Italy’s Far-Right Firebrand Takes Aim at Europe Matteo Salvini’s profile has skyrocketed on radical rhetoric and an everyman image, but his decisions reflect a more pragmatic politician By Giovanni Legorano
https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-salvini-rises-with-fiery-words-and-pragmatic-decisions-11550066401
Far-right lnterior Minister Matteo Salvini strolled through a crowd of supporters in the main square of this southern Abruzzo town. Leaping on stage to campaign for regional elections, Mr. Salvini took aim at prosecutors who have charged him with kidnapping 177 African migrants last year after he refused to let them disembark from a rescue ship.
“They will have to put me on trial for the next 20 years, because I’ll go on blocking the migrants ships,” Mr. Salvini told the cheering crowd last week. “If they think they are scaring somebody, they chose the wrong person.”
In practice, though, Mr. Salvini is working to preserve his immunity against prosecution as a member of Italy’s Senate. His electioneering effort worked. On Sunday, a far-right candidate for governor backed by Mr. Salvini’s League party won the Abruzzo election.
Mr. Salvini is one of the fastest-rising politicians in a major European Union country. He has turned the League, a moribund regional movement in Italy’s north, into the nation’s most popular political force. His combative anti-immigration rhetoric and down-to-earth persona on social media have tapped anger at Italy’s aloof, ineffectual political establishment in swaths of Italian society.
Next, he says, he wants to take the EU by storm in this May’s European Parliament elections. He has become the central figure in efforts to build a pan-European alliance of nationalists and nativists, including politicians such as France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. It’s unclear, though, whether Europe’s disparate far-right parties can unite, and what their aims would be.
Mr. Salvini, a bearded 45-year-old former journalist, has built his rise on the image of a revolutionary chief, or “the Captain,” as his devoted fans call him. In recent years he has promised to overthrow Rome’s rotten political class, to split Italy’s richer north from the rest of the country, and to take Italy out of the euro.
But a closer look at Mr. Salvini’s decisions in power suggests the open-shirted former college dropout from a gritty working class part of Milan is more of a pragmatist than his rhetoric implies. That has implications for the EU if Mr. Salvini’s rise continues.
Since the League took over Italy’s government last June, in coalition with the antiestablishment 5 Star Movement, Mr. Salvini has dropped his anti-euro rhetoric, watered down his expensive tax and pension promises, and said he wants to reform the EU from within, not to leave or destroy it.
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