Italy’s Trump
Matteo Salvini has become the most powerful politician in Italy by attacking immigration and the EU. What’s his goal?
What position does Salvini hold?
Technically, Salvini is Italy’s joint deputy prime minister. His far-right party, the League, is the junior partner in an unstable coalition government formed in June last year with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. But the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, is an unelected figurehead with no political experience – and Salvini, who is also the interior minister, has become Italy’s most visible and influential politician. Under his leadership, the League has risen meteorically to become the country’s most popular party. It took 17% in last year’s vote, but 34% in May’s European elections – and it is polling even higher today. Salvini is an unabashed nationalist in the same mould as President Trump: his slogan is “Italians first”, and he came to power promising to deport 500,000 illegal immigrants.
What is Salvini’s background?
He is a career politician who dropped out of college in his native Milan in 1993 to become a city councillor for what was then known as the Northern League – which aimed to split wealthier northern Italy from the poorer, Mafia-ridden south, and to form its own independent state, called Padania. The party regarded Rome and southern Italians as the source of corruption and criminality. Salvini long refused to support the Italian football side, and in 1999 refused to shake hands with Italy’s president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, saying: “No thank you, doctor, you do not represent me.” But he was not right-wing; far from it, he joined a small communist faction within the Northern League. His first big break came as a talk radio host on the party’s official station, Radio Padania, where he developed the quick-fire, man-of-thepeople style that he still uses today. He became an MEP in 2004.
And how did he rise to power?
In 2013, Salvini became the Northern League’s leader at a time of crisis: embroiled in its own corruption scandal, it had taken only 4% at that year’s general election. He turned it from a separatist movement into its apparent opposite: a pan-Italian nationalist party, which rebranded itself as “the League”. At rallies, his battle cry was no longer the exploitation of the hard-working north by the rest of the country; instead, he focused particularly on immigration, Roma encampments and seizing back control from the Brussels elite. He aligned himself with Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (the party is alleged to have received illegal Russian funding). The strategy was successful: he is also a senator for Calabria in the south as well as deputy prime minister.
Why was migration a key issue?
From 2014 onwards, Italy was taking in upwards of 120,000 migrants by sea every year. Salvini promised to militarise Italy’s borders and keep the “invaders” out. On taking office last year, his first step as interior minister was to close Italian ports to rescue boats; he also greatly reduced the number of search and rescue operations undertaken. Last month, he called for the prosecution of the captain of a rescue boat, the Sea Watch 3, after it landed 40 migrants on Lampedusa, saying that Italy was “tired of being treated as a dumping ground”. The number of arrivals has dropped from 181,436 in 2016 to 3,350 so far this year, and Salvini has taken the credit – though much of the reduction is in fact down to the previous government, which made a deal with Libya’s leaders to block migration from its shores.
What does Salvini believe in?
Salvini has espoused a range of policies, some free-market (low taxes of 15%), some libertarian (he wants brothels legalised, and gun laws liberalised), some welfarist (he opposes cuts to pension benefits). He rejects left- and right-wing labels, declaring that he has been entrusted “with the role of saving European values”. Salvini opposes same-sex marriage, makes ostentatious displays of his Catholic faith, and claims to stand up for ordinary Italians against the elites and immigrants. His ideology is often described as sovranismo – a form of nationalism that stresses sovereignty and racial identity. It has struck a chord in a nation that has seen its migrant numbers quadruple since the turn of the century to more than five million, while its native population declined and its economy stalled.
What form does his sovranismo take?
As with Trump, he uses racial rhetoric not previously seen among senior politicians. Salvini consistently links immigrants to crime. “We need a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighbourhood by neighbourhood,” he declared last year of Italy’s Roma population. He has ordered local authorities to conduct a “census” of Roma and other travellers’ settlements ahead of a campaign to bulldoze them, declaring that they constitute “a concrete danger to public order and security”. Salvini is also fighting a series of battles with the EU: he describes the bloc as a “gulag”, and the euro as a “crime against mankind”.
How is the anti-EU battle going?
Salvini aims to create a powerful panEuropean group of nationalist parties who will take control of the European parliament. Orbán approvingly described him as a leader of one of the “two camps in Europe” – the nationalist, anti-migrant side facing the liberal globalists led by France’s Emmanuel Macron. But in May’s EU elections, the far-right bloc as a whole fell far short of anticipated gains. Italy’s governing coalition, meanwhile, is in a state of continual confrontation with the EU: it wants to raise public spending, but Italy has sky-high public debt (132% of GDP) and keeps hitting EU spending limits. Critics say this suits Salvini well, as he has done nothing to tackle Italy’s ingrained problems – low growth, high youth unemployment, labyrinthine bureaucracy, corruption – but he turns the resentment they produce into a political weapon.