More than half of the landings in Italy were facilitated by Teutonic organizations. Who are playing a declared political game. But enough is enough.
We are back to discussing non-governmental organizations, clearly. We needed the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosiwho, with Olympic calm and tactical mastery, caught his German friends who wanted the repatriation of the Dubliners off guard and found themselves with the NGO boomerang.
The “Dublinarians” are those migrants who entered the EU from a country of first arrival (Italy) who move elsewhere (Germany) and ask for asylum there; for the Dublin Regulation However, responsibility remains with the first country of entry, so they must be sent back. From 12 June 2026 the new European asylum system (Seca) triggers these repatriations to us again, after three years of suspension obtained from the government. Berlin says the bilateral agreement has expired with Seca; Rome claims the opposite and blocks the returns of those who landed before June 12th.
The Dublin short circuit between electoral calculations and political tide
From these lines written in the language dear to Brussels, we understand how the issue of migration is, for the EU, a bureaucratic affair that will come to blows every time the political tide rises. In Germany, then, the openness of the then Chancellor Angela Merkel still burns, who in 2015 decided not to apply the Dublin regulation to Syrian asylum seekers: “We can do it”. The result was the arrival of over a million people, mostly transiting along the Balkan route (Greece-North Macedonia-Serbia-Hungary/Croatia-Austria). The following year, Germany pushed for the EU-Türkiye agreement in order to close the Balkan route in exchange for 6 billion euros in favor of Erdogan. Who – especially after what happened in Ceuta – will have no problems in pulling the migration lever to settle some open accounts with Europe.
The chancellor Friedrich Merz has reopened the issue of Dubliners in view of the upcoming elections in some Länder, one of which is Saxony-Anhalt, where Afd, on 6 September, risks taking over the first governor. On September 20th it’s the turn of the local parliament in Berlin: here there Cdu of Merz is in difficulty and is focusing heavily on cracking down on irregular migrants. In short, beyond bureaucracy, there is politics which, obviously, uses the desperate, in a game in which everyone seeks the most convenient rhetorical keys to their narrative.
The counter-move of the Interior Ministry and the weight of the Teutonic landings
The sea taxi drivers enter into this score, who Piantedosi put on the negotiating table with a move that they didn’t expect in Berlin. Let’s start with the numbers. From 2022, 53% of landings via NGOs in Italy are headed by German organizations (22,513 out of 42,338, Viminale source), which rises to 27,000 counting ships of other flags but German-owned: four times the contribution of the Italian and Spanish ones combined. This is why the data is useful to the executive in negotiations with the “Dublinists”: do you want to reopen the issue? So we ask for a “compensation mechanism” whereby you take on a share of the landings generated by your NGOs. Otherwise they are all good, from Germany to Spain via France (which closes Ventimiglia). Let’s say that with the Meloni government we are far from the times when Renzi opened the ports and allowed record numbers of migrants to enter.
The Bundestag funds and the red-green axis on naval routes
The budgets of the Teutonic NGOs also tell us another thing, which is politically very important. In 2021 Sea-Watch declared 12 million euros in fundraising, and SOS Humanity 1.8 million, 61% from private donors. However, in recent years the public component has grown: the Bundestag has allocated 8 million euros (2024-2026) for the network United4Rescueand the Scholz government had already provided 790 thousand euros to SOS Humanity. Added to this is a documented plot: the president of United4Rescue, Thies Gundlach, is the companion of the vice-president of the Bundestag Katrin Göring-Eckardt (Greens); the German Evangelical Church is among the main institutional donors. In short, the convergence between the red-green political galaxy and activism at sea certainly exists.
On this ground I also highlight the splendid book created, with Matteo Carnieletto, by the war correspondent Fausto Biloslavo entitled Taliban of hospitality (Signs Publishing), in which he reconstructs in the field – along the Mediterranean and Balkan routes – the network of political, judicial and financier supporters behind the NGOs’ activism, describing episodes of some ships in open insubordination towards the Italian authorities.
Luckily the wind has changed.
