Italy doubled down Friday on its new tough stance against migrants, warning the migration crisis could put the bloc’s survival at stake. Italy’s three-week-old populist government is threatening to seize rescue ships or bar them from its ports.

“We cannot take in one more person,” hardline Interior Minister Matteo Salvini told the German weekly Der Spiegel.

“On the contrary: we want to send away a few.” Just two days before the informal talks called by Berlin, Salvini, who is also the country’s deputy prime minister, warned that nothing less than the EU’s future survival was at stake.

“Within a year it will be decided whether there will still be a united Europe or not,” Salvini said.

Upcoming EU budget talks, as well as European Parliament elections in 2019 would each act as a litmus test for “whether the whole thing has become meaningless,” he said.