Salvini’s anger: “Enough of the North and the party of the nostalgic! Vannacci? I don’t give a shit.” He reiterates his call for a third term

This is how Salvini rallies his League: Attilio Fontana’s ‘North’ is a load of rubbish, and Italy is set to face an invasion of ‘Nigerians’. He gathers his team at Villa Angelucci and, instead of offering reassurance, he lashes out and encourages people to snitch. The party of the North? “Enough of the North! It’s just for nostalgics.” The old League? “It doesn’t exist. The world has changed. Do you want to get that?” Vannacci? “I don’t give a shit.” The defectors? “Let’s see if they get elected.” Who’s talking to the press? “Internal enemies; they’re doing the League a disservice.” It’s not the Ministry of the Interior he wants, but a shooting range to settle scores with Romeo, Zaia and Fontana. He defends Roggero because, like the goldsmith, he dreams of legitimate revenge: bang! Bang!

Renzi tells him during Question Time in the Senate: “Dear Salvini, adding your prison visits to Roggero’s 14-year sentence – now that is cruelty.” We’ve reached the point where the newspapers are reporting for the fourth time that Salvini is heading to the Ministry of the Interior (as we predicted, copied, then predicted again and copied once more – but always as we’d predicted: success comes posthumously) and, as Renzi says, it’s unclear whether to hope he actually goes there to free the commuters, or that Piantedosi will barricade himself in his office in the name of Italian restraint. What would happen if Salvini were actually to return there? He’s changed, he’s got worse, and he’s so hated that the League MPs listening to him are asking themselves, in all seriousness: “But if he goes to the Ministry of the Interior, what will he do? Will he put us all on file?” League MPs find themselves at Angelucci’s house, a villa as big as the Abruzzo National Park, following Vannacci’s outburst and on the eve of the final purges. They are expecting an Al Pacino-style speech from Salvini, but instead they feel only the chill of the blade. Salvini promises, yet again, that the League will reach ‘ten per cent’, ‘which will elect at least 70 MPs’, but the truth is that he has only one aim: to decimate the traitors. The election? “We want to go to the polls in the autumn of 2027, whilst Meloni wants to do so in the spring.” Preferential voting? “There’s no agreement. Tajani is opposed. We’re not against it.” “The League in the North? That made sense forty years ago. Now we need the international sovereignist alliance, with Le Pen, the Poles and Vox.”

When he speaks of the north, he is referring to Attilio Fontana, Massimiliano Romeo and Luca Zaia, even though he never mentions them by name. He is waiting, they say in the League, for the night the candidate lists are announced, just as the Count of Monte Cristo awaited revenge and the punishment etched on the face of his ancient enemy: “My God! You are that hidden, implacable, deadly enemy. In Marseille I did something to you, oh, wretched me!’ He lists the League members who have defected with Vannacci and, instead of saying: ‘Perhaps we weren’t good enough at keeping them, but let’s not lose any more comrades now. Well, instead of doing that, he calls for booing because ‘I can hold my head high, but the others cannot’. When he utters the name of Gianangelo Bof, the League members start stamping their feet and Salvini recalls that ‘the traitors used to come to my office asking for posts and guarantees of candidacy’ and they are the very same people who are now ‘discrediting’ him. What will he do? Will he send them to Bollate? The local branches have emptied, but according to Salvini, the blame lies with the MPs who fail to connect with the rank and file. To restore the harmony that reigns within the League, it’s worth reading the interviews given by Alberto Stefani, who talks about autonomy without ever mentioning Zaia – which is like talking about apartheid without mentioning Mandela. In Veneto, they’ve even gone so far as to wage an internal war: Stefani’s men are phoning round saying, ‘Zaia wants to bring Stefani down’. Is this what they call a family?

The Lega regional committee met again yesterday, and Salvini once more proposed a third term “because now everyone wants it”. Landings have fallen, crime has fallen, but the only tune Salvini knows how to play is one of anxiety and repetition. Claudio Durigon, at the very least, is pushing the pension issue again; he will soon ask Giorgetti to lower the retirement age, whilst Salvini imagines Italy populated by “Nigerians whose numbers are growing by two per cent every year. ‘Soon they’ll invade Europe.’ He hasn’t had much luck with the Messina Bridge yet, but soon – you’ll see – he’ll propose a sea wall off the coast of Lampedusa. What kind of community can grow and have the drive to achieve anything if its leader is always in a bad mood? Salvini accuses his League of being nostalgic, of believing in a world that no longer exists, and perhaps he’s right, but what he’s proposing is worse than director Nolan’s Hades. It’s a world inhabited by nightmares and grudges. Vannacci’s cruelty comes across as more likeable than his own. The Ministry of the Interior is now like the lotus flower that Calypso offered to Ulysses to help him forget the torments of the sea.