November, with the new general secretary, with whom Meloni has already agreed to take over the post. Hours later, NATO assured, to cool the controversy in the face of Italian protests, that the appointment will be announced “in due time.”
Javier Colomina has been NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy since 2021 and the Secretary General’s Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia. Between 2017 and 2021, he had been Deputy Permanent Representative at the Spanish Embassy to this organization. Before that, he had worked at the Spanish embassies in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Damascus and at the UN in New York. The election of Colomina means that NATO does not create a new post ad hocbut rather entrusts a senior official of the organisation with the task of implementing the Southern Neighbourhood Action Plan approved at the recent summit in Washington, which also means budgetary savings.
Faced with Italy’s protests, the Spanish Foreign Ministry is very cautious. “While awaiting official communication, the Foreign Ministry very positively values the creation of the position of the Secretary General’s representative for the southern neighbourhood, as well as the important progress made at the Washington meeting, which is in line with the position expressed by Spain at the previous NATO summits in Madrid and Vilnius,” official sources simply state. Diplomatic circles do not rule out the possibility that Meloni’s manoeuvre is intended to stop the appointment of the Spanish diplomat, which was taken for granted, reports Miguel Gonzalez.
Immigration from Africa
For the Italian prime minister, who has been selling her diplomatic achievement as a done deal since the NATO summit in Washington last week, this position has a strong strategic and symbolic value. Immigration from African Mediterranean countries is one of her government’s main priorities and it is precisely on this point that she boasts of having managed to influence EU decisions in the last legislature, despite the cordon sanitaire that weighs on the far right, with her commitment to more severe measures and changing the strategy to deal with the phenomenon. For example, with the construction and opening in Albania of reception centres to deport migrants rescued at sea by Italy, which will begin to operate after the summer. Also this week Meloni has just returned from Libya, which, by virtue of a controversial migration agreement with Italy, sponsored by the EU and renewed since 2017, receives funding to intercept migrant boats, who are sent to detention centres where human rights organisations denounce torture and inhuman conditions. Last January, Meloni also presented the so-called Mattei Plan, an ambitious cooperation project with nine African countries.
Knowing what’s happening outside means understanding what’s going to happen inside, so don’t miss anything.
KEEP READING
In this operation to crown itself as the great guardian of the Mediterranean that is finally solving the problem of immigration, the NATO position was the cherry on top that was missing, and it was counting on it. Hence its indignation. In fact, the protest letter insists that “in order to be effective, NATO’s policy towards the south needs a renewed attitude, not a change of name.” This is what Meloni has been telling the other leaders both at the summit of the military organization and at the G-7 summit held in Italy last month. That is why he has taken it almost as a personal affront, as if everything that had been said had been for nothing.
Moreover, this controversy has come at a time of weakness for the leader of the Brothers of Italy, who has seen how the EU cordon sanitaire remained in force for her and she was left out of the power-sharing of the new European Commission. On Thursday, she voted against the re-election of Ursula von der Leyen, aligning herself with the rest of the far-right parties and it is the first time in the history of the EU that Italy, a founding country of the EU and the third largest economy on the continent, has voted against the parliamentary majority. Even the Five Star Movement (M5S), born anti-system, supported Von der Leyen in 2019, when she was president of the Italian government.
The opposition in Italy is now clamouring for the risk of the country being relegated to a marginal role. Moreover, on the military level, there is also the weight of having within the Government of Rome a partner like the League, openly allied to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and aligned with the Hungarian Viktor Orbán in the new European far-right group, the third in the European Parliament, Patriots of Europe. And just in this debate, the setback has come in NATO. The appointment of the Spanish diplomat, for the Government of Italy, has been so premature and out of place that it claims that it has not even had time yet to decide who its candidate is, since no name is known, although it was already assumed that the post was his.
Follow all the international information at Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.