Italy’s maverick anti-migrant minister outshines his rival

rome — He skipped a Cabinet meeting to attend a horse race and took a dip in a Tuscan villa’s swimming pool to show he didn’t fear the Mafia. He leads the junior party in Italy’s populist coalition government, but he acts like he’s the one running the country.

Five weeks after taking national office, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who heads the right-wing League party, is outshining his coalition rival and fellow deputy premier, Luigi Di Maio, whose 5-Star Movement is the Italian Parliament’s biggest party.

Opinion polls indicate that Salvini’s anti-migrant, anti-European Union party has soared in popularity since it placed third in Italy’s

It’s difficult to hide that there are cracks in the coalition. They exist, and they are destined to multiply. Massimo Franco, political analyst

March 4 election. Recent surveys of eligible voters put the League neck-and-neck or even a couple percentage points ahead of the 5-Star Movement.

Salvini’s brash, populist style is an undeniable novelty in Italian politics, and he seems to be relishing his role as a maverick from some of his recent actions.

At the US ambassador’s Fourth of July party in Rome, an annual tobe-seen-at event for international VIPs, a tieless Salvini chowed down on a burger smothered in red onions while gripping the bun in his hands. Other guests daintily tackled their grilled meats with forkand-knife as Italian table etiquette demands.

As Italy’s prime minister and cabinet discussed Di Maio’s first main accomplishment as labor minister, a decree clamping down on “gig’ economy short-term contracts, Salvini was a couple hundred kilometres away in Siena for the running of the Palio, the wild and popular medieval horse race.

The next day, to hammer home that he would be hard on organised crime, Salvini toured a villa in Tuscany that Italian prosecutors had seized from a Cosa Nostra boss, changed into bathing trunks and dove into the villa’s chilly swimming pool while journalists watched and cameras rolled.

“The last (Italian) politician I can remember doing that is Benito Mussolini,” Teneo’s Piccoli ventured, referring to the Fascist dictator who liked to show off his physical fitness. Salvini seems to be permanently campaigning for the League, which he has transformed from a regional party to a national force. —