Salvini eyes return to power:

Europe

Rightwing opposition leader Matteo Salvini is telling Italians who are voting in two regions to use their ballots to help his antimigrant party return to national power.

Voting began Sunday morning in Emilia-Romagna, a northern region where the left-wing has held power for decades, and in Calabria, in the south, an area Salvini’s League party once disparaged as unproductive but where it now wants to expand a foothold .

Results, expected early Monday, of the voting for governor and regional legislatures could rock Italy’s squabbling central government in Rome.

Salvini is demanding an early election to end Premier Giuseppe Conte’s coalition government, whose junior partner is the center-left Democrats. If the Democratic Party’s incumbent governor in EmiliaRomagna loses to the League’s candidate on Sunday, the bickering among Conte’s coalition partners could worsen and jeopardize the nearly 5-month-old government’s survival.

The senior party in Conte’s government is the populist 5-Star Movement, which itself is so plagued by infighting and defections that its political leader resigned his post last week.

Salvini in a Facebook post urged Italians as they headed to vote Sunday to “liberate these splendid regions” from the Democrats and “let’s free the entire country.”

Salvini, who in Conte’s previous government took a hard line against immigration, lost his role as deputy premier and interior minister last year and his right-wing party lost its place in government when he yanked his support from Conte in a failed bid for an early election that Salvini had hoped with make him premier. (AP)