ROME — The leader of Italy’s Lega party has raged against a double standard whereby Italian citizens are getting “fines and lockdowns” whereas illegal immigrants get “open ports.”
The government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has raised fines to unprecedented levels for those who break the nation’s mask mandate and other new restrictions on personal freedoms, while migrants continue to stream into the country unimpeded on a daily basis, Mr. Salvini complains.
In a Monday morning Facebook post, Salvini notes some 400 migrants arrived from north Africa to the Italian island of Lampedusa on Sunday followed by another three boats with 200 more migrants that landed Monday.
Apparently, the Prime Minister’s health edicts “do not apply” to migrants, Salvini wrote.
The Lega leader has also voiced his opposition to new lockdown measures, insisting that the remedy would be worse than the disease.
“I hope that a new total closure will not be reached because it would be a real economic, social and emotional disaster,” he wrote on Facebook. “Are there any alternatives? Yes, home care because often the remedy risks being worse than the disease.”
In a strange irony, media revealed last Friday that the Tunisian immigrant Brahim Issaoui who stabbed three people to death in the southern French church of Notre Dame while shouting “Allahu akbar” had arrived on the same island of Lampedusa on September 20 before heading north to France where he carried out his attack.
Italian authorities had reportedly put Mr. Issaoui in quarantine and subjected him to a deportation decree before releasing him, after which he made his way to France.
The knife attack occurred at around 9:00am local time in the southern city of Nice. Wielding a six-inch blade, the suspect killed three people, nearly decapitating one, and injured several others.