Portrait of Matteo Salvini - Italian Minister of the Interior

Matteo Salvini radically changed his party’s path, and transformed the Northern League into the Matteo Salvini League. For almost a decade, Italians had been experiencing a deep economic crisis that brought about real social distress - high unemployment, widening inequalities, increasing poverty. This crisis is still ongoing to this day, despite a timid resumption of growth and flourishing foreign trade in 2018. The centre-left and centre-right parties, which governed the country and pursued austerity policies in line with those imposed by Mario Monti when he was Prime Minister (2011-2013), were, among others, held responsible for this situation. Hence the yearning for radical change and the desperate quest for novelty. Salvini precisely managed to present himself as a new man, despite having been in politics for 28 years.

There was a time when he perfectly embodied the Northern League. He was happy to wear his party's green shirt, to insult and denigrate the inhabitants of the South or to castigate Italy. Thus he spectacularly refused to shake hands with President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi on an official visit to Milan in 2013, claiming that he did not feel represented by him. However, Salvini has stopped attacking southerners and Rome’s "parasitism". He now attacks the European Union and immigrants, with even more acrimony than the Northern League had done so far. The former deeply disappointed the Italians who, after having been the most Europhile people on the continent, have now turned to Euroscepticism. Four main steps led to this historical change. First, the introduction of the Maastricht criteria, which put an end to significant public spending that benefited Italians. Second, the single currency, with which transalpine consumers had a bad experience - hence their mixed attachment to the euro. The latter is nevertheless supported by the majority, even though that majority is the weakest in all countries of the Eurozone. The third factor is the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2008, which hit the peninsula hard. The final step is the crisis sparked by the massive arrival of migrants from 2013 onwards. Thus for Italians, Europe is no longer synonymous with prosperity and protection. Moreover, many of them are traumatized by the five million legal immigrants - i.e. four times more than in 2001, the half a million illegal immigrants and the flow of migrants arriving on the Italian coast. In addition, for more than a quarter of a century, globalization, Europeanization and migratory shocks have led Italians to question their identity. This question has been recurrent since the Italian unification in 1861.

It is no longer simply located in the north of the country, its great bastion: it has largely pervaded the center of the peninsula (Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Marche, Umbria), which had historically been predominantly left-wing until now, and has begun to establish itself in the Mezzogiorno. At the European level, the League now asserts its proximity to European far-right populist parties and movements, starting with the National Front, especially in the run-up to the European elections. Yet Salvini's ambition to become a European leader, against his designated enemy, Emmanuel Macron, by gathering all populist groups in a "League of Leagues of Europe", as he proclaimed in a meeting last July, faces serious obstacles. These include diverging strategies and the ideal of the defense of national interests held dear by each of the populist parties to which he is reaching out.

Finally, Salvini succeeded in tilting the balance of power in his favor towards the right and centre-right coalition to which his party belonged for the 2018 elections, by taking advantage of the weakening of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia. Not only that, but all polls show that he has now completely marginalized the latter. The League has become the leading Italian party, according to voting intentions. It is ahead of the Five Star Movement, which won the most votes (32.7%) in the March election, and with which the League has been governing the country since June. This happened after they wrote a far-fetched government contract, which can be explained by the fact that they had just been competing against each other, disagreed on a number of issues and represented divergent interests. Moreover, Salvini, who is not only Minister of the Interior but also Deputy Prime Minister, quickly gained the upper hand over his partner, the other Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the Five Star Movement and Minister of Economic Development, Labor and Social Policy. Salvini is involved on all fronts and even overshadows the Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte. In other words, Matteo Salvini is the protagonist of the current Italian government.

In order to further broaden his electoral base, he seeks to combine three different stances:

• The first is an extreme right-wing position towards foreigners, which he represents by using xenophobic or even racist statements that have contributed to the increase in insults and attacks against foreigners in the country. 
• The second stance is populist, which he embodies by opposing the legitimacy conferred by universal suffrage to the unelected judges who prosecute him, for instance.
• Finally, he also wants to seem like a responsible leader, and thus speaks out in favor of companies, expresses his willingness to pursue the construction of a high-speed train line linking Lyon to Turin, which the Five Star Movement aims to stop, or moderates some of Luigi Di Maio’s attacks on journalists.. 

The truth is, Matteo Salvini's comments are often contradictory. He violently criticizes Brussels yet occasionally declares that he wants to "respect the constraints" of the European Commission. He claims to be receptive to business leaders’ demands by reducing their taxes yet wants to allow early retirement. In fact, he simply adapts to what the polls say, and is probably preparing for the early political elections that could occur after a break with the Five Star Movement. He hopes to be in a position of strength in order to build alliances with Forza Italia and other small parties, which would allow him to occupy the spectrum going from the centre-right to the far right. This could increase his chances of winning, to govern on his own terms.

Does Matteo Salvini symbolize the return of fascism, as some of his critics claim, and more so outside Italy than within the peninsula? Some of his statements and attitudes are reminiscent of the Duce and are undoubtedly constructed as subliminal messages addressed to the Italians’ collective unconscious. Thus, when in May 2018, President Sergio Mattarella, using the powers conferred to him by Article 92 of the Constitution, refused to appoint Paolo Savona to the Ministry of Economy, the League momentarily considered calling for a "march on Rome". The latter evoked Mussolini's march in October 1922, which was a key moment in his coming to power. Another example: Matteo Salvini did not hesitate to use some of Mussolini’s famous sentences - or those attributed to him - such as the one he pronounced on 29 July 2018 (Mussolini was born on 29 July 1883): "So many enemies, so much honor". Similarly, when the League leader allows photographs to be taken of him shirtless on beaches, he knows perfectly well that, by doing so, he is bringing back famous images of the Duce harvesting wheat in the Italians' memory. But there are many differences with fascism. The historical context is obviously not comparable. And above all, fascists used physical violence to terrorize their opponents. From very early on, they tried to forge a true doctrine and to deploy a totalitarian project aimed at empowering the one-party state and generating a "New Man". Nothing like that with the League.

In fact, the League leader is, before anything, a politician of our time. One of what Ilvo Diamanti and I call the "peoplecracy" that populists in Italy and elsewhere promote, whether or not they win the elections. They impose their topics, their style, their way of doing politics, their temporality, their simplistic, conspiracist and binary vision of the world, the idea that the sovereign people is all-powerful, without any limits. This is what is causing liberal and representative democracy to falter. And so emerges the possibility of a "peoplecracy", synonymous with immediate democracy, without any intermediate bodies, which establishes a kind of digital agora in which the leader, in this case Matteo Salvini, plays a more fundamental role than ever.

Finally, the latter’s popularity is part of a larger historical period. It is not the first time that a large share of Italians follow a man who promises miracles: Mussolini in the inter-war years, the socialist Bettino Craxi in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently Silvio Berlusconi or Matteo Renzi. These leaders differ radically in the content of their policies and in their personalities. Nevertheless, all of them embody, to varying degrees, the figures of providential men, bearers of a form of Caesarism conceived as a response to profound moments of crisis. This bears witness to the weakness of political liberalism in this country. And to the Italian democracy’s fragility, which did not, however, prevent it from successfully facing significant challenges in the past, including that of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet if Matteo Salvini does not embody the figure of an authoritarian leader, in the full sense of the term, it is because the quest for authority expressed by the Italians does not mean that they aspire to authoritarianism, to "democratic dictatorship" or, worse, to the establishment of a real dictatorship. But it does nevertheless testify to a recurrent fascination for "decisionismo", as we say in Italian. And thus for men who display their strength, if not their virility. Who combine the power of speech with the ability to act. Who free themselves from the exhausting parliamentary deliberations and avoid multiple mediations. Today, Matteo Salvini is that man. For how long? At what cost? Many of our questions remain unanswered. For now.

Bibliography
Ilvo Diamanti, Marc Lazar, Peuplecratie. La métamorphose de nos démocraties, Paris, Gallimard, publication in March 2019. 
"Italie : le temps du populisme. Entretien avec Matteo Salvini, par Richard Heuzé", Politique internationale, n°161, Fall 2018, p. 23-36. 
Gianluca Passarelli, Dario Tuorto, La Lega di Salvini. Estrema destra di governo, Bologne, Il Mulino, 2018. 

Illustration : David MARTIN for Institut Montaigne.