Who is Matteo Salvini?
The far-right leader of the antiimmigrant League party isn’t Italy’s prime minister, but he is nonetheless the country’s most powerful politician. He entered the government in 2018, when the League and the antiestablishment Five Star Movement trounced the traditional parties of the Left and the Right and formed a populist coalition with a figurehead prime minister. Salvini, 46, became deputy prime minister and interior minister, in charge of the police and the borders. He relishes the role of top cop and often wears a police or firefighter’s uniform at press conferences. A college dropout, he shaped his views in his first job, as a journalist with Radio Padania, where Italians called in to complain about immigration and the tyranny of European Union bureaucrats in Brussels. Though divorced and the father of a child born out of wedlock, he casts himself as the defender of family values and traditional morality. He’s an unabashed nationalist in the same mold as President Trump. “No longer would the European elites silence the Italian citizens,” wrote Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, in Salvini’s bio for Time’s Most Influential People of 2019. “Matteo Salvini resurrected Italy’s national pride.” Middle East. Professional smugglers pack migrants into makeshift boats in Libya and point them toward Lampedusa, an Italian island just 70 miles from Africa. Many of the boats sink on the way, and thousands of people drown every year. For years— long before the 2015 migrant surge— the Italian navy had been rescuing these people and pleading vainly for the EU to help resettle them. In 2017—before Salvini took office— Italy changed course and struck deals with the Libyan tribal chieftains to prevent migrants from leaving that country. The change was dramatic: Sea arrivals plummeted from a peak of 180,000 in 2016 to fewer than 24,000 last year. Still, Salvini closed Italian ports to rescue boats and made it much harder to claim asylum. Last week, one such boat, the Sea-Watch 3, defied Italy’s orders and docked at Lampedusa with 40 migrants aboard. A furious Salvini vowed to prosecute the captain. Italy, he said, is “tired of being treated as a dumping ground.”