widthWhether they are camping in cold temperatures or stranded at sea, Matteo Salvini There is little sympathy for asylum-seekers who are blocked on the European border. The Italian far-right leader, as the Minister of the Interior, tried to prevent the NGO rescue ship from landing in an Italian port. One of them led to criminal charges. He will go to Warsaw next month to support the Polish allies who deployed core tactics to stop several others. Thousands of refugees trying to enter from Belarus.
“I think Europe Realizing that illegal immigration is dangerous,” Salvini told the Guardian in an interview with the Guardian, when 27 people attempted to cross the English Channel on an inflatable boat and drowned. “So maybe this kind of shock would be useful. “
The Polish border crisis is an excellent opportunity for Salvini to reignite his faded right-wing populist star, as he is developing a strategy for the next general election in Italy, which will be held in 2023, but may come sooner. Earlier attempts to take advantage of the soaring poll ratings by disintegrating the alliance between his coalition party and the anti-establishment five-star movement (M5S) and forcing new elections were counterproductive and turned the party into the opposition, but in a special At the turning point of the incident, it came back as part of the emergency management led by former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, and the government joined the government in February.
Salvini once accused Draghi’s role in saving the euro as “an accomplice in the massacre of our economy.” Now he says Draghi is “very good”, especially in terms of protecting Italy’s overseas interests.
But Salvini, described by some as a political chameleon, is also very in campaign mode, resorting to his tried-and-tested formulas of immigration, nativism, and Euroscepticism before the election.
Salvini did not hold the ministerial position, but he placed objects on his desk in the spacious office of the Italian Senate—disorganized, like a family home, with pictures of him, his children and girlfriend, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. A photo of Leah, an AC Milan jersey and a yellow toy bulldozer on a bookshelf-understand his current position. A document contains a list of projects that Salvini wants to insert into Italy’s 2022 budget, including a fund to help people with disabilities. Another plan was drawn up by the revival of the European Union of Far-Right Political Powers (including the National Assembly of the Union and Marina Le Pen) to create “Another Europe.”
Salvini said in an interview: “I can dream of a different Europe while being a pro-European government.”
He said he joined Draghi’s broad alliance because it was the right thing to do as Italy recovers from the pandemic. “In the government, the alliance can handle tourism, flat taxes, disabled people… Did you see those people who left when you came in? They are business owners. They came to me because I work in a government department and can help .”
But in future elections, Italy’s declining birth rate will become the primary theme of the league. “My goal is to calm the Italians financially and encourage them to have children,” Salvini said. “I refuse to consider replacing 10 million Italians with 10 million immigrants.”
In August 2019, Salvini seemed to be about to become prime minister, when he announced on a beach near Rome that it was impossible to use M5S to make up for the alliance’s differences, and early elections were the only way out. Salvini, the Minister of the Interior, waved his rosary and posed for a selfie. He was crowded with supporters in squares across Italy. Supporters praised him for closing the country’s seaports to immigrants.
The League is Italy’s largest political party and ranked among the top in public opinion polls. He called on the Italians to give him “full power”-the same sentence used by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1922 after he came to power. But Salvini was defeated by M5S, which continued to form a government with the center-left Democratic Party to push the alliance to the opposition, and its poll ratings were immediately hit.
Ask the party’s former supporters — now the party’s approval rating is about 18%, behind its far-right ally, the Italian Brotherhood and the Democratic Party — why Salvini fell out of favor and they inevitably pointed out his miscalculations . Many people turned allegiance to the Italian Brotherhood, saying that its leader, Georgia Meloni, was more aligned. Since choosing to stay away from the Draghi government, the Italian Brotherhood has continued to rise steadily.
Although Meloni was allied with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the election, Salvini’s reputation eclipsed him in the polls. He was thwarted by the League’s defeat to the left in the Mayoral elections of major cities in October, and blushed after a secret recording showed him suggesting that Meloni was “a man in pain.” He insisted that he had no competitive relationship with Meloni and was willing to give up his ambitions and let her serve as prime minister. “I will let the voters decide… but I do not approve of pink quotas, green quotas or female quotas. What I am interested in is [the candidate] It’s good, man or woman. “
He said that he has no regrets about the power outage in 2019. “Life is a risk… We are part of the government, we did good things in the first year, and then everything stopped completely,” he said. “M5S is against everything… and then they start to say,’Salvini is wrong on immigration.’ I am a member of the government and I cannot do what I promised.”
During his tenure as Minister of the Interior, he adopted severe anti-immigration measures, including closing refugee centers, canceling humanitarian protection permits, and preventing the arrival of immigrants. In August 2019, he was tried in Palermo for kidnapping charges that prevented 147 migrants from boarding the NGO vessel Open Arms, and he is not worried about this. “I don’t regret it. I did it [blocked the ships] 50 times, I will do it again. What I was most satisfied with at that time was that Europe remembered the existence of Italy,” he said.
When asked if he could envisage a more humanitarian immigration policy, he said: “I hope to set up a special immigration and international cooperation department, which includes a’humanitarian corridor’ to help move from places like this. Bring in children. Libya and Afghanistan.” He said that “a well-trained foreign labor force” could be useful to Italy’s economy. “I don’t want them to arrive by boat, it’s a mess.”
When the topic of fascism came up, Salvini became irritable. The coalition started as a northern separatist party whose founder, Umberto Bossi, lamented “damn fascists”, and then Salvini took the helm in 2013 and began to turn to the hard-line right.
Although evoking figures from the fascist era in some of his speeches and social media posts, he said that the alliance “never had anything to do with fascists or nostalgia.” As for the partnership with the Italian Brotherhood that emerged from neo-fascists, he said: “Even the Italian Brotherhood has changed. I hope that in 2021, fascism can be archived for everyone.”
If the general election is held in a short period of time, the League, the Italian Brotherhood and the Italian Extreme Sports will easily exceed the 40% of the votes that may need to be in power. Salvini said that they performed better in towns and provinces outside of the city. “These towns and provinces are more globalized, have things like Amazon, and have fewer social connections.” Among them, they already own 14 of the 20 Italian regions. “My goal now is [national] vote. We are all in God’s hands, but I am in good health. We will win. “
