Who is Matteo Salvini’s challenger: a profile of Massimo Garavaglia, a ‘Draghi-aligned’ member of the Lega

Matteo Salvini’s challenger has now emerged and goes by the name of Massimo Garavaglia. “I am standing for election at the party congress because I am a free member of the League,” he told this newspaper yesterday, also referring to the need for a secret ballot. Seen from outside the League, Garavaglia is the former Minister for Tourism in the Draghi government – a detail that explains a great deal, though not everything – as well as having served as Under-Secretary and Deputy Minister for the Economy in the first Conte government, now a senator and chair of the Finance Committee, and a key figure-in-the-making at the Milan showdown on 24–25 October between the Salvini and anti-Salvini camps, with the northern regional governors sitting on the latter side (and it is thought that former Finance Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti, too, aligns himself more with this camp than the other, given his shared views with the senatorial candidate).

Seen from within the League, however, the challenger himself – for example, in his home region of Lombardy – is a die-hard, long-standing League member who entered Parliament in 2006 thanks to Umberto Bossi’s resignation (a move made to retain his seat as a Member of the European Parliament) and his experience on the ground: Now aged 58, Garavaglia served two terms, from 1999 to 2009, as mayor of Marcallo con Casone, a town deep in the Milanese hinterland, and worked as a business consultant, having earned two degrees (in Economics from Bocconi University and in Political Science from the University of Milan).

Close to Lombardy’s governor Attilio Fontana – who has been elected to Parliament on several occasions and is the son of a factory worker and a housewife – Garavaglia is now aiming to recapture the ‘genius loci’ of the Lega of its early days, emphasising one point: the Lega, he says, “is not far-right”. In 2018, the year the ‘yellow-green’ coalition government was formed, Logos magazine portrayed him as a former youth group member, curious and determined, ready to make sacrifices to help his mother and grandmother support him through his studies – hence his temporary jobs as a bricklayer and waiter. When a Lega branch was established in Marcallo con Casone in 1993, the young Garavaglia joined. From that moment on, it was political love at first sight – just as it had been romantic love at first sight with his schoolmate Marina (who later became his wife and the mother of his daughters), with whom, in the 1990s, he volunteered in war zones, from Bosnia to Albania.

An advocate of the ‘politics of action’, the former minister is now one of the Lega’s television personalities. Early in the morning, on Rai, Mediaset or La7, one therefore often hears him speak of ‘genuine coalitions’ as opposed to ‘power games’, and of alliances formed ‘not for the sake of positions’ (and who knows if he is thinking solely of his opponents on the left). For him, the forthcoming budget manoeuvre by his friend Giorgetti must be “prudently bold”. It is worth recalling that, after the 2022 elections, in the face of the outbursts on X by his colleague Claudio Borghi, it was Garavaglia who defended the League’s participation in the Draghi government (his argument being that the League’s decline had not stopped with Draghi’s fall, and in any case the League had already been on the decline before that).