Salvini’s Lega tired of being in shadows, ID clips its wings

In the run-up to next year’s EU elections, Vice-Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s Lega has started an internal reflection to reposition itself in Brussels and finally obtain strategic political positions that until now have been precluded.

Part of the party believes that Lega should distance itself from some of the members of its group in the European Parliament, Identity and Democracy (ID).

“We are in a heterogeneous group, with some allies who are distant from our sensibilities on many issues, it is right to reflect to understand what to do and be incisive”, Lega’s group leader in the Chamber of Deputies Riccardo Molinari told Libero.

According to Molinari, the party’s experience in Italy, where it leads important government ministries, is widely different from what goes in Brussels, where the party is in a group “that entails automatic exclusion from any power to influence”.

However, the party’s federal council, which met a few days ago and will convene again on 29 May, has not yet decided on a plan, and Salvini did not take any explicit position on the matter.

The most obvious route would be to join Manfred Weber’s European People’s Party (EPP), a group Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia already belongs to and towards which Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (ECR) also seems to be approaching. Forza Italia, Fratelli d’Italia and Lega govern Italy since September 2022.

However, Lega has repeatedly attacked the EPP, especially for its close alliance with the Socialists, and has often shown itself as a Eurosceptic political force.

“We have to understand how much having our hands tied in Europe for a sort of coherence to the fact that we have always been, rightly, critical of the ideological, globalist and fundamentally undemocratic choices of Brussels is still compatible with our being a decisive government force”, Molinari explained.

“One can be coherent and faithful to the electoral mandate even by changing positions (…) Even in Europe, it is now perhaps a case of reasoning on how to try not only to denounce the problems but also to solve them and avoid shambles”, he continued.

(Federica Pascale | EURACTIV.it)