EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s visit to Lampedusa at the weekend – at the invitation of Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – is a clear sign that the Euro establishment has abandoned its Pontius Pilate policy on the illegal migrant emergency in the central Mediterranean.

In the past week, around 12,000 migrants have arrived in several hundred small boats on the tiny Italian island that lies between North Africa and Sicily. They join the 129,869 migrants who have already reached Italy by sea this year – double the number last year over the same period. This year’s total is likely to exceed the 2016 record of 181,436.

Von der Leyen dropped everything to come to Lampedusa. ‘We will decide who comes to Europe, not the people traffickers!’ she said.

It was a ‘highly symbolic’ moment, Meloni argued at a press conference in Rome on Monday. It shows the Euro establishment at last accepts what she told me when I interviewed her last year and what she has been urging it to do ever since. That is: the only way to solve the illegal migrant crisis in the Mediterranean is to stop the boats at source with cash and force, and to set up hot-spots in North Africa to process asylum claims, while at the same time increasing legal migrant quotas.

In Lampedusa, von der Leyen announced a ten point EU emergency plan to stop illegal migrants setting off from North Africa for Italy. The plan advocates, among other things, the seizure and destruction of the boats. And it talks of a naval taskforce as well.

Nearly three quarters of Italians (71 per cent) support the creation of such an EU naval task force to stop illegal migrants entering Italy, according to an opinion poll this week for the prime time political show Porta a Porta.

On Monday, Meloni told a press conference in Rome: ‘I wonder if they will all now accuse President von der Leyen, as they have done to me, of wanting to sink boats with migrants on board.’ By ‘they’ she meant not just her political opponents but also the mainstream media.

The situation in Lampedusa – where the Spiaggia dei Conigli (rabbit beach) is one of TripAdvisor’s ten most beautiful beaches in the world – has been described as ‘apocalyptic’ by the island’s priest Don Carmelo Rizzo. The island’s inhabitants are at their wits end. On Sunday they blocked the motorcade carrying von der Leyen and Meloni from the airport to the town. Meloni got out of her limousine and spoke to the crowd. That was brave. They let her through.

Most of the migrants who arrived last week in Lampedusa have now been ferried to so-called welcome centres in Sicily, as there is only space in Lampedusa for 400. From there, many will simply disappear, and a fair few will find a way to reach countries in northern Europe, including Britain, where welfare and work are much easier to get.

The traditional EU line has been to leave Italy to its own border. That has failed. Only Europe can help Italy and thus itself. And it can do so only in North Africa.

As von der Leyen said: ‘Italy can count on the EU… The challenge of illegal immigration is a European challenge that requires a European response.’

We shall see if von der Leyen’s tough words translate into tough action. But her presence in Lampedusa at such short notice demonstrates Meloni’s increasing influence at the heart of Europe one year after coming to power.

Meloni has ensured that EU leaders will discuss at the next European Council meeting in October the creation of a naval task force to stop the migrant boats setting off from Tunisia – which has this year become the main departure point in place of Libya.

Unlike the EU’s Operation Sophia that ran from 2015-20 the mission of this new task force would not be to rescue migrants and take them to Italy, but to rescue them and take them back to Tunisia and Libya.

The Euro left of course will fight tooth and nail to scupper Meloni’s plan for this. As Meloni told Monday’s press conference: ‘In fact, the aim of the European left is to make mass illegal immigration inevitable.’ She had in mind, she said, above all the EU Commission’s Foreign Affairs Minister Josep Borrell of the Spanish socialist party who has been notably absent during this year’s negotiations about the migrant crisis.

Yet the Euro left’s only concrete proposal on illegal migrants is that they be redistributed among member states once in Europe. Even if that were a solution – which obviously it is not – successive EU agreements designed to achieve it have proved useless. When push comes to shove no EU country wants to accept more migrants.

France meanwhile sends back to Italy at the frontier on the Riviera any illegal migrants caught coming across – about 100 a day. But in a telephone conversation with Meloni on Sunday, Macron confirmed that while he will continue to send migrants back to Italy, he will also back EU moves to block them departing from North Africa. On Monday French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin met his Italian counterpart Matteo Piantedosi in Rome to agree the same.

The fact that the EU Commission, led by von der Leyen, should support Meloni’s tough line in the face of outright hostility from the Euro left – whose placemen are everywhere in the EU’s institutions – is proof of the gravity of the situation. And it is a reflection of the current success of the right throughout Europe, where it has gained, or is set to gain, power in numerous member states.

Most of the migrants crossing the Mediterranean are men, regardless of how it might seem from the news coverage, which often focuses on migrant women and babies. A huge number of these men are from sub-Saharan West Africa, or else Tunisia and Egypt, which are not war zones. Despite this, once inside Italy, and thus Europe, it is virtually impossible to deport anyone. Italy, where there are thought to be about half a million illegal migrants, actually deports only about 4,000 a year.

Meloni’s opponents say that this year’s record numbers of migrants are proof that she has failed to honour her elaection pledge to stop the boats. That’s absurd given that if they were in power they would be doing far less. But in any case there would have been far more migrants if Meloni were not Prime Minister.

Thanks largely to her efforts, the EU signed a deal in July with the Tunisian dictator Kais Saied, in the presence of von der Leyen, to pay Tunisia €105 million to stop migrant boat departures. The EU also agreed to pay €150 million as the first tranche of a €1 billion aid and investment package. The deal is similar to the €6 billion deal the EU struck with Turkey in 2016 to stop migrant departures for Greece.

Italy already has a deal with Libya, struck in 2016, by which it equips and trains the Libyan coastguard to stop and take back migrant boats. In 2022, it stopped and returned to Libya boats carrying nearly 25,000 migrants.

Initially, this summer the migrant flow from Tunisia to Italy slowed down noticeably. The Tunisian coastguard stopped and returned to Tunisia boats headed for Italy containing 40,000 migrants. On the night of 14-15 August alone they stopped 18 boats with 630 migrants on board.

But the EU has yet to hand over the agreed €105 million. Payment is being held up by red tape and obstructionism by the Socialists in Brussels within the Commission and the parliament.

Last week, as a result, it seems clear, the Tunisian coastguard downed tools.

Only Europe can stop the illegal migrants. The question is: does it want to?