Whether they’re camped outside in freezing temperatures or stranded at sea, Matteo Salvini exhibits little sympathy for the asylum seekers blocked at European borders. The Italian far-right leader, who as interior minister attempted to stop NGO rescue boats landing in Italian ports, in one case leading to criminal charges, will travel to Warsaw next month in a show of solidarity with his Polish allies who have deployed hardcore tactics to ward off thousands of refugees trying to enter from Belarus.

“I think that Europe is realising that illegal immigration is dangerous,” Salvini told the Guardian in an interview conducted before 27 people drowned attempting to cross the Channel in an inflatable boat. “So maybe this shock will be useful.”

The Poland border crisis is the perfect opportunity for Salvini to reignite his faded rightwing populist star as he plots his strategy for Italy’s next general election, which is slated for 2023 but could come sooner. An earlier attempt to capitalise on soaring opinion poll ratings by collapsing his League party’s coalition with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and forcing fresh elections spectacularly backfired, instead sending the party into opposition, but in a peculiar twist of events it returned to government in February as part of an emergency administration led by the former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi.

Salvini once accused Draghi of being “complicit in the massacre of our economy” for his role in saving the euro. Nowadays he says Draghi is “very good”, especially when it comes to protecting Italy’s interests abroad.

But Salvini, described by some as a political chameleon, is also very much in campaign mode, resorting to his tried and tested formula of immigration, nativism and Euroscepticism before the election.

Read the full story here:- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/25/matteo-salvini-interview-far-right-migration

Credit:- theguardian