Salvini is pushing to launch the project by June, when European elections will be held that could make or break his leadership of the League.
The timing will be critical. As electoral support for the League shrinks, Salvini’s party colleagues are running out of patience. All 15 members of one local party association in Lombardy, a League heartland, resigned in protest last month.
“Salvini singlehandedly rewrote the party’s ideology to be nationalist,” said Daniele Albertazzi, professor of politics at the University of Surrey. “It is as if Catalonia autonomists wished to represent people from Madrid. Activists and voters were OK with this, only as long as he was successful.”
In February the party took just 3.7 percent in regional elections in Sardinia. League voters feel betrayed by the party’s forays in the previous legislature into two governments, which forced them to make compromises — for example supporting onerous pandemic rules.
The doubters have found their voice. One MEP, Gianantonio Da Re, was recently kicked out of the party after calling Salvini a cretin. But other League members agree with him.
Paolo Grimoldi, a senior party figure and former MP, said that Da Re’s only mistake was staying quiet for too long. “When ideas, policies, coherence trustworthiness, consensus and loyalty are lacking, you look for … scapegoats, excuses, plots, but the disaster is exclusively your fault,” Grimoldi wrote on Facebook.
