Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is confident that next year, when the new European Asylum and Migration Pact enters into force, Italy's migrant repatriation centers in Albania "will work like they should have worked from the beginning."

Meloni was speaking at the end of the first summit with her Albanian counterpart Edi Rama in the Italian capital.

Both leaders stood by their decision two years ago to create the mechanism for what has become known as the 'Albania model'.

"The responsibility is not mine. We will end up doing two years later exactly what we could have done two years before. I think that everyone will take responsibility for their own actions," the Italian prime minister added.

"Not everyone has understood the validity of the model" of the Italy-Albania Memorandum of Understanding on migrants, she said at the end of the summit while thanking the Albanian prime minister and his government.

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'The potential to change the paradigm on migration management'

"Many people worked to slow it down or block it entirely. However, we are determined to move forward with it, since it is a mechanism that has the potential to change the paradigm on migration management."

The Albanian government, Meloni added, "showed that Albania already behaves like an EU member state."

Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama said that he would do it again "a hundred times" and, on whether he would suggest to other countries to do the same, added that "with Italy, as I said before, I would do it a hundred times over. With other countries? Never."

"Italy can ask us anything it wants and we are always ready to say yes, since we feel like we are an integral part of this country," he added.

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'Revolutionary accord envied by many other countries'

Among the "many" things that Meloni claims have hindered the functioning of the centers in Albania were the halts to repatriations by Italian courts that deemed such countries as "Bangladesh and Tunisia, unsafe, which are instead on the EU list" for safe countries as designated by the EU Commission.

The Italian prime minister said that those who "did not understand the validity" of the Albania model as a "revolutionary initiative for migration management" will have to admit their mistake, while "some European nations" instead understood and "have long tried to join" the MoU.

However, some in the Italian opposition want to underline that they see the subject in a very different way.

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Italian opposition calls Albania centers 'a failure'

Meloni "says that [the issues with the centers in] Albania are not her fault. She says that everyone should take responsibility for their actions. Everyone except for her, since the fault of the fact that they failed, and that they built inhuman and illegal centers that also remained empty is that of the prime minister, who -- every once in a while, after three years of governing -- could take responsibility for her actions," said Democratic Party (PD) secretary Elly Schlein.

"She [Meloni] said that they will work and the reality is that they still do not work. They threw away 800 million [euros] of Italian public money to create empty prisons. They deployed security forces there when across all of Italy there are personnel gaps, simply in order to create propaganda hurting the most fragile."

"For the first time Meloni admits that we lost two years in Albania, whereas she had said that they would work. No, these centers are not working. Over a billon euros were wasted. She should look into the mirror because it is her fault. And then she blamed the Italian Court of Cassation, the Court of Justice," commented the Five Star Movement chairman Giuseppe Conte.

In the eyes of the secretary of +Europa, Riccardo Magi, Meloni behaves as if she were a "third-rate comedian, giving the paying public once again the joke that 'it will work' in relation to the centers in Albania. This is a laughable act for which Italians are paying hundreds of millions of euros and that has been judged illegal by courts of all levels and degrees and that thus far have hosted only a handful of migrants."

"Shengjin has been shuttered and even if the new European pact is approved, it will not be possible to make centers like those in Albanian managed by Italy [work]," he added. "Meloni should admit to the failure of these centers."

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