Matteo Salvini

    

“The good times are over,” the right-wing leader said during a pompous military parade, adding, “The free ride is over. It’s time to pack your bags.”

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister as part of the country’s new government, said Monday the country will no longer be “Europe’s refugee camp,” promising tough action to reduce migrant and refugee arrivals and deport a large number of people.

“The good times are over,” the right-wing leader said during a pompous military parade, adding, “The free ride is over. It’s time to pack your bags.” Salvini, head of the right-wing League and a deputy prime minister in the eurosceptic coalition, has made curbing immigration one of agenda’s top items.

During a radio interview, Salvini said Italy “can’t be transformed into a refugee camp,” and vowed to lobby Italy’s partners to obtain more EU assistance to handle the problem.

“It’s clear and obvious that Italy has been abandoned, now we have to see facts,” Salvini added, when asked about comments from German chancellor Angela Merkel that Europe needs a new approach to immigration. Salvini, who wanted to open a migrant detention and deportation center in every Italian region, later tweeted: “either Europe gives us a hand in making our country secure, or we will choose other methods.”

Two days after the government was sworn in on Friday, Salvini headed for Sicily, the main port in which more than 600,000 migrants have arrived on Italy’s shores from North Africa since 2014.

“The party is over,” for migrants in Italy, he said, before visiting a so-called “hotspot” or reception center, in the port of Pozzallo, where boat-borne arrivals are registered, photo-identified and fingerprinted.

Italy’s right-wing League party stated that the vast majority of migrants in Italy have no right to refugee status, Italy cannot afford to help them and by accepting low pay they worsen the working conditions of Italians.

Italy is one of the prime routes into Europe for hundreds of thousands of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, who risk their lives on the arduous journey crossing from North Africa through the Mediterranean route, where thousands have lost their lives at sea. The other main route, from Turkey to Greece, was largely shut down in 2015 after over 1 million people arrived.

After at least 48 migrants died over the weekend after their boat sank off Tunisia’s coast, Salvini stated there was no reason for people to be fleeing Tunisia which was “a free and democratic country.”

Part of the newly formed coalition, 5-Star leader Luigi Di Maio, also a deputy prime minister as well as labor and industry minister, pledged to overhaul the labor reform, known as the “Jobs Act,” of the previous center-left government.

An opinion poll by the Ipsos agency published on Saturday in the Italian daily, Corriere Della Sera showed support for the right-wing League rose to 28.5 percent from 17 percent after the March 4 election. It now stands just 1.6 points behind its coalition partner, the more left-leaning 5-Star Movement, whose support has slipped slightly since it achieved 32.7 percent at the election.