Italy has a new strongman, and for many, a new saviour. The effective head of the government in Rome is not the titular premier, Giuseppe Conte, nor the winner of the last election, the Five Star Movement (M5S) leader Luigi Di Maio. It is the interior minister, Matteo Salvini. This previously obscure municipal councillor from Milan, and longtime activist for the separatist Northern League, became the most powerful figure in the country almost overnight. Under his leadership, a party that was a political relic (with only 3-4% support in the polls) has become in just five years the pivot of Italian, and perhaps European, politics.
The transformation began far off, not in time but in distance. Since 2014 wars and vast economic disparities have driven millions from Africa and the Middle East across the Mediterranean in search of work, freedom and peace, towards a Europe that is affluent, but aging and ever more unequal.
Europe prefers to look the other way, or to exploit fantasies based on the desperation of others: not to help migrants, but to identify an enemy, to stage a competition in humiliation. Those who come last on earth and the next-to-last are pitted against each other, while the most favoured are left undisturbed. In Italy, Salvini has led a revolt of the next-to-last; as their leader he has learned to talk, with great skill, to their hearts and souls.
The Northern League was founded in 1991, on the eve of the implosion of the mass parties — the Christian Democrats, Communists and Socialists — that had dominated Italy since the second world war. It merged Umberto Bossi’s Lombard League, which dated back to the mid-1980s, with other regionalist forces in the north, describing itself as ‘neither right nor left’. Its first electoral successes marked a change in Italian politics. Its goal was specific: independence for Padania, an imaginary nation centred on the River Po. Its message was that the north, an industrious and prosperous (...)
