It would be a fatal mistake for the
right-wing League party to split in Europe with its domestic
allies, Premier Giorgia Meloni's right-wing Brothers of Italy
(FdI) and Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani's
centre-right Berlusconist Forza Italia (FI) party, League leader
Matteo Salvini told a rally of the right-wing Identity and
Democracy (ID) European caucus members in Florence Sunday,
saying a united centre-right front would boot out 'squatters' at
next year's European Parliament elections.
"The centre-right in Europe can only bring about a revolution if
it is united, not a small Italian political polemic," Salvini
said at the end of the convention of the 'sovereignists' and
allied parties of the League in Europe.
"The Italian government is not in question and will govern for
the full five years that the Italians voted for us.
"I work very well with Giorgia and Antonio and I am planning
infrastructures that need years to move forward (the Messina
Bridge, ed.).
"But to my friends on the centre-right I say: just as we are
taking Italy by the hand to bring it back to growth, it would be
a fatal mistake to divide the centre-right in Europe".
While the League spearheads ID, Fdi leads the Tory-founded
European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) caucus and FI is in
the centre-right European People's Party (EPP).
Tajani this week ruled out an alliance featuring rightist
anti-Islam Dutch election winner Geert Wilders.
The European Union is occupied by squatters and the united
centre right can and will free it, Salvini told the rally,
eyeing a historic win at next year's EP elections.
"Next year, for the first time in the history of the European
institutions, the united and determined centre-right can free
Brussels from those who occupy it illegally," Salvini told the
Free Europe! event.
Tajani has ruled out working with some ID members including most
recently Wilders.
"Tajani is wrong to say that he will never team up with Marine
Le Pen and Alternative for Germany (AfD)," Salvini told the
rally, at which Le Pen, leader of France's National Rally, said
"we are movements of democratic and patriotic resistance".
Salvini told the rally that it was not a political alliance as
much as a friendship.
"Today there is not a political and party alliance but a feeling
of friendship: on this stage there have been leaders who, like
in a love and professional story, experience ups and downs. It
has happened in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy," he said.
"But Identity and Democracy is there and will be decisive in
Europe because no one has ever abandoned a friend momentarily in
difficulty, it is too easy to ally oneself only with those who
win", said Salvini, closing the convention of the sovereignists
and allied parties of the League in Europe.
"The League is there, it is winning and it will win, in the face
of those who have wished us the end more than once", he said.
ID is not a black anti-EU building site but a blue wave hoping
to reform the bloc, he said.
"Today (here) there is the top party in France, the Netherlands,
Austria, and Belgium, the second party in Germany and an Italian
government party," Salvini said.
"We aren't a black building site, on the contrary, there is a
blue wave.
"The data tell us that today we are the fourth biggest political
force at the European Parliament.
"The objective is to get into third place, to become decisive.
"We are offering our contribution (to reform)".
Salvini added that ID would grow further; that its idea was a
Europe based on work, and that the Italian government was not
called into question because its constituent parties had
different allies in Europe.
Most of the ID members' leaders were present in Florence apart
from Wilders who is too busy with government formation efforts
after his anti-Islami PVV came top in the recent Dutch
elections.
ID is an alliance of nationalist, right-wing populist and
eurosceptic European political parties founded in 2014.
The party has been described as both right-wing and far-right.
It also includes Danish, Flemish, Estonian and Czech members,
among others.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
