Salvini’s escape route

I am tired of speaking ill of Salvini – once known as “Il Truce” and later Senator Salvini – who, personally, is an affectionate and candid person despite his aberrant ideas and the grotesque way he defends them in public. This is a technical issue, and someone as experienced as he is by now cannot fail to understand it. Doing badly in elections can happen. However, if you get your alliances right and someone else’s success – or rather, a woman’s success – propels you into government, so much the better. The problem isn’t the bridge – bearing in mind, as Buttafuoco used to say, that Sicily is an island – nor is it the 5 per cent, nor is it being overtaken by Forza Italia or Vannacci, nor is it the Ministry of the Interior, which Maroni and Piantedosi have managed at different times with discretion and a certain degree of effectiveness. The problem is that you can survive the plunge into the full powers of the Papeete. That’s one. You can try to get away with it after a pro-Ukraine rally in Poland – improvised and ending with the display of a T-shirt or a hoodie bearing an image of Putin in military garb – and let’s call it a gaffe. That’s two. However, recruiting someone who then mocks and betrays you in a high-profile manner leaves you with egg on your face and a beating, whilst a ruling class of administrators, ministers and MPs – who aren’t half bad – are making their way, winning votes and reasoning about the League’s identity and future in a coherent manner; this is a third instance – there’s no two without a three – and it’s technically unsustainable.

I’m afraid the charming and disciplined composure of a Giorgetti, the sudden courage of a Fontana in Lombardy, Fedriga’s political weaving in Friuli, Zaia’s formidable charisma in Veneto, and the rest of the political elite, are signs or signals that a leader cannot downplay; he must come to terms with them, Pontida or no Pontida. Salvini faces the classic problem of an exit strategy; he must find, as in the cinemas of yesteryear, the safety light, step aside without committing political suicide, and guarantee a future which, with him, is one of embarrassing precariousness, and without him, an unknown quantity with some hope. He was an activist, a youth-oriented figure from the early days of ‘bossism’ with a left-wing background, a fighter who has become fossilised in the mould of a right-wing ideology influenced by the worst of the worst – from Trump to the AfD right through to Marine Le Pen, back when she was rather thoroughly demonised. With that doubly complicated issue that is Putinism – as popular as ever when it comes to bowing down before a strongman, yet scarcely justifiable from the perspective of governance in Europe, the part of the West that Salvini’s revered backer wishes to tear to pieces. As for security, the ‘project of fear’ – which is itself frightening – is crude; it conflicts with the data presented here and reported by Corriere della Sera; and when it comes to illegal immigration, there are ways other than rigid ideology to tackle the issue. In short, the ground has given way beneath Salvini’s feet. He needs to convince himself of this. Partly for his own good, too. 

A process of re-education for his overly inflated ego – a Ranucci-style case, perhaps – would be a solution for him and for the restless rank-and-file of his party, which risks, in a full-blown civil war, actually disappearing and harming its allies. The senator, formerly known as ‘Truce’, can only claim – and that is no small thing – that he has not harmed in the slightest those who today clearly wish to replace him with who knows what, but something, at the helm of the governing League: a northern, business-oriented party, pragmatic and reliable, rather than a caricature of Europe’s most aggressive nationalist right-wing parties, which, in Italy, are prone to ridicule. Let him take pride in the one sensible thing he has done – not eliminating the glimmer of a ruling class to which he never paid any heed, out of sheer arrogance – and let him find a dignified yet unpretentious political role. That is what he deserves. Nothing more.