A restaurant dedicated to Giorgia Meloni has opened near an Albanian refugee camp that processes asylum claims for people trying to enter the EU by sea as part of a controversial deal pushed by Italy's far-right prime minister.
Trattoria Meloni, a seafood restaurant in the northern port town of Shenzhen, was opened by restaurateur György Luka, a close friend of Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama.
The restaurant is decorated with 70 portraits of Mr Meloni, whose Italian Brothers party, a neo-fascist-origin political party that leads Italy's ruling coalition, and there are pictures of him smiling, serious and angry, as a child, a teenager and as a politician.
“When cooking, art and politics come together something beautiful happens,” Luca told AFP.
Meloni and Rama first devised the relocation plan last summer, which has been condemned by human rights groups as a violation of international law but has received tacit backing from the EU.
Meloni visited the Shenjin site in June before the restaurant opened. It's one of two centers set to start processing asylum claims in the coming weeks. Under the Italian-funded arrangement, men caught by the Italian coast guard after crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa are taken to Albania.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who met Meloni in Rome last week, drew criticism from human rights groups and Labour politicians for expressing his “great interest” in the migration deal and promising to provide £4 million to support Meloni's controversial crackdown on illegal immigration.
Meloni Once said Italy should repatriate the migrants and then “sink the ships that rescued them”, and has in the past called for a naval blockade of North Africa.
But the centres have been widely welcomed by locals as job creators in Albania's poorer regions.
Luca, the son of a well-known Albanian actor and a former actor himself, said he was charmed by Meloni's personality, calling her “extraordinary.”
He said he hopes she will return to taste his food and admire her portraits, which adorn every inch of the restaurant's walls.
All these portraits were painted by the famous Albanian artist Heriton Hariti.
“I think Meloni is a very interesting and strong personality and even though her political beliefs are not my own, they do not get in the way of my passionate work,” Harrity told AFP.
“Did he need permission to paint her portrait?” he added. “Did Andy Warhol need permission to paint Marilyn Monroe? In postmodernism, it's allowed, and I think I succeeded with Meloni.”
Meloni was also a key figure in a deal signed between the EU and Tunisia in July 2023 that sees the EU stop migrant boats from leaving the country and pay millions of euros to the North African country to invest in business and education, all aimed at deterring migration.
While the policy had little initial success, the agreement, along with one first signed by Italy in 2017 to equip and train the Libyan coast guard to intercept migrants, is now credited with reducing the influx.
The deal with Libya will effectively send people back to detention centres where they will face torture and other ill-treatment. Shocking abuses of migrants in Tunisia were reported by The Guardian last week.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
