Italy’s Salvini seeks to unite right at Rome rally

Italy’s former firebrand interior minister Matteo Salvini held a mass rally in Rome on Saturday which he hopes will propel him to leadership of the country’s disparate right-wing parties.

A crowd of over 100,000 people thronged the Rome piazza, ferried in from around the country by eight special trains and 400 coaches for the “Italian Pride” demonstration.

“We were right to abandon this government,” the head of the far-right League party thundered, after speeches by a string of far-right leaders as well as billionaire former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The anti-migrant Salvini pulled support from the previous populist government over the summer in a bid to spark elections he was convinced he could win to govern the eurozone’s third-largest economy alone.

That plan failed when his former coalition partner, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, sealed a deal with the centre-left Democratic Party to form a new, pro-European government.

After suffering a blip, the League’s popularity has risen slightly again in the opposition role Salvini is more used to.

“I want to live in a free country, where you can govern without waiting for a phone call from (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel or (French President Emmanuel) Macron,” the eurosceptic Salvini said.

Recent opinion polls put the anti-immigration party at between 30 to 33 percent of voter intentions, well ahead of the Five Star (M5S) and Democratic Party (PD), which have dropped slightly to between 18 and 20 percent each.

With the current left-leaning government seeking to change the electoral law to prevent Salvini triumphing alone at the next elections, the 46-year-old hopes to unite parties on the right and centre-right under his leadership.

That, however, will not be an easy task.

Forza Italia head Berlusconi, 83, whose party has been in a lengthy slump, appears open to just such an alliance, along with the smaller, far-right Brothers of Italy.

“We’re here in this piazza because we have a big responsibility, to answer our people’s call for unity,” Berlusconi said, attacking the current government as “the most left-wing” since the war.

Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni, who had earlier complained that only League banners were visible on the podium, vowed to fight what she called “the Islamisation of Europe”.