On Monday, 10 August, Giorgia Meloni and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen posted a joint statement on social media — "Dear all, we know that many will wonder about our collaboration" — staking out, as the only two women currently leading a government in the European Union, a hard line on immigration, calling for return centres in third countries and invoking the defence of Europe's "Christian cultural heritage."

There is something deeply toxic, for anyone who identifies with Europe's liberal-progressive, pro-European camp, in Frederiksen's signature beneath this letter. It lends further credibility to a case built on partial and at times false claims, and to a divisive, identity-driven language that the left had always recognised as its adversary. In Italy the practical effect is twofold: it once again crowds out the climate emergency, which Meloni has never addressed in three years of government, along with the countless other problems she leaves unattended; and it winks — lending a degree of legitimacy — at a far more extreme version of this same "Christian" defence of Europe: the manifesto of the new far-right party Futuro Nazionale, published by its leader, former General Vannacci, which demands twenty years of residency and "assimilation into Greek, Roman and Christian civilisation" as conditions for Italian citizenship, describing the presence of other peoples as "a threat to the existence of a social identity." It is, at the end of the day, the same approach as the letter, carried naturally to its most extreme conclusions. This, too, is an unforgivable concession for anyone who calls themselves progressive: opening, through language that appears moderate, the space in which a programme fundamentally at odds with European values becomes debatable rather than unacceptable.

Frederiksen appears to be operating on a specific conviction: that draining votes from the right, at home, requires embracing even its more culturally contentious positions. In Denmark the strategy has worked electorally — she is now in her third term, while the far-right Danish People's Party has been in decline since its 2015 peak — and it stirs little domestic debate, since the Danish left shifted toward restrictive migration positions a decade ago. Two days after signing the letter, she had already moved from principle to practice: addressing the Folketing, she said Denmark stood ready to tighten border controls and, "as a last resort," to close them entirely should a new wave of migration move through Europe — confirmation that the letter was not a communication exercise but the opening move of an escalation already planned, even though there is no sign of any such wave reaching Europe, let alone Denmark.

Why does she lean so heavily on security as an existential theme? Denmark's own data offer a telling answer. The country ranks among the OECD's most secure, yet 2022 was dubbed at home the "tryghedsvalg" — the security election — fought precisely over an everyday sense of insecurity despite objective conditions among the best in the world. It is a lever that has always worked for Frederiksen domestically, regardless of the underlying data. She is now exporting it into a European context, seemingly indifferent to what it does there: what in Denmark is a settled electoral calculation becomes, elsewhere, the legitimisation of an entire political camp — one that undermines the European project at its foundations, and her own side's ability to offer any alternative to the drift toward the far right.

"We have pursued a rigorous migration policy, both in our own nations and in Europe," the two leaders write. That word is worth pausing on, because rigour is not the same as harshness: it means managing the whole cycle — preventing irregular status through procedures that actually work, offering legal channels that meet real labour demand, cooperating with third countries without outsourcing violence, and naturally also managing borders and returns. On concrete results, in Italy at least, the picture is bleak: forced returns remain below pre-pandemic levels; only 20 per cent of expulsion orders result in an actual removal; the Albania model costs €120 million a year to process 527 people against a promised capacity of 36,000; and in Italy's pre-removal detention centres (CPRs), people are confined for months with nothing to do, in facilities that meanwhile divert funds from already scarce and sporadic integration policies: the very funds that would be needed to teach language, recognise professional qualifications, and support access to housing and work go unallocated, while money is spent containing a few hundred people in an administrative and human limbo. It is the exact opposite of the "rigour" being claimed: heavy spending to contain a few, while cutting what would be needed to include the many.

The letter attributes three effects to "illegal immigration": rising crime, growing pressure on public services, erosion of public trust. On crime, the real correlation is with irregular status, not with immigration as such: a Bocconi University study, using Romania and Bulgaria's 2007 EU accession as a natural experiment, shows that it is legal status, not national origin, that explains why reoffending among the same individuals halved once they gained legal access to the labour market. On public services, the calculation is more complicated than the letter implies: irregular status forecloses access to most rights (no vote, no pension accrual, only emergency healthcare), while it is often the employers who exploit undeclared labour, without paying social contributions, who benefit — a cost that falls on the fiscal system through a different channel, not through public services.

On Denmark's allegedly eroded trust, we have already spoken. As for Italy, perceived insecurity is at a historic low — 6.4 per cent in 2023, against 19.4 per cent in 2015 — a figure that makes the opposite of the letter's premise more plausible: that a repeated narrative, rather than any real deterioration in conditions, is what helps produce perceived insecurity.

The underlying problems are real, of course: much of the social tension around immigration stems from a genuine scarcity of resources. Housing is the clearest example: in Milan, 23,000 families sit on the waiting list for public housing while 8,000 units remain vacant for years, often derelict and never renovated. This is where the so-called "war among the poor" is generated — not because foreigners "steal" housing from Italians, but because decades of neglect of public housing have left a supply far below demand, Italian and foreign alike. Framing it as an immigration problem, rather than one of missing public investment, is another way rhetoric diverts attention from the real causes.

On the link between immigration and sexual violence — also invoked by Frederiksen in her annual press conference in January 2026, where she said, in substance, that those fleeing war to reach "the best country in the world" end up assaulting women and girls, that "the victim becomes the perpetrator" — Denmark's own official data tell a more complicated story. The report "Indvandrere i Danmark 2025," published by Statistics Denmark, shows in its analysis of crime rates by country of origin that income, education and employment status explain most of the variation between population groups, rather than national origin itself. It is the same Bocconi finding cited above, now applied to the data of Frederiksen's own country: generalising from individual cases, however serious, to a collective claim about refugee and migrant behaviour is a leap her own government's data do not support.

The decline in irregular crossings into the EU (down 26 per cent in 2025, a further 37 per cent in the first half of 2026) is claimed by the letter as the result of the hard line. But besides the fact that, in parallel, deaths at sea rose dramatically, this decrease is in fact tied to concrete operational agreements with Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania — agreements that hand increasingly authoritarian regimes, ever less capable of meeting their own citizens' needs, an effective instrument of pressure over Europe. The human cost of these agreements is documented: people abandoned in the desert along the Malian border, detention in Libyan facilities known for systemic abuse, handovers to regimes that repress dissent — while on the other side, the European side, the response amounts to a de facto restriction of the right to asylum for those who, under such conditions, still manage to arrive. The Ceuta crisis, with roughly 70,000 people fleeing Morocco at risk to their lives within days, shows that externalisation does not resolve the causes of departure: it merely displaces them, shifting the human cost onto those with the least bargaining power in the chain.

Alternatives exist: the EU's Talent Partnerships, Italy's THAMM Plus programme with Morocco and Tunisia — but they remain marginal, not for lack of a working model, but for lack of financial support. THAMM Plus, launched in 2024 and funded through the EU Trust Fund for Africa, aims to bring 500 Moroccan and 2,000 Tunisian workers to Italy over three years; so far 580 have been trained and 469 are ready for employment. The overall funding figures are not published transparently — a problem in itself — but the scale comparison is telling regardless: a few thousand people over three years, against a shortfall Unioncamere estimates at nearly 1.3 million hard-to-fill job openings in Italy in the first half of 2026 alone.

The two leaders give the impression that irregular migrants are, by necessity, a category of people who break the law by choice. In Italy at least, irregular status is more often produced than chosen — and the clearest case is the Decreto Flussi, the mechanism meant to regulate legal labour migration, which in 2025 succeeded in only 7.9 per cent of cases. The mechanism deserves spelling out: an employer secures clearance, but the consular visa, for applicants from Pakistan, Bangladesh or Morocco, can take over a year; the job offer often no longer exists by then, or the employer hires the person anyway without waiting for the process to conclude; if the employment relationship ends before the residence permit is finalised, that person is left without valid status — not for breaking a rule, but because bureaucratic time outlasted the time of their actual duration. Italy faces a structural mismatch between labour supply and demand, estimated by Unioncamere and CNEL at €44 billion a year, and bureaucratic inefficiency, together with the closure of legal entry channels, is among the causes — though not the only one — of that gap.

There is a corollary that makes the rhetoric of "rigour" even more fragile: what is now unfolding with Germany. While Rome raises its voice against Madrid over Schengen, Berlin has reopened the file on "Dublin transfers" — asylum seekers who passed through Italy before reaching Germany — announcing that transfers would resume from 19 August. At issue is how to read a December 2025 agreement between the two countries: Berlin argues that transfers were meant to resume from 12 June 2026, when the new Migration and Asylum Pact took effect, applying even to those who had reached Germany before that date but whose asylum claims were still pending. Rome argues instead that cases predating 12 June are "zeroed out" — no longer subject to transfer. Germany's reading appears more consistent with the underlying logic of the Dublin regulation itself, which ties responsibility to the country of first entry regardless of when a person later moved on; Italy's looks more like a defensive line built after the fact. In the first half of 2026 alone, 11,745 such cases were already registered in Germany — a rising number that risks becoming a boomerang for Rome, and the clearest proof yet that the hard line serves no one, least of all whoever deploys it first: there is always someone willing to be harder still.

As for the European Convention on Human Rights: the letter claims a victory already secured, referring to the Chisinau Declaration of May 2026, in which 46 Council of Europe member states asked the Court to apply Articles 3 and 8 less restrictively to convicted foreign nationals. It is too early to say whether this will have a practical effect: it is a political declaration inviting a revision of case law, not yet a ruling that has changed it. Among the European values the two leaders claim to defend, there is, in any case, no endorsement of expelling people without procedural guarantees. Yet in Italy this is already happening, in precisely the places where the Convention is meant to serve as a safeguard: Italy's pre-removal detention centres (CPRs) were condemned in 2016 for detention without adequate guarantees (the Khlaifia ruling), where today only 13.7 per cent of releases from the Ponte Galeria facility correspond to an actual removal. Italian prisons fall under this same kind of structural condemnation. In 2013 the Court found their overcrowding unlawful (the Torreggiani ruling); in 2025 alone, 6,539 complaints of inhuman treatment were upheld. This affects the whole prison population, Italian citizens included. Italy, in other words, invokes the Convention as an external constraint that should be loosened, while at home it fails to meet the minimum standards the Convention already requires, for foreign nationals and Italian citizens alike.

The problem the letter taps into — genuine difficulties of management, pressure on certain communities, a demand for security — is real and needs addressing. But the solutions on offer make it worse, while models that actually work remain sidelined: Italy's SAI system of community-based reception, for example, which the 2026 ANCI report confirms is functioning and replicable at European scale. This is where a progressive response should begin — not by chasing the right's language in the illusory hope of draining its support, but by showing that alternative models genuinely work. And one final point: that it was the only two women leading a government in the European Union who signed the Ceuta letter should be, for the rest of Europe's progressive female leadership, one more reason to respond with equal visibility — not an embarrassment to watch in silence.