With Salvini, Italian ‘Brexit’ is not impossible – Enrico Letta
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League chief Matteo Salvini’s call for snap Italian elections after he turned on his own coalition partner faced mounting resistance on Sunday, with both his former 5-Star ally and the centre-left opposition seeking to put the brakes on.
Matteo Salvini, who has plunged Italy into turmoil by pulling out of a coalition government, could eventually take the country out of the EU, former prime minister Enrico Letta warned on Sunday.
“One day, he can say he wants Europe, the next that he wants to leave. With Salvini, an Italian ‘Brexit’ is not impossible,” said Letta, who was Italy’s premier between April 2013 and February 2014.
Both the League and M5S campaigned in the 2018 elections on anti-EU platform, but have since stepped back from demands to exit the eurozone single currency bloc.
But on Saturday, Salvini said that pulling the country out of either the euro or the European Union “has never been in the works.”
“The political chaos in Italy is complete and it’s linked to the failure of this government majority,” said Letta — the former head of the centre-left Democratic Party — in an impromptu interview at Lamezia Terme airport in southern Italy.
Salvini ended the 14-month-old ruling alliance on Thursday, saying afterwards he had had enough of working with the M5S led by Luigi di Maio and what he said was its refusal to work together on key issues.
Letta called Salvini a “big opportunist” whose path was “not only sovereignist and racist,” but whose “anti-migrant, anti-integration” ideas were becoming more widely accepted.
