Matteo Salvini’s Italian League continues to radicalize its positions to try to win votes ahead of the community elections next June. The latest controversial measure has been a bill by Senator Claudio Borghi, who is running for the European Parliament, to remove the European flag from Italian public buildings.
“The Italian flag is only one, the tricolor, which must be accompanied when possible by the flag of the region,” said the parliamentarian, a well-known eurosceptic, after having delivered a bill to withdraw the rule he introduced in 1998 the obligation to display the EU flag inside and outside public buildings. No other party in the right-wing government majority has supported this idea, so it has little chance of prospering.
The League, which won the last European elections in Italy with 34% of the votes, is now in trouble because polls predict only 8% of support. They could even fall below Forza Italia, the center-right party, for the first time since 2018. This is generating a lot of nervousness in the party, and there are already those who are asking that after the elections a reflection be opened to think about whether Salvini should continue at the head of the party.
A decision that has generated deep unrest, especially among the barons in the north of the country, has been to choose as the flagship candidate Roberto Vannacci, a general suspended from the Army for his homophobic, sexist, racist or anti-Semitic opinions. There are already several leaders in the north of the country who have disavowed statements by the soldier, who has been forced to apologize to the Italian volleyball champion, Paula Egonu, after she denounced him for writing in the book that his “somatic features They do not represent Italianness” because she is black, and of African origins.
In Italy, the League has been replaced by the pull of the Brothers of Italy and above all of its leader, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who faces comfortably winning European elections that she herself has presented as a plebiscite for her own. game. Although they are government partners and also rule together in many Italian regions, Salvini and Meloni are rivals in Europe, since Brothers of Italy is part of the group of Conservatives and Reformists – along with Vox or the Poles of Law and Justice – while the League He is part of Identity and Democracy – with Marine Le Pen or Alternative for Germany. Both parties hope for important progress in these elections to the European Parliament.
