The New Populist Playbook
In May, Matteo Salvini, then the interior minister and deputy prime minister in Italy’s first populist government, stood in front of a Milan cathedral with other European far-right politicians, holding a rosary, and called for a defense of Christian Europe against its replacement by foreigners. In August, he campaigned and DJed—shirtless, cross around his neck, mojito in hand—at a beach club where female dancers in low-cut leopard-print bathing suits gyrated to the Italian national anthem. Throughout, his social-media accounts posted a steady stream of videos of cats, dogs, food, and immigrants behaving badly.
Salvini’s formula has been to combine tough “us versus them” talk on immigration and emotional, yet vague, defenses of national identity with an Italian-everyman relatability. “Buongiorno, amici!” is his standard form of address. “Hello, friends!” After each rally, Salvini poses for selfies, sometimes for hours. Every selfie a vote, is his strategy. His clever use of social media—his Facebook page has more overall engagement than President Donald Trump’s—has helped him build a cult of personality that’s painstakingly curated so as to make him seem unscripted. His popularity has allowed him to transcend his party, the right-wing League, and become the face of Italy, eclipsing the prime minister in the public imagination.
In 15 months as the junior member of the government, Salvini’s relentless campaigning—while interior minister—helped his party double its standing in opinion polls, clearly outpacing any other party, including his former coalition partner, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. The League placed first in Italy in elections for the European Parliament in May, with 34 percent of the vote. All the while, Salvini has shrugged off unanswered questions about the League’s ties to Russia and whether he really wants Italy to stay in the euro.
The seemingly unstoppable momentum emboldened Salvini to put his popularity to the test. He withdrew his party’s support for the government, forcing a crisis in a bid for new elections that he hoped would make him prime minister of the first far-right government of a major European power. He didn’t get his wish this time. Instead, the Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party—one representing the populist anti-establishment, the other the establishment—put aside their long-standing mutual animosity to form the strangest new government in recent Italian history, one with a sole purpose: to block Salvini.
Salvini may have miscalculated—out of hubris, perhaps—yet he is still at the forefront of Italian and European politics; he is the center of gravity, the man whom rivals fear most. The rise of this charismatic former talk-radio host, political chameleon, and turbocharged techno-populist is instructive, and marks a new and notable chapter of democracy in the age of social media. Salvini has swiftly and dramatically changed the culture in Italy, humanizing far-right rhetoric and making public discourse and the mood on the street rougher and more aggressive. He is not simply a Donald Trump facsimile in Europe, nor merely the archetype of an angry anti-immigrant nationalist in the Viktor Orbán mold. Salvini has been writing an entirely new playbook for 21st-century populism.
More than a Mediterranean hothouse, Italy has always been a political laboratory, a harbinger of things to come. Its revolutions have all been right-wing—from fascism to futurism to Silvio Berlusconi. Yet what has been unfolding with Salvini has implications beyond Italy, across Europe and for other democracies. More than any other politician in the world today, he has been testing the relationship between clicks and consensus—whether slow-moving institutions in Italy and Europe, to say nothing of rival political parties, can withstand the use of lightning-fast, reactive social media. Whereas Trump has used Twitter, both while campaigning and in office, to set the news agenda, Salvini goes a step further. He uses it to bring his supporters closer to him, making them feel as though he is one of them. While Trump’s rallies are where he seems to feel most at home, for Salvini it is also the moments after, when he spends hours, arm extended, taking selfies with his supporters. And though Trump’s social-media missives give off an air of haphazard responsiveness, Salvini’s are part of a well-honed machine that has given significant thought to experimenting with whether Facebook likes translate into votes.
In many ways, Salvini, whose supporters call him “,” or “the captain,” is a product of circumstance. Berlusconi, who stepped down as prime minister in 2011, paved the way. His Forza Italia was also a charismatic movement and stunted the growth of a non-personality-driven Italian right. It was Berlusconi’s private television networks that created a viewership that then became an electorate years before Trump did the same with . On his watch, Italy’s economy lost years—it has barely grown in two decades—and its electorate, already cynical, became even more disillusioned. Then came Trump, who emboldened nativist copycats worldwide. Salvini shares a siege mentality with Trump. He has championed that legalizes shooting intruders in self-defense, that would allow chemical castration of rapists. What the southern border is to Trump, ports are to Salvini, and he has to what he calls an “invasion” of immigrants entering the country illegally.
