Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has welcomed the new alliance between Italian populist Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and Poland’s conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS).
Interior Minister Salvini met with PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, and Interior Minister Joachim Brudziński in Warsaw on Wednesday, proposing an alliance between his League (Lega) party and the Polish conservatives to counter the “French-German axis” ahead of the EU Parliament elections in May.
The proposal of an alliance between the populist conservatives in Rome and Warsaw has been met with support from Prime Minister Orbán who remarked at a press conference that “the Warsaw-Rome axis is a great development, great hopes are tied to it”.
He praised Salvini, saying “he was the first politician to say that migration across the sea can also be stopped.”
The Hungarian leader also reiterated his previous statement about Salvini saying being a “hero”, saying he still thought this way.
When asked about his own party, Fidesz, and its current membership in the “centre-right” European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament — which includes the likes of Angela Merkel’s CDU — Orbán said “Fidesz is a member of the EPP [and] as long as we are members we will always be loyal to our party family.”
He added, however, that “The question of migration does not limit itself to the boundaries of political parties.”
While Salvini has been forging alliances with supporters of sovereignty across the EU, in Italy some in his Five Star Movement coalition partners are more sceptical, including Under-secretary for Foreign Affairs Manlio Di Stefano, who said: ” if the Salvini model is that of Orbán, it is clear that it can not be ours.”
Following his meetings in Warsaw, Salvini said: “The goal is that with the next European elections to the European Parliament the Sovranisti [the ‘sovereigntists’] will be the number one political movement and become a fundamental part of the next Parliament.”
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