page_title: Matteo Salvini
section_title: Federal Secretary of Lega Nord
hierarchical_section_title: Matteo Salvini / Federal Secretary of Lega Nord
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Discorso di Matteo Salvini alla cena di gala per il 30° anniversario della Lega Nord in provincia di Bergamo.
context_page_description: Matteo Salvini is an Italian politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Minister of the Interior from 1 June 2018 to 5 September 2019. He has also been Federal Secretary of the Northern League since December 2013. He has been a Senator in the Italian Senate since March 2018. He previously served as a Member of the European Parliament for the constituency of North-West Italy from 2004 to 2018.
  He has been considered a hardline Eurosceptic politician, holding a starkly critical view of the European Union, especially of the euro and Islam. Salvini opposes illegal immigration into Italy and the EU as well as the EU's management of asylum seekers. He is also considered one of the main leaders of the populist wave which shook Europe during the 2010s and a member of the neo-nationalist movement, which has a rightist ideology that emphasizes de-globalization, nativist and protectionist stances.
  Salvini is nicknamed "The Captain" by his supporters.
context_section_description: In September 2013, Roberto Maroni, secretary of LN and Salvini's mentor, announced he would soon leave the party's leadership. After a few weeks, Salvini announced his candidacy for the first Lega's leadership election. A congress was scheduled for mid-December and in accordance with the new rules set for the election five candidates filed their bid to become secretary: Umberto Bossi, Giacomo Stucchi, Manes Bernardini, Roberto Stefanazzi and Salvini. Of these, only Bossi and Salvini gathered the 1,000 necessary signatures by party members to take part in the internal "primary", and Salvini collected four times the signatures gathered by Bossi.
  On 7 December 2013 Salvini, who counted on the support of Roberto Maroni and most of the party's senior figures (including Flavio Tosi, who had renounced a bid of his own), defeated Umberto Bossi with 82% of the vote in the "primary". A week later, his election was ratified by the party's federal congress in Turin. Under Salvini, the party embraced a strongly critical view of the European Union, especially of the euro, which he described a "crime against humanity". Ahead of the 2014 European Parliament election, Salvini started to cooperate with Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, and Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom. These moves were criticised by Bossi, who called attention to Salvini's left-wing roots, and Tosi, who represented the party's pro-European wing and defended the euro.
  In April 2014 Salvini presented the party's logo for the European Parliament election, with Basta Euro ("No more Euro") replacing Padania, to emphasize the party's Euroscepticism and desire to exit from the Eurozone. The party included in its slates candidates from other anti-euro and/or autonomist movements (hence Autonomie, meanining "Autonomies"), notably comprising The Freedomites, a right-wing populist and separatist party active in South Tyrol (whose symbol was also included).
  In the European Parliament election the party obtained 6.2% of the vote and 5 MEPs. The result was far worse than the previous EP election in 2009 (a fall of 4.0%), but better than that of the 2013 general election (a gain of 2.1%). The LN were third with 15.2% in Veneto (although Tosi obtained many more votes than Salvini, a fact that demonstrated Tosi's popular support and that the party was far from united on the anti-euro stance), ahead of Forza Italia (FI) and the other parties having emerged from the defunct People of Freedom, and fourth in Lombardy with 14.6%. Despite the party having lost Piedmont to the Democrats, after Roberto Cota had been forced to resign, Salvini was triumphant, with the success of Massimo Bitonci in being elected mayor of Padua, a Democratic stronghold, adding to the successes.
  The party's federal congress, summoned in Padua in July, approved Salvini's political stance, especially a plan for the introduction of a flat tax and the creation of a sister party in central-southern Italy and the Isles. In November the Emilia-Romagna regional election represented a major step for Salvini's "national project": the Lega Nord, which won 19.4% of the vote, was the region's second-largest party, and far ahead of Forza Italia, helping paving the way for the Lega Nord to become the dominant centre-right party. In December the sister party for southern Italy, Us with Salvini (NcS), was launched.
  The party's growing popularity among voters was reflected also in a constant rise in opinion polls. A December 2014 Ipsos poll showed that Salvini's approval rating had increased by from 28% to 33%, "cementing his position as a rising political force in Italy".
  On 28 February 2015, Salvini led a rally in Rome protesting against illegal immigration.
  In March 2015, after a long struggle between the two main Venetian party's leaders Flavio Tosi and Luca Zaia, backed by Salvini, over the formation of the slates for the upcoming regional election in Veneto, Tosi was removed as national secretary of Liga Veneta and ejected from the federal party altogether. Despite this in-fighting, the 2
caption: Matteo Salvini in Bergamo, 2015
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