Matteo Salvini (; born 9 March 1973) is an Italian politician serving as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Minister of Infrastructure and Transport since 2022. He has been Federal Secretary of Italy's Lega party since December 2013 and an Italian senator since March 2018. Salvini represented Northwestern Italy in the European Parliament from 2004 to 2018.
Salvini has been a hardline Eurosceptic politician, holding a starkly critical view of the European Union, especially of the euro. He opposes illegal immigration into Italy and the EU as well as the EU's management of asylum seekers. He is also considered one of the main leaders of the populist wave in Europe during the 2010s and a member of the neo-nationalist movement, which is a right-wing ideology that emphasizes de-globalization, nativist and protectionist stances.
During his first stint as deputy prime minister, many international political commentators and newspapers, such as The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist, and The Huffington Post, characterized him as a strongman and the most influential politician in Italy after the 2018 elections. Salvini condemned the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He had previously praised Russia's president Vladimir Putin, describing Putin in 2019 as "the best politician and statesman in the world".
Early life Matteo Salvini was born in Milan in 1973, the son of a business executive father and a homemaker mother. In 1985, at the age of 12, he took part in game show Doppio slalom (the Italian version of Blockbusters), hosted by Corrado Tedeschi on Canale 5. And in 1993, at the age of 20, he participated on Il pranzo è servito, hosted by Davide Mengacci, which was broadcast by Rete 4.
Salvini studied at the Classical Lyceum "Alessandro Manzoni" in Milan. He later attended the University of Milan where he first studied political science before switching to history. However, he interrupted his studies to start his political career and never graduated.
Salvini has said that, as a teenager, he used to visit the left-wing self-managed social centre Leoncavallo.
Early political career In 1990, Salvini became a member of the Lega Nord, the regionalist and separatist movement founded by Umberto Bossi in 1989. He was an active member of Young Padanians Movement, LN's youth faction, of which he became city coordinator for Milan in 1992 and city secretary in 1997. In the same year, he started working as journalist for La Padania, the official newspaper of Lega Nord. In 1999 he also worked on Lega's radio broadcaster Radio Padania Libera and since July 2003 he has been registered as a journalist on the list of Italian professional journalists.
In 1993 he was elected in the City Council of Milan, a post that he would hold until 2012. While in 1997 he participated in the Padanian elections and was elected within the list Comunisti Padani (Padanian Communists), which gained 5 seats out of 210. In the following year, he was elected provincial secretary of the League for Milan.
In 1999, during an official visit of Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in Milan, Salvini refused to shake his hand, stating that Ciampi did not represent him.
European Parliament and local leader Salvini was elected with 14,000 votes a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the North-West region in 2004 and participated in the European Parliament as a part of the Non-Inscrits. During the legislature he selected Franco Bossi, brother of the party's secretary Umberto, as his parliamentary assistant.
In 2006, he lost his office as member of the European Parliament and was replaced by Gian Paolo Gobbo. Salvini was then re-elected city councilor in Milan, in the municipal election of that year, with over 3,000 votes. In the same year, he became deputy secretary of the Lombard League, along with Marco Reguzzoni, and the party leader in the city council.
He sat on the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education, and was a substitute for the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety and a member of the delegation to the EU–Chile Joint Parliamentary Committee. He stood down from the European Parliament in November 2006.
Salvini ran in the 2008 general election and was elected in the Chamber of Deputies for the constituency Lombardy 1. However he resigned on 13 July 2009, after being elected once again in the European Parliament in the June election. In the Parliament, he sat in the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group.After he was re-elected in 2009 as an MEP, he sat on the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and was a member of the delegation for relations with India, and the delegation for relations with the Korean peninsula. He was a substitute on the Committee on International Trade and the Delegation for relations with South Africa. On 2 June 2012, Salvini became the federal secretary of the Lombard League, defeating Cesarino Monti with 403 votes against 129. Following the election, on 12 October he decided to leave the office of group leader and city councilor after 19 years. Salvini was later elected deputy in the 2013 general election, but he renounced his mandate on the first day of the legislature, and was replaced by Marco Rondini; Salvini maintained the position of MEP.
After the 2014 European election, in which he was re-elected, he returned to the Non-Inscrits. In June 2015, he was part of the creation of a new group, the Europe of Nations and Freedom, which also included parties such as the French National Front and the Dutch Party for Freedom; he was also the vice-president of the Italian delegation.
Federal Secretary of Lega Nord In September 2013, Roberto Maroni, secretary of LN and Salvini's mentor, announced he would soon leave the party's leadership. After a few weeks, Salvini announced his candidacy for the first Lega's leadership election. A congress was scheduled for mid-December and in accordance with the new rules set for the election five candidates filed their bid to become secretary: Umberto Bossi, Giacomo Stucchi, Manes Bernardini, Roberto Stefanazzi and Salvini. Of these, only Bossi and Salvini gathered the 1,000 necessary signatures by party members to take part in the internal "primary", and Salvini collected four times the signatures gathered by Bossi.
On 7 December 2013, Salvini, who counted on the support of Roberto Maroni and most of the party's senior figures (including Flavio Tosi, who had renounced a bid of his own), defeated Umberto Bossi with 82% of the vote in the "primary". A week later, his election was ratified by the party's federal congress in Turin. Under Salvini, the party embraced a strongly critical view of the European Union, especially of the euro, which he described a "crime against humanity". Ahead of the 2014 European Parliament election, Salvini started to cooperate with Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, and Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom. These moves were criticised by Bossi, who called attention to Salvini's left-wing roots, and Tosi, who represented the party's pro-European wing and defended the euro.
In April 2014, Salvini presented the party's logo for the European Parliament election, with Basta Euro ('No more Euro') replacing Padania, to emphasize the party's Euroscepticism and desire to exit from the Eurozone. The party included in its slates candidates from other anti-euro and/or autonomist movements (hence Autonomie, 'Autonomies'), notably comprising The Freedomites, a right-wing populist and separatist party active in South Tyrol (whose symbol was also included).
In the European Parliament election, the party obtained 6.2% of the vote and 5 MEPs. The result was far worse than the previous EP election in 2009 (a fall of 4.0%), but better than that of the 2013 general election (a gain of 2.1%). The LN were third with 15.2% in Veneto (although Tosi obtained many more votes than Salvini, a fact that demonstrated Tosi's popular support and that the party was far from united on the anti-euro stance), ahead of Forza Italia (FI) and the other parties having emerged from the defunct People of Freedom, and fourth in Lombardy with 14.6%. Despite the party having lost Piedmont to the Democrats, after Roberto Cota had been forced to resign, Salvini was triumphant, with the success of Massimo Bitonci in being elected mayor of Padua, a Democratic stronghold, adding to the successes.
The party's federal congress, summoned in Padua in July, approved Salvini's political stance, especially a plan for the introduction of a flat tax and the creation of a sister party in central-southern Italy and the Isles. In November the Emilia-Romagna regional election represented a major step for Salvini's "national project": the Lega Nord, which won 19.4% of the vote, was the region's second-largest party, and far ahead of Forza Italia, helping paving the way for the Lega Nord to become the dominant centre-right party. In December the sister party for southern Italy, Us with Salvini (NcS), was launched.
The party's growing popularity among voters was reflected also in a constant rise in opinion polls. A December 2014 Ipsos poll showed that Salvini's approval rating had increased by from 28% to 33%, "cementing his position as a rising political force in Italy".
On 28 February 2015, Salvini led a rally in Rome protesting against illegal immigration.
In March 2015, after a long struggle between the two main Venetian party's leaders Flavio Tosi and Luca Zaia, backed by Salvini, over the formation of the slates for the upcoming regional election in Veneto, Tosi was removed as national secretary of Liga Veneta and ejected from the federal party altogether. Despite this in-fighting, the 2015 regional elections were another success for the LN, especially in Veneto, where Luca Zaia was re-elected with 50.1% of the vote and the combined score of the party's and Zaia's personal lists was 40.9%. The party also came second in Liguria with 22.3%, second in Tuscany with 16.2%, third in the Marche with 13.0% and third in Umbria with 14.0%. The LN had never polled so high in those five regions before.
After the 2016 local elections, in which the party ran below expectations in Lombardy (while doing well in Veneto as well as Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany) and the NcS performed badly, Salvini's political stance came under pressure from Bossi, Maroni, and especially the recently elected leader of Lega Lombarda, Paolo Grimoldi, who criticized the party's right-wing turn and its focus on the south, while reclaiming the federalist and autonomist identity of the LN.
In the run-up of the 2017 leadership election, Salvini focused on becoming the leader of the centre-right and, possibly, changing the Northern League's name by ditching "Northern". Paolo Grimoldi, leader of Lega Lombarda, chose not to run against Salvini (and Maroni maintained his neutrality), but Gianni Fava, Lombard regional minister of Agriculture in the old social-democratic tradition, announced his bid aiming at representing the federalist / autonomist / separatist wings of the party. Fava, who was anti-prohibition of drugs, pro-civil unions for same-sex couples, pro-Atlanticism, and, like Bossi, anti-National Front ("[it] is one of the most centralist and conservative blocs in Europe, what does it have to do with us?"), recalled an old activist saying, "let's hurry up in making Padania, then I want to return voting the left", and added, "this was the League and it has to be like this anew."
2018 general election
On 21 December 2017, Salvini presented the new electoral logo of the Northern League for the 2018 general election; for the first time since its foundation the party ran in all the constituencies of the country, using a logo without the word "Northern".