Daily Times

He skipped a Cabinet meeting to attend a horse race and took a dip in a Tuscan villa’s swimming pool to show he didn’t fear the Mafia. He leads the junior party in Italy’s populist coalition government, but he acts like he’s the one running the country.

Five weeks after taking national office, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who heads the right-wing League party, is outshining his coalition rival and fellow deputy premier, Luigi Di Maio, whose 5-Star Movement is the Italian Parliament’s biggest party.

Opinion polls indicate that Salvini’s anti-migrant, anti-European Union party has soared in popularity since it placed third in Italy’s March 4 election. Recent surveys of eligible voters put the League neck-and-neck or even a couple percentage points ahead of the 5-Star Movement.

During the short time the 45-year-old Salvini has occupied his first Cabinet post, he grabbed international headlines with his “Italians come first” politics, ordering Italy’s ports closed to private rescue ships and thereby keeping hundreds of migrants stranded at sea.

He also has alarmed European Union leaders by pledging to make a European Parliament election next year a referendum on the legislature he served in for 14 years, and firing up the League’s rank-and-file with slogans like “We’ll knock down the wall in Brussels.”

“He understands very well what the public is expecting from him,” analyst Wolfango Piccoli, co-president of London-based Teneo Intelligence, said. “They want to see a change.”

Salvini’s brash, populist style is an undeniable novelty in Italian politics, and he seems to be relishing his role as a maverick from some of his recent actions.

n At the US ambassador’s Fourth of July party in Rome, an annual to-be-seen-at event for international VIPs, a tieless Salvini chowed down on a burger smothered in red onions while gripping the bun in his hands. Other guests daintily tackled their grilled meats with fork-and-knife as Italian table etiquette demands.

Published in Daily Times, July 9^th 2018.