Matteo Salvini, Italy’s de facto leader, is instinctively authoritarian

WHEN the Northern League linked up with the Five Star Movement (M5S) to form Western Europe’s first all-populist government of recent times, it was clear which was the junior partner. The League had won barely half as many votes at the general election in March. Yet in the absence of the new prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, it was the League’s leader, Matteo Salvini, who chaired the new government’s first cabinet. That was apparently because, at 45, he was older than his fellow-deputy premier, Luigi Di Maio of the M5S, then aged just 31.

But it was an augury: hyper-active and omnipresent, Mr Salvini has since set the agenda for the media and the government. Pointedly, he has continued to address rallies under his electoral slogan of “Salvini premier” (“Salvini prime minister”). It still adorns his and his party’s websites, Facebook and Twitter pages. Only now, almost five months after the vote, is it starting to give way to a new refrain: Prima gli Italiani (“Italians first”), an echo, conscious or unconscious, of a Donald Trump slogan.

One criticism of the League’s leader is that he acts as if he is still on the hustings. It is not one to which he is likely to pay much heed. Since March 4th, polls suggest, he has closed the gap with the M5S. Both parties now have a following of around 30%. Mr Salvini has achieved this feat by hammering away at the issue of illegal immigration, and deploying a communications strategy that, according to Domenico Ferrara, one of his biographers, Mr Salvini sums up in an acronym: TRT. It stands for Territory, Internet (rete in Italian), Television. Unlike many politicians, Mr Salvini has not abandoned either the old media or an even older way of communicating with voters by speaking to them directly, at rallies and on the street. But his use of social media is cannier and more intensive than that of Mr Di Maio of the supposedly technologically astute young M5S. From an iPad he carries everywhere, the League leader keeps up a barrage of tweets and posts to Facebook and Instagram. Mr Ferrara says that Mr Salvini does not use ghostwriters, relying instead on a software programme, dubbed The Beast, written for him by a university lecturer from Verona. It monitors reaction to his output, allowing him to emphasise whatever elicits the most favourable reception.

Sofia Ventura, associate professor of political science at the University of Bologna, points to another characteristic of Mr Salvini’s profuse communication: he puts himself forward on the one hand as the strong man who can solve Italy’s problems, but on the other as an affectionate chap who loves children and animals. On one recent, 11-tweet day he demanded that other countries take in the rescued migrants he had refused to let enter Italy, while finding time to comment with fatherly pride on his son’s good school report.

Increasing the League’s following by half since the election is Mr Salvini’s second impressive achievement. The first was to save the party from imminent extinction. He took the helm in 2013 after a financial scandal that shattered the League’s vaunted image as the party of probity. Its poll ratings were just 3-4%. Since then, he has succeeded in giving nationwide appeal to a movement whose traditional followers regard southerners as idle, backward terroni (peasants). He dropped “Northern” from its logos and posters (though it is still part of the party’s official title). And in 2014 he founded an offshoot to fish for votes in the south. Today, amazingly enough, Mr Salvini, who used to say he could not identify with the national flag, sits in the Senate as a member for Calabria, the “toe” of Italy.

But then the League has always relied on hostility to an external foe; and what Mr Salvini has done is to switch enemies, replacing the southerner with the immigrant. Not that he is any stranger to ideological acrobatics. A member of the League from the age of 17, he made a name for himself as leader of the communist wing of what was then a very different party. As a young man, he often hung out at a community centre in Milan renowned for its associations with the radical, even violent, far left.

Pass Il Duce on the left hand side

His authoritarian manner and origins on the left; the combination of a nationalist agenda and a lower-middle-class power base; the hostility to outsiders and ethnic minorities: it all adds up to a profile disturbingly reminiscent of the 1920s. So is The Captain, as his devotees call him, a Mussolini in the making? “For electoral reasons, but also out of conviction, he has adopted a language that pleases those who look back nostalgically at fascism,” says another of his biographers, Alessandro Franzi. But, he cautions, Mr Salvini is “very cynical and very opportunistic. Maybe, ten years from now, nationalism will no longer ‘sell’ and he will have dropped it.”

That is a long way ahead. In the meantime, Mr Salvini’s ability to turn his extremist rhetoric into reality will depend on the degree to which he is circumscribed by his allies and by voters. Before the next election, which he can engineer whenever he wants to, he must decide whether he wants to head a right-wing alliance or stay yoked to M5S. The latter is more moderate, but has so far been unable or unwilling to restrain him. His partners on the right would be Silvio Berlusconi’s drastically weakened Forza Italia and the Brothers of Italy, who are the spiritual heirs of Italian neo-fascism. Neither looks likely to cramp Mr Salvini’s style.

A more effective brake may be the fickle mood of the country. If Mr Salvini is to maintain his poll ratings, the government to which he belongs will have to honour at least some of its election pledges, and especially those that promised an improvement in the living standards of its supporters. That means the universal basic income favoured by the M5S and the lower taxes advocated by the League. The snag is that there is not the money to pay for either—at least not if Italy is to respect its euro-zone commitments. Mr Salvini is surely headed for a big bust-up with Brussels.