(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Matteo Salvini comes across as a Trump-like agitator, but when it comes to politics he likes to play the long game.
Italy’s home affairs minister and deputy prime minister scored a significant political victory on Monday when parliament passed a security law which will make it harder to rescue immigrants at sea. His League is polling just below 40%, a remarkable success for a party which only gained 17% in last year’s general election. And yet, Salvini refuses to trigger an election, which could propel him to become prime minister and cement the role of the League as the dominant force in Italian politics.
His patience rests, above all, on the ineptitude of the Five Star Movement, which is nominally the League’s senior partner in Italy’s coalition government. Under the leadership of Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s other deputy prime minister, the anti-establishment movement has imploded at record speed. It is now polling around 15%, less than half of its result last year, and trails well behind the center-left Democratic Party. Five Star lawmakers appear increasingly reluctant to challenge the League’s agenda, as a new election could cost them their parliamentary seats. On Wednesday, they will vote for a parliamentary motion opposing a high-speed train link between the northern Italian city of Turin and Lyon in France – a project Five Star has long resisted – but the government intends to go ahead with it anyway. In a sense, they are the best coalition partner Salvini can hope for.
The opposition is also offering little resistance. Forza Italia, which was the League’s main ally in last year’s election but is now in the minority, is melting away as the leadership of an ageing Silvio Berlusconi fades. Salvini is gambling that he can continue to peel off voters from Forza Italia to the League so that he doesn’t have to rely on Berlusconi in the future. The Democratic Party is bitterly divided between its current leader, Nicola Zingaretti, and former prime minister Matteo Renzi. There is no prospect it will bounce back any time soon. A more effective opposition would find it easy to drive a wedge between the League and Five Star and undermine support for the government.
Most importantly, Salvini appears more interested in his popularity than in policy. He revels in tweeting on pretty much anything – from the beer he is drinking to celebrating the birthday of the Virgin Mary – and in DJ-ing shirtless in a beach club on Italy’s coast. But when one looks at how much of the League’s program he has actually implemented, voters have little to celebrate.
Take economic policy. The League has failed to deliver on its pledge to bring in a “flat tax” to lower Italy’s notoriously high rates. Instead, the tax burden has increased in the first three months of this year to 38% of gross domestic product from 37.7% in the same period of 2018, according to Italy’s statistics office. Salvini has also failed to deliver on a law which would give greater autonomy to Italy’s northern regions – the League’s electoral base – because of opposition from Five Star, which fears losing support in the South.
Finally, ahead of last year’s elections, Salvini pledged he would take Italy out of the euro. But not only is the country still a member of the monetary union, support for the euro is rising, according to the latest Eurobarometer survey. His anti-EU rhetoric so far hasn’t been matched by concrete action. On Tuesday, he insisted Italy could ignore European budget rules next year to deliver tax cuts and more investments. Yet his tough talk came just a month after the government softened its stance towards the bloc and agreed to cut the deficit by 7.6 billion euros ($8.5 billion) to meet the EU’s 2% deficit target this year. Salvini enjoys hitting the decks, but when it comes to tax-and-spending decisions, he is very much dancing to Brussels’ tune.
The League’s ineffectiveness may matter little to voters for now, but it risks undermining Salvini’s waiting game. The longer this government lasts, the higher the risk that voters look beyond the tweets and realize it hasn’t achieved very much at all. For now, it’s only the Italian economy that’s stagnating – but it doesn’t take much for political support to follow suit.
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Ferdinando Giugliano writes columns on European economics for Bloomberg Opinion. He is also an economics columnist for La Repubblica and was a member of the editorial board of the Financial Times.
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