Salvini’s 10 years at the helm of the League
How the League has changed with Matteo Salvini. Paola Sacchi's note
“Matteo Salvini, M10 Capitano”, the 20-minute video given by the League to the federal secretary for the first 10 years of his leadership, on the occasion of the anniversary of the election on 15 December 2013, is opened by Roberto “Bobo” Maroni. That already in 2012, on the day of his debut as successor secretary of the "Gran Capo Padano" Umberto Bossi, the founder of the Northern League, at the Assago congress he had indicated Salvini as his successor.
In the League, a structured party with well-planted roots "because Bossi wanted it that way" (Maroni in an interview with myself on Panorama ) nothing ever happens by chance. If they had got right all the predictions and the most imaginative backstories churned out in recent years by the so-called newspapers, often with phrases and suppositions put into the mouths of anonymous "Po Valleys", this video wouldn't be there. The Salvini era, reveals Giancarlo Giorgetti, "was not born in a hut, but under a tent, with a pact between me, Bobo and Matteo, to whom we said: now it's your turn, you have the right energy to refresh the League". Bobo: “Matteo is the best of all”.
The League, shaken by the Belsito case, had reached an all-time low, just over 3 percent. Maroni, as an experienced and refined politician, was immediately aware of the fact that his would be a transitional secretariat. Giorgetti, the Gianni Letta of all the leaders of the League, starting with Bossi, has always, with a touch of complacency, made his motto: "I don't have the charisma to be a leader". Giorgetti, League man par excellence, a pragmatic party with administrators as its flagship, knows well that "the team wins". Because roles and functions are there for everyone, in what Maroni loved to define as "the last Leninist party", obviously not in content, but in scheme.
He says that the team always wins at the end, emotionally thanking Salvini for the video. Improvisations in Via Bellerio, the historic headquarters in Milan, are not in fashion. The boss is the boss. And Bossi himself, known as Capo with a capital C, was not discouraged. He resigned. From Northern League to National League, according to Matteo. But always enhancing territorial autonomies, with new energy. As recalled by the Northern League governors who alternate in the video, from Luca Zaia (Veneto) to Attilio Fontana (Lombardy), Massimiliano Fedriga (Friuli), Maurizio Fugatti (Trentino) recently reconfirmed. According to Matteo, the bet of the national party broke through the "wall" of the "Dio Po".
“Salvini, the man who saved the League”, Vittorio Feltri immediately headlined. Salvini's strategic collaborator, Senator Andrea Paganella, recalls this in the video. Governors of non-historical Northern League origins also alternate: Donatella Tesei (Umbria), who recalls the great novelty of the victory over the "government of the left for 50 years"; Christian Solinas (Sardinia) who praises “Matteo's great challenge in trusting me, the historic autonomist Sardinian Action Party. Two presences which, in the Northern League liturgy, reiterate that Salvini, as he has already said, intends to confirm them both at the helm of Umbria and Sardinia, where there will be elections next year. Clear message to center-right allies.
Then, the new "friends", those who for Salvini "don't need to have the League card", like the Minister of the Interior, his successor at the Interior Ministry, Matteo Piantedosi, Salvini's former head of cabinet, who recognizes him: " Friendliness and determination." There is Giuseppe Valditara, Minister of Education and Merit, indicated by the League, at the center of recent controversies on the committee for education in relationships, coming from AN, who praises Salvini's bet to make the League a national party. Party with Autonomy in its DNA as Zaia recalls with the minister Roberto Calderoli. “Now the project is coming to fruition,” they say.
But who, in addition to "Bobo" and Giorgetti, immediately believed in that young activist who joined the League as a boy, was elected city councilor in Milan, "the only one of us who also made it among the well-heeled kids of Via della Spiga" (he recognized with the undersigned years ago the bossian Marco Reguzzoni)? The president of the Chamber, the Venetian Lorenzo Fontana, in his role as deputy secretary of the Northern League, recalls that several years ago he named "Matteo" with the program "La Zanzara": "I responded like this when they asked me who would come after Bossi and I took it ”. “Nobody believed in us,” says the other deputy secretary, former youth leader, the thirty-year-old Andrea Crippa, of the triad of deputy secretaries with Giorgetti, already a collaborator in Brussels with Salvini, MEP, with whom he shared a microscopic apartment.
Crippa went on an adventurous electoral campaign in a camper with “Matteo”. Paganella remembers "the emotion of that day at the Quirinale when with Luca Morisi (former social media manager affected by an affair that was later archived, "in reality they wanted to hit me", said "the captain") we accompanied Matteo to be sworn in as Minister of the Interior and deputy prime minister". And he adds: "Matteo, you have another ten years to govern, remember to rest every now and then." Luca Toccalini, youth secretary: "Thanks to Salvini there are many of them in parliament too." We move on to the yellow-green or yellow-blue government where "we discovered that Giuseppe Conte was actually already connecting with the Democratic Party and Salvini was right to pull the plug", claims Riccardo Molinari, group leader in the Chamber.
The images of the 2019 rally in Pescara appear, and not in Papeete according to popular belief, where Salvini pulled the plug: “Conte you are making an agreement with the left and the Democratic Party. But the League does not forgive." The group leader in the Senate Massimiliano Romeo defends that choice and the National League project, "going beyond the Northern agglomeration". The group leader of the EU delegation Marco Campomenosi speaks on the "results in Europe". In the video there is also the original Matteo. The one, told by Alessandra Locatelli, Minister for Disabilities, who "went alone and little known to hold rallies on a bench in the park and at the markets".
The "Matteo" that few had imagined would become leader of the League. And now part of the press had already imagined that he would be replaced by this or that of the Northern League elite. But not the historic "legologist" journalist Rodolfo Sala of "Repubblica" who in unsuspecting times asked him to write a first autobiography, evidently knowing the tenacity that distinguishes him: "In that autobiography Salvini already imagined for himself a leading role in centre-right". A surprise in the video is Salvini's son, Federico: "Hi dad, for me and Mirta (the other daughter ed. ) you are an example for your stubborn and contrary navigation, as your beloved Fabrizio De André says". The images of Salvini's partner, Francesca Verdini, scroll by. The ones with Bossi and Silvio Berlusconi. With the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the other Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani. We can't see one from Mario Draghi, to whose government Salvini decided to contribute, adhering to the head of state's call for responsibility. Which, however, certainly earned him the cold attitude if not hostility of the former president of the ECB.
It is not known what "SuperMario" wants to do when he grows up in the EU and if he wants to do it. However, it does not seem that he will have Salvini among his most fervent supporters. The European Championships will be a race with proportional representation and Matteo "hard headed", a leader who falls and gets back up, the challenge to make the League grow again has already begun some time ago.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/matteo-salvini-dieci-anni-lega/ on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 08:32:52 +0000.