The Mattei Plan: why Giorgia Meloni is looking to Africa
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Thursday, April 25, 2024
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Since coming to power, Giorgia Meloni’s government has been remarkably orthodox in its foreign policy.
Key Points:
- Since coming to power, Giorgia Meloni’s government has been remarkably orthodox in its foreign policy.
- And yet on Africa, the prime minister has broken with convention, pointing to the intractability of the right-wing nationalist coalition’s foreign strategy.
The making of the Mattei plan
- To answer such questions, it is worth returning to the first iterations of the Mattei Plan for Africa.
- From then on, this Mattei plan for Africa has undergone much scrutiny and driven Italy’s partners wild as they tried to pin down the plan’s contents.
Venturing beyond the Mediterranean..
- For a long time, Italy has conceptualised its foreign action by referring to the geographical area of the “enlarged Mediterranean” as its core focus.
- In this way, the concept of African policy can be seen as a timely clarification on Italy’s part.
… In the steps of her conservative predecessors
- Back in the days when he was head of government in 2014-2016, Matteo Renzi visited nine African countries, calling to invest in the continent in terms quite comparable to those of the Mattei Plan.
- The idea of a correlation between the fight against immigration and the development of Africa appealed to the Meloni government, which associated it with the Mattei Plan.
- The presence of European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen further added a European dimension to the initiative, a point not lost on Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
Italy’s old ties with Africa
- Italy is strongly rooted in Africa.
- We’ve already mentioned the importance of ENI, the state-owned oil and gas company that plays a pre-eminent role on the continent.
- We therefore observe a remarkable intensity in the relationship between Italian non-governmental actors and Africa.
Addressing the root causes of immigration
- Italy’s African policy initiative thus corresponds to a necessity for Meloni, who has to deal with attempts by Matteo Salvini’s Lega party to outflank her on the right.
- But it also responds to a series of wider influences that reflect the importance and complexity of the relationship between Italy and Africa.
Jean-Pierre Darnis a reçu des financements publics de recherche dans le cadre de l'Académie 5 de l'Université Côte d'Azur / financements IDEX