Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Matteo Salvini: Can Italy's populist leader return to power?

It creates a gap for sure. What sort of person is he? This gives us an idea

By James Reynolds BBC News, Rome

Published 24 September 2019

[...]

The coalition government of Salvini's far-right League party and the Five Star Movement fell apart. Fifteen months of populist experiment was at an end.

[...]

Salvini joined the Northern League at a time when it wanted independence from the rest of Italy. The party believed that the south of Italy was holding back the more affluent north, and its members enjoyed joking in their chants that southerners were dirty and lazy.

"There's a bad smell /

Even dogs are running away /

Must be that the Neapolitans are arriving /

They have cholera, are earthquake-hit /

They never washed themselves with soap."

In Italy, all political parties operate their own mini-states. Salvini found work in the Northern League's in-house newspaper and its radio station, taking his place on the movement's left wing - a point he advertised by wearing a Che Guevara pin.

Alessandro Morelli is a close friend of Salvini who grew up alongside him and is now a fellow League member of parliament.

"We would always be involved in grassroots politics," he says. "We'd put up posters, set up gazebos, distribute propaganda - we were always close to the people. Even then you could see he had the makings of a leader."

In 1993, at the age of 20, Salvini was elected to Milan's city council. Six years later, with an early eye for a populist gesture, he refused to shake the hand of the visiting Italian president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

"No thanks," he said. "You don't represent me."

Salvini's anti-southern views even overshadowed his own 2003 wedding to Fabrizia Ieluzzi. The couple divorced in 2010.

"It was crazy," she tells the BBC. "My origins are from Apulia, in southern Italy, and he's from the north. For a start, he had four relatives there, and I had 200.

"When we were going to cut the cake he took his shirt off and put on a green one, the colour of The League, and all his friends started chanting [anti-Southern] League songs. And all my relatives, on the other side of the ballroom, started booing. That was my wedding!"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44921974