Salvini Sets Course for European Vote After New Regional Win

(Bloomberg) -- Italy’s Matteo Salvini scored the latest in a series of wins in a regional vote, while another dismal performance by his national government partner cast doubt on the future of the fractious populist coalition.

Vito Bardi, the candidate for the center-right alliance including the League and Forza Italia party of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, got 42 percent in the southern region of Basilicata, an area that has long been a stronghold of the center-left.

The League, which is allied with the center-right in regional and local governments across Italy, obtained 19 percent of the vote, final results show. Salvini swiftly trumpeted the result as a sign of success in upcoming European Parliament elections in late May.

“The League tripled its votes in one year winning also in Basilicata,” Salvini commented on Monday. “Best regards to the Left and it’s now time to change in Europe too,” he added in reference to the European vote.

Salvini is portraying the European contest as a clash between forces defending national sovereignty and establishment groups seeking a more integrated European Union, including French President Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche party and Brussels bureaucrats.

European Target

Salvini’s foreign affairs adviser Marco Zanni said on Sunday that the League and like-minded parties aim for as many as 140 seats to become the third force in the European parliament as part of an Alliance of European People and Nations, according to comments cited by Italian newswire AdnKronos.

Salvini will launch the manifesto for these parties at a news conference by mid-April in Rome or Milan and will be joined by leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen and parties such as Germany’s right-wing AfD and Spain’s Vox among others, according to Zanni.

A series of victories in regional elections for the center-right have triggered speculation that Salvini could seek to force early elections to claim the prime minister’s post. Salvini himself has repeatedly denied he would do this, insisting he will stick with Five Star for the whole life of the current Rome-based parliament.

The Five Star party of fellow Deputy Premier Luigi Di Maio suffered yet another blow in Basilicata as it slumps in a series of regional elections this year and in national opinion polls. Its candidate obtained 20 percent of the votes compared with the 44 percent that the party got in Basilicata in the general elections held in March of last year.

Nationally, Five Star fell to 21 percent support in an SWG survey last week, narrowly overtaken by the center-left Democratic Party for the first time since 2017.

Recent local elections did not show a “brilliant performance” from Five Star, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in an interview with La Stampa published on Monday. He added that the local vote result doesn’t amount to a threat to the government stability.

The center-left candidate obtained 33 percent of the vote with the Democratic Party, the alliance’s main force and the biggest opposition party in the Italian parliament, getting just under 8 percent.

Salvini campaigned heavily in Basilicata ahead of Sunday’s vote, boycotting a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Rome to flag his displeasure at Five Star’s embrace of the Asian giant.

Salvini’s score in Basilicata extends his efforts to turn the League into a national party. It was Salvini who changed the name of a party previously called the Northern League, and which used to campaign for northern secession.

To contact the reporters on this story: John Follain in Rome at jfollain2@bloomberg.net;Lorenzo Totaro in Rome at ltotaro@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Kevin Costelloe, Jerrold Colten

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