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‘Italians first’: Italy’s far-right leader echoes Trump in election campaign

The leader of Italy's far-right party, Matteo Salvini, repeated the slogan 'Italians first' in a TV interview in which he laid out plans to expel hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants.

Published: 24 January 2018 13:12 CET
'Italians first': Italy's far-right leader echoes Trump in election campaign
Matteo Salvini pictured in Milan this week. Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP

“In Italy there are too many illegal immigrants who go around making trouble. I can't take it anymore,” said Salvini on political talk show Dimartedì.

Salvini's Northern League party is part of a centre-right alliance led by Silvio Berlusconi and currently leading opinion polls.

Salvini said that if he became prime minister, he would ensure that within a year 100,000 “illegal migrants” would be sent back to their countries of origin, saying: “In this moment of crisis and unemployment, the more migrants that come in, the more confusion.”

However, it is not clear how he plans to overcome the bureaucratic obstacles that have slowed down deportations, including the difficulty of tracking down those who live without documents and work in the black economy, or dealing with countries of origin that refuse to accept deported migrants.

The Northern League leader tweeted along with the show, using the hashtag #Primagliitaliani (“Italians first”), one of the party's slogans in the 2018 election campaign and a sentiment echoed in several of his statements.

He accused former PM Matteo Renzi of “betraying the Italians” and said the Northern League would put forward as a candidate “anyone who recognizes themselves in the League's slogan 'Italians first'”.

The day before he had said on Twitter that this slogan was the party's “only objective”.

The 'Italians First' slogan, with its clear parallel to Donald Trump's catchphrase 'America First', is one of several recent shifts in Salvini's rhetoric which give insight into how the party hopes to gain votes in the 2018 election scheduled for March 4th.

It doesn't come as a surprise to see Salvini emulating Trump; he has regularly shared messages in support of the US president, even before his election victory, describing him as a “heroic and colourful person” who shared many of Salvini's own views.

When the pair met, Salvini tweeted a photo of him and Trump smiling and doing thumbs-up signs, though Trump denied claims he had told the Northern League leader “I hope you become prime minister soon”, and said he didn't even know who Salvini was. But that didn't deter Salvini, who was the first Italian politician to congratulate Trump on his election, tweeting “Go, Donald, GO” and the hashtag #oratoccaanoi (“now it's our turn”).

By repeating 'Italians first', Salvini also demonstrated the shift in tactics from the party, which was originally founded as a secessionist movement in the northern area it calls Padania.

In 2014, the Northern League launched a sister movement aimed at Italy's south and titled Noi con Salvini (“Us with Salvini”). This angered party founder Umberto Bossi, but Salvini said of the party's previous criticism of mafia activity, low employment figures and crime in the southern regions: “We have never attacked citizens of the south, only those who manage it”.

Under Salvini's leadership, the Northern League has changed its focus from campaigning for autonomy for the northern regions to a heightened emphasis on its anti-immigration and anti-EU stance.

In his Tuesday interview, he said: “My League is a league which has chosen to speak to all of Italy” as well as saying he was “less and less interested” in differences between the political right and left.

The Northern League also dropped the word ‘north’ from their official logo in late December, approving a simple logo with the word ‘League’ above the party’s image of 12th-century Lombard warrior Alberto da Giussano.

On the new logo, the heading 'Lega' is now accompanied by the new slogan ‘Salvini premier’, yet another sign that the party is increasingly focussed on its figurehead. 

If the centre-right bloc gains a majority, either Forza Italia or the Northern League will choose the country's next prime minister, depending which of the two parties gets more votes. Currently, Forza Italia is just ahead with opinion polls showing it with 16 percent of the vote compared to the League's 14 percent; however, Forza Italia's leader Berlusconi is ineligible to run for office due to a tax fraud conviction.

Salvini also defended the party against accusations of racism in the Tuesday interview, after a Northern League politician said that migration threatened to “wipe out our white race” in what he later claimed was a slip of the tongue. 

Speaking on Tuesday, the party leader said that “the only antidote to racism is controlled immigration”.

 

POLITICS

Can foreign residents in Italy vote in the European elections?

The year 2024 is a bumper one for elections, among them the European elections in June. Italy is of course a member of the EU - so can foreign residents vote in the elections that will almost certainly affect their daily lives?

Published: 3 May 2024 15:25 CEST
Can foreign residents in Italy vote in the European elections?

Across Europe, people will go to the polls in early June to select their representatives in the European Parliament, with 76 seats up for grabs in Italy. 

Although European elections usually see a much lower turnout than national elections, they are still seen as important by Italian politicians.

Giorgia Meloni will stand as a candidate this year, hoping use her personal popularity to give her Brothers of Italy party a boost and build on her success in Italy to “send the left into opposition” at the European level too.

When to vote

Across Italy, polling takes place on Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th June 2024.

Polling stations will be set up in the same places as for national and local elections – usually town halls, leisure centres and other public buildings.

You have to vote at the polling station for the municipality in which you are registered as a resident, which should be indicated on your electoral card.

Polling stations open at 8am and mostly close at 6pm, although some stay open later.

Unlike in presidential or local elections, there is only a single round of voting in European elections.

Who can vote? 

Italian citizens – including dual nationals – can vote in European elections, even if they don’t live in Italy. As is common for Italian domestic elections, polling booths will be set up in Italian consulates around the world to allow Italians living overseas to vote.

Non-Italian citizens who are living in Italy can only vote if they have citizenship of an EU country. So for example Irish citizens living in Italy can vote in European elections but Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. cannot.

Brits in Italy used to be able to vote before Brexit, but now cannot – even if they have the post-Brexit carta di soggiorno.

If you have previously voted in an election in Italy – either local or European – you should still be on the electoral roll.

If not, in order to vote you need to send an application more than 90 days before the election date.

How does the election work?

The system for European elections differs from most countries’ domestic polls. MEPs are elected once every five years.

Each country is given an allocation of MEPs roughly based on population size. At present there are 705 MEPs: Germany – the country in the bloc with the largest population – has the most while the smallest number belong to Malta with just six.

Italy, like most of its EU neighbours, elects its MEPs through direct proportional representation via the ‘list’ system, so that parties gain the number of MEPs equivalent to their share of the overall vote.

So, for example, if Meloni’s party won 50 percent of the vote they would get 38 out of the total of 76 Italian seats.

Exactly who gets to be an MEP is decided in advance by the parties who publish their candidate lists in priority order. So let’s say that Meloni’s party does get that 50 percent of the vote – then the people named from 1 to 38 on their list get to be MEPs, and the people lower down on the list do not, unless a candidate (for example, Meloni) declines the seat and passes it on to the next person on the list.

In the run up to the election, the parties decide on who will be their lead candidates and these people will almost certainly be elected (though Meloni would almost definitely not take up her seat as an MEP, as this would mean resigning from office in Italy).

The further down the list a name appears, the less likely that person is to be heading to parliament.

Once in parliament, parties usually seek to maximise their influence by joining one of the ‘blocks’ made up of parties from neighbouring countries that broadly share their interests and values eg centre-left, far-right, green.

The parliament alternates between Strasbourg and Brussels. 

Find out more about voting in the European elections from Italy on the European Parliament’s website or the Italian interior ministry’s website.

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