The man who could become Italy’s next prime minister is sat just opposite the entrance to the huge US and Nato airbase near Catania in Sicily at a hotel confiscated from the Mafia. It’s not Silvio Berlusconi, no matter how much the British press tells us that ‘Berlusconi is Back!’ Silvio Il Magnifico (as I call him) cannot be prime minister because he is banned from public office after his four-year jail sentence for tax fraud in 2012 (commuted to a year’s community service in an old people’s home).
No, the man I’m talking to is Matteo Salvini, leader of Lega, the leading party on the right (15 per cent, give or take, in the polls), just ahead of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (14 per cent), whose support has collapsed since the good old days. Together with the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia (5 per cent), they have enough support to win a working majority at the election, when Italians will attempt to empower their first elected prime minister since Berlusconi was forced to resign in 2011.
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