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ROME — The message was lost on no one when Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s xenophobic Northern League, slid a black T-shirt over his button-down white work shirt to address a crowd in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo on Saturday, calling for the overthrow of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in one of the most visceral anti-government, anti-Europe demonstrations the Italian capital has seen in years.
The square was full of followers, many from Italy’s extreme right group Casa Pound, which has been compared to Greece’s Golden Dawn party. Some waved the Russian flag, others held signs with black-and-white photos of Italy’s favorite fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, whose Black Shirts proved to be the most influential political force in Italian history. Flags with the black Celtic cross—a universal sign for neo-Nazis—fluttered in the wind above the crowd. “The problem isn’t Renzi,” Salvini said. “Renzi is a pawn. Renzi is a dumb slave at the disposal of nameless people who want to control all of our lives from Brussels.” The crowd roared.
Salvini, at 42, is a charismatic—albeit unnervingly intense—political figure whose growing popularity is setting him on a trajectory toward a power showdown with the differently charismatic Renzi, who came to power in a quintessentially Italian power play last February. Salvini cut his political teeth as a youth leader in Italy’s Northern League party in Milan, which has long held openly xenophobic, anti-Euro, separatist views. Salvini was elected to lead the main party in 2013 after Umberto Bossi reluctantly handed over the reins amid numerous unseemly corruption scandals and failing health.
Lest there be any doubt about just what Salvini stands for, it should be noted that his honored guest at Saturday’s protest was supposed to be Marine Le Pen, head of France’s National Front who had invited him to address her rally in November and with whom Salvini shares a vast number of views. Le Pen apparently had last-minute commitments that kept her in France, but she has emphatically endorsed the Italian leader in the past. “He sends me into ecstasy,” Le Pen told a National Front rally last November when she introduced him. “He is an extremely brave man. Would he make a good prime minister? Why not?”