The News
Europe’s far-right leaders rallied together in Italy Sunday in support of the country’s deputy prime minister, who faces prosecution stemming from his anti-immigration stance.
Matteo Salvini could be sentenced to as many as six years in prison over his 2019 decision to bar a boat carrying more than 100 migrants from docking in Italy. Prosecutors allege he essentially kidnapped the migrants, forcing them to remain at sea despite increasingly bleak conditions on their boat.
Far-right firebrands including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders came to Salvini’s defense, railing Sunday against Brussels and illegal immigration — the latest demonstration of Europe’s widening ideological chasm over immigration.
As a result of fragmentation and polarization, Europe’s “governments have struggled to find common ground on even basic issues, much less some of their most acute problems,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. “Mainstream political leaders now govern in unwieldy coalitions between left- and right-leaning parties, their hands tied on most major policy issues, from migration to the war in Ukraine to their stagnating economies.”