Italian populist leader and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has warned that if the sovereigntist and populist parties do not make a breakthrough in European elections next week, some nations could head down the path of becoming Islamic states.
Mr Salvini announced a large-scale rally would be taking place in Milan next week, which will include representatives from various populist and sovereigntist parties such as French Rassemblement National leader Marine Le Pen. Speaking over the weekend following a meeting in Albenga, Salvini stressed the importance of a populist election victory, newspaper Il Giornale reports.
“Either we save Europe now or we leave our children with an Islamic state based on fear and precariousness. And I want a generation that is free and proud,” Salvini said and announced the Milan rally would take place on Saturday in the famous Piazza del Duomo, where Il Giornale claims that up to one hundred thousand people could attend the event.
Over the course of the last year, Salvini has been building new alliances with sovereigntist leaders in central and eastern Europe, including most notably Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban who has referred to Salvini as his “hero” for drastically reducing mass illegal migration on the Mediterranean sea.
Earlier this month the two met again in Hungary, with the Hungarian leader once again praising Salvini just before the visit calling the Italian, as “the most important person in Europe.”
Along with Hungary, Salvini has also built connections with the conservative Law and Justice (PIS) party in Poland, a key ally of Orban.
After the meeting, Salvini said, “I proposed to the leader of PiS Jarosław Kaczyński, and I intend to propose it to others, a pact for Europe… in which Italians, Poles, Spaniards, Danes, and others can decide whether to agree or not. We will work before the elections.”
“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,” he added.
According to some projections, the sovereigntists could end up being the largest political force within the European Parliament with the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank claiming that sovereigntists could make up as much as one-third of the total MEPs in the chamber.
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