Vienna, Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and his German and Austrian counterparts, Hoorst Seehofer and Herbert Kickl will meet in Innsbruck next week to look at ways “to close down Mediterranean migration”, Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Thursday.
The meeting is expected to take place in the run-up to a meeting of European Union interior ministers in Innsbruck on July 12-13.
Kurz made the announcement after a meeting with Seehofer, who earlier this week cut a last-ditch deal with Chancellor Angela Merkel to detain asylum-seekers at Germany’s border with Austria and send them back to the EU countries they first arrived in.
Kurz, a right-wing conservative who is in coalition with his country’s far-right party, has called for the formation of an anti-migration “axis of the willing” with Germany and Italy, to push for more restrictive border policies at an EU level.