Whether it may be a showdown or not, there are very high expectations from today’s Federal Council of the League. This afternoon in Rome will be the first opportunity to understand how much the Carroccio is still to be considered the party of Matteo Salvini, or how much it really is split after the latest criticisms rained down from Giancarlo Giorgetti in the interview collected in the book by Bruno Vespa. The minister and deputy secretary of the League had accused Salvini stopping at the films with Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, instead of following his advice to go further, perhaps higher, aiming for the Oscars with Meryl Streep. Comparisons abound, as well as references to more recent history, with the tears of which the center-right still bears the marks. For example, the now mythological: “What are you doing chase me away?” by Gianfranco Fini to Silvio Berlusconi, this time overturned by a background in the Press that tells of a tense phone call between the two leaguers, during which Salvini would have said to Giorgetti: “If you want, I’ll step aside.” The clash is once again on two visions and two directions that everyone would like to give to the League, with that of populism that seems to prevail and for which Salvini does not seem willing to withdraw. The last signal was the videoconference yesterday, November 3, between the leader of the Northern League with the Hungarian Viktor Orbàn and the Polish Morawiecki, guides of the Visegrad group at the antithesis of that EPP in which Giorgetti would like to accommodate the Northern League in Europe.
The skirmishes within the League will certainly not end today, when Salvini reiterates that: “I’m in charge here”, as all the newspapers anticipate. And the League secretary himself had anticipated that this autumn a season of internal confrontation would open, which should lead to a programmatic assembly by the end of the year. Not a real congress with the election of a new secretary, but at least a restart point after the electoral blows and precisely the controversies that are wearing out the internal relations in the Northern League. At that point there will be very little missing from the campaign for the new tenant of the Quirinale, another issue on which Salvini and Giorgetti seem divided, with the first not excluding, at least in words, focusing on Berlusconi, while the second has even aired a de facto presidentialism with Mario Draghi, able: “to lead the convoy even from the Quirinale”.
