Matteo Salvini and Marine Le Pen are joining with allies to create what may be the third-largest bloc in the European Parliament
Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini led a rally of his European far-right allies in front of Milan’s Gothic cathedral on Saturday. He pledged to change history after this week’s EU elections by making the populist alliance one of the largest groupings in the European parliament.
Flanked by France’s Marine Le Pen and leaders from nine other nationalist parties, Salvini began his speech to the packed Piazza del Duomo by quoting the British writer GK Chesterton: “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him but because he loves what is behind him.” He added that his group would remould Europe “not for our sake, but for our children”.
“There are no extremists, racists or fascists in this square,” he claimed. “The extremists are those who have governed Europe for 20 years in the names of poverty and precarity.” Protesters opposed to Salvini’s rally converged on Milan’s Sempione Park, while people hung banners that announced “Milan is anti-fascist” from their windows. Giuseppe Sala, the city’s centre-left mayor, said: “Nationalists won’t take the city.”
Salvini, who leads the far-right League, and Le Pen, leader of National Rally, are pushing for their Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group to become the European parliament’s third biggest party after the forthcoming elections.
Other speakers, including Geert Wilders from the Netherlands’ Party of Freedom, Anders Vistisen from the Danish People’s party and Jörg Meuthen from Germany’s AfD, stuck to the common rhetoric, invariably championing a crackdown on illegal immigration while “protecting European civilisation”. At the same time they maintained a barrage of attacks on Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker.