CLIPS OF ITALIAN Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni speaking have been spread widely online along with false captions claiming that she is saying that the EU migration treaty is “a betrayal of Europeans”.

“GEORGIA [sic] MELONI JUST EXPOSED EVERYTHING,” begins a number of posts on X, Facebook and Instagram, which have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times since being posted 19 January. “The EU Migration Pact is in her words about the ‘Islamization of Europe’.”

Other versions of the video were also shared online with slightly less dramatic descriptions.

“In 2023 Georgia [sic] Meloni Italy’s PM exposed the EU Migration Pact, which she describes as the Islamification of Europe,” reads one post on Facebook.

“Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni publicly criticized the EU Migration Pact,” posts on Instagram and Facebook read.

The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum updates how the EU’s 27 member states and other Schengen countries (such as Switzerland) manage migration and asylum seekers. It will seek to standardise screening of asylum seekers and speed up decisions on their cases, and create a common database on migrants, the European Commission says. 

Controversially, it will also create a “solidarity mechanism” that compels countries where few people seek asylum to help countries with significantly higher numbers of asylum applications.

The pact was adopted by the European Parliament in 2024 and is expected to come into effect this coming June.

The video

The footage in these posts shows Meloni, leader of the anti-immigration Fratelli d’Italia party, speaking to a number of reporters in the Chamber of Deputies, where the lower house of Italy’s Parliament meets. 

When asked if Islam was compatible with Europe, Meloni responds in Italian that there was a “problem of compatibility” between “a certain interpretation of Islamic culture” and European civilization.

A screenshot from the video of Meloni in the Italian lower chamber.

She does use the phrase “Islamification of Europe”, but not in relation to any EU migration pact.

“I believe that these questions need to be addressed,” she said of Saudi Arabia funding Islamic centres in Italy. “which does not mean generalising about Islam, but rather raising the issue that there is an ongoing process of Islamisation of Europe, which is very distant from the values of our civilization.”

It is impossible that Meloni could have been speaking about the EU migration pact because, when the footage was filmed, the pact did not exist.

The footage was filmed in February 2018, and from when Meloni was the leader of her party, but not yet prime minister. The migration pact was not proposed until September 2020, two-and-a-half years after this footage was filmed.

Meloni’s real statements on the migration pact have been mixed.

She expressed a tepid welcome to news the pact was passed and has since said the pact allows aspects of her own migration policy to function. However, she has also said that it doesn’t go far enough.

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