ROME: Italy’s far-right League will begin its annual conference on Sunday with party head and hardline Interior Minister Matteo Salvini in triumphant mood after declaring the country’s ports closed to NGO migrant ships.
Salvini, attending his fifth party conference in the northern port of Pontida, said the League goes into its annual meeting “stronger and more organised than ever”.
Around 50,000 people from around Italy are expected to attend the event.
Salvini, 45, who is co-deputy prime minister as well as interior minister, has thrived as the migrant issue has become central to the European agenda.
He announced on Friday that Italian ports would be closed “all summer” to NGO ships which rescue migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe.
“The NGOs will only see Italy on a postcard,” Salvini quipped.
Anti-immigration hardliners accuse NGO rescue boats of exacerbating the situation in the Mediterranean, where migrants try to cross the sea on rickety boats.
‘Italians First’
“It’s the League’s moment,” the Corriere della Sera daily opined Saturday.
The party’s strength “depends above all on the continuity of Matteo Salvini’s communication strategy in relation to the electoral campaign, a strategy based on a precise choice of sensitive topics in Europe, and also on his aggressive stance towards political leaders,” in particular President Emmanuel Macron of neighbouring France, the paper said.
Last weekend Macron called for financial penalties to be levied against EU nations that refuse to accept migrants.
Salvini’s co-deputy prime minister and head of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, Luigi Di Maio, has been eclipsed by the League’s leader.
Italy’s new anti-establishment government took power on June 1, ending months of deadlock that saw the Eurozone’s third largest economy narrowly avoid snap elections after a last-gasp coalition deal.
New Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, 53, was sworn in at the head of the first populist government in an EU founding member, forged by the Five Star Movement and the far-right League.
Salvini had taken the helm of the League in 2013, when it was a northern secessionist party on the brink of collapse with four per cent of the popular vote.
His “Italians First” slogan has helped bring about a triumphant nationalist transformation for the party.
His previous mocking of southern Italians has been forgotten and for Sunday’s party conference there will be people travelling up in their hundreds from Campania, Calabria and even Sicily.
