Only a few years ago, he was the leader of a small third party of regionalists. Yet today, Interior Minister of Italy, Matteo Salvini, is poised to become prime minister of Italy. What exactly is going on in Italy?
The Path to Power
The Lega Nord (Northern League in English) was officially formed as a party in 1991, as an advocate of separatism for Northern Italy.
The party consistently got votes in Northern Italy, but due to its nature as a regionalist party, it had a fairly low ceiling on support. In all of its elections between its foundation and 2013, the party only broke double-digit results once, and even then, barely getting over 10% of the vote. However, everything would change with the ascension of Matteo Salvini to the Federal Secretary of the party.
While the party had always been on the right side of the political spectrum, Salvini would reorient them from a mainly separatist party to a proper right-wing populist party.
As early as 2014, before right-wing populism had hit the scene in Europe, Salvini was working with France’s National Front and the Dutch Party for Freedom. As the migrant wave hit Europe in 2015, Salvini wasted no time identifying the party as hardliners against immigration.
As the party entered the campaign for the 2018 election, Salvini announced a major branding change, removing the Nord part of the name Lega Nord, identifying The Lega as a party for all of Italy instead of just the North.
The 2018 Election
As a multi-party system, Italy relies on coalitions for its elections. The center-right coalition included The Lega, with Forza Italia (Silvio Berlusconi’s party), and Fratelli d’Itallia, a smaller national conservative party.
The three parties had made a deal: whichever gained the most votes in the election would set the agenda for the whole coalition.
On the other side from the center-right coalition was the ruling center-left coalition, led by the Partito Democratico. Apart from the two coalitions was the Five Star Movement, a newly founded populist party.
The Lega, who campaigned with far-right positions on immigration, culture, and economics and managed to score a stunning upset in the election. They outperformed their polls significantly and managed to score more votes than Forza Italia, suddenly putting them in charge of the center-right coalition.
The Five Star Movement came in second a standalone party, with the center-left coming in third.
In Government
Although the center-right came in first, they didn’t quite make the 40% of the vote needed to form a government, leading to a complex game of political dealing.
Eventually, the Lega would abandon their coalition and form a government alone with the Five Star Movement, making a government out of two anti-establishment populist parties that had both never been in charge of a government before.
Giuseppe Conte, a fairly unknown politician and politically independent, would become the prime minister. However, Salvini and Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the Five Star Movement, would be the real policy setters of the new government as co-deputy prime ministers.
Essentially, the deal had the Lega setting the immigration agenda, while the Five Star Movement focused on the economy. As such, Salvini would also act as Interior Minister while Di Maio would act as Economic Minister.
Salvini, as the Interior Minister, increased deportations of illegal migrants and moved to close down Italian ports to human traffickers who brought migrants across the Mediterranean.
Di Maio, on the other hand, did very little to enact his party’s agenda.
As a result, The Lega surged in the polls, with the party alone reaching the upper 30’s, close to the 40 percent needed to form a government. Meanwhile, the Five Star movement slumped to the upper teens from the 32 percent they got in the 2018 election.
Sensing this weakness, Salvini announced a no-confidence vote in the government of Mr. Conte with the goal of creating fresh elections this fall. While this has currently created chaos in the Italian political scene, it is quite likely that this will result in a snap election.
Where Salvini Goes from Here
If Salvini’s goal for fresh elections becomes a reality, it is quite likely that he will become Italy’s next prime minister. His party alone is almost at the cutoff to form a government; the center-right coalition is polling at an absolute majority in some polls, or just under that.
Victory would see a far-right populist government right in the heart of Western Europe, and it could be a game-changer for the movement worldwide.
One also can’t ignore how he has had affected the EU — while he began as strongly anti-Europe, as those positions have become less popular due to the Brexit chaos, he has changed his strategy to try to work within the EU and to reform it.
This June, he helped create the group Identity and Democracy in the European Parliament, a far-right coalition of parties that earned 10 percent of the vote in this spring’s European Parliamentary elections.
However it turns out, there is no denying that Salvini has had a profound influence on the European wave of right-wing populism, and is poised to do even more to strengthen the movement.
Nicholas Hill is a writer and contributor to CitizenSource, with a focus on world politics, immigration, and nationalism. He is from New York City but currently resides in Washington, D.C.
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