‘Fascist? No! I’m a federalist’

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.

Comic demagogue Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement tops the polls on 27 per cent. But it cannot win because it refuses to join coalitions. Ex-prime minister Matteo Renzi’s post-communist Partito Democratico is second on 25 per cent, but is dogmeat after five years of failure and three unelected premiers (including him).

We had gone outside to smoke at my suggestion (Salvini instantly agreed) and we got on like a house on fire, as smokers invariably do these days. Salvini, 44, is a big smoker and has a fairly big beard, too. I’d spent a week following him around Sicily before last month’s regional elections in what was a dress rehearsal for the national campaign. Who wins Sicily, wins Italy. The coalition of the right won hands-down.

Lega was founded in 1989 to detach northern Italy (La Padania) from everything south of ‘Roma Ladra’ (thieving Rome).