ROME: With his “Italians first” rallying cry and his tub-thumping against Islam and a “migrant invasion,” Matteo Salvini has rebranded himself and his party, aiming to lead a far-right surge in elections to decide who will govern Italy.
Salvini, who will turn 45 soon after Sunday’s vote, has changed the once secessionist Northern League by removing the location from the party’s name. He has even made moves to gain support in southern Italy, until recently enemy territory for what is now simply named The League.
He has done so by railing against the euro, Brussels and the more than 690,000 migrants who have arrived in Italy since 2013.
On a recent campaign stop at Matera, in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, Salvini promised “order, rules, cleanliness” and lamented that “immigration is out of control.”
“I’m very happy to bring our battle for security, identity and autonomy to 60 million Italians and not anymore just a part of the country,” he said.
Italy has a new complex electoral system in place — a mixture of proportional representation and first-past-the-post — which makes the outcome of this vote particularly difficult to predict.
Salvini opposes same-sex unions and has said he wants to deport foreign criminals and shut down Roma camps.
Born and raised in Milan in 1973, Salvini joined the then-Northern League in 1990, aged just 17, and rose through the ranks of a party that since its inception had insulted poorer southern Italians as “lazy,” and “parasites” draining wealth from the “hard-working” north.
“The tricolor (Italian flag) doesn’t represent me,” Salvini said in 2014. “At home I’ve only got the flag of Lombardy and Milan.”
Back in 2009, he suggested that the Milan metro should have reserved seats for Milanese.
“Within 10 years we’re going to be a minority so we’ll have to reserve seats on the metro like we used to with the disabled and war-wounded,” he said.
Salvini bangs on his anti-immigrant drum to his 640,000 followers on Twitter and more than two million fans on Facebook, where every day he publishes posts, live videos and photos of his meetings — what he gets up to and even what he eats.
While he also likes to show his pride in his two children, 14-year-old Federico and Mirta, five, he is less happy to discuss his complicated love life.
Currently living with glamorous model and TV presenter Elisa Isoardi, his children come from past relationships with ex-wife Fabrizia Ieluzzi, a political journalist, and his previous girlfriend Giulia Martinelli.
Regardless, his strong online presence has helped to create a political persona capable of dragging The League to 13 percent in the polls, roughly five points behind right-wing coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy), which is on course for 18 percent.
That is a huge jump from the four percent the party scored in the 2013 elections, after which Salvini took over the leadership. Berlusconi, whose career has been shadowed by sex scandals and court cases, cannot himself hold elected office because of a fraud conviction.
Sunday’s vote appears unlikely to bring much relief to the country. Prospects are high for weeks, even months, of more political tensions, with backroom party maneuvering quite possibly producing a crisis-prone, short-lived government with limited chances of making headway on Italy’s economic and social issues. Some fear an even more dismal outcome.
The election “will bring Italy in line with the worst tendencies in contemporary European politics,” predicted Cornell University sociology professor Mabel Berezin, who studies populism and fascism in Europe.
Salvini has made conciliatory noises toward the five million foreigners officially residing in Italy, saying they can “consider themselves Italians.”
Nonetheless, he has continued to keep immigration high on the agenda, aligning himself with other figures on the far-right in blaming “an invasion” for the racist gun rampage carried out in Macerata last month. A fascist sympathizer shot and wounded six Africans in revenge for the murder of a young girl, allegedly at the hands of a group of Nigerians.