“The next European elections will start epochal changes for the future of Europe,” Salvini, the leader of the League party, said in an interview with Russian news agency TASS. Salvini will be participating in the assembly of Russia’s industrial confederation on Wednesday.
He said the CSU party’s defeat in Bavaria was an exceptional phenomenon, ushering in change. “Arrivederci, Merkel,” Salvini said, meaning “goodbye Merkel”. He said her unpopularity was “no coincidence” either, suggesting that voters were rejecting her policies en masse.
“Our opponents says a catastrophe is coming, but this only regards their personal interests. The peoples of Europe will have an unprecedented opportunity to create a new Union of sovereign territories based on democratic principles,” he said.
The European Commission is against the Italian leadership’s plan to allow Italy’s budget deficit to rise to 2.4% of GDP next year.
“I am increasingly convinced that the financial lobbies in Brussels cannot accept our presence in the government,” Salvini noted.
“This reaction does not surprise me. “They have manipulated puppets for years, but now they are forced to deal with two political movements that they cannot blackmail because they don’t own anything to anyone, but defend the interests of their people”.
Salvini also repeated his sharp criticism of Western sanctions against Russia. “Maintaining good relations with Russia is a natural component of the national interest for us,” he said. “Unfortunately, the deterioration in diplomatic relations between the USA, some European countries, and Russia is a complicated problem for Italy, which depends on its membership of certain international structures like the European Union and NATO,” he explained.
“The sanctions on Russia are absurd and we will try to convince our partners,” Salvini said.
The deputy prime minister expressed concern over the split between the Russian and Ukranian Orthodox churches. “We [the EU] have invested €15 billion in Ukraine in recent years. I was terrified when I read that there could be a religious war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian church and the Ukrainian church. Religious wars have never done anyone any good. We know from history when political leaders interfered in religious affairs nothing good ever came out of it,” Salvini said, noting that the Italian media had failed to report on the Ukrainian autocephaly.
“For some, if you work with Russia – you’re almost a criminal. Recently we have seen some mythical stories about spies who poison other ex-spies. It all sounds quite unconvincing,” Salvini added.
In Italy 65 percent of voters are in favour of the euro, but far fewer, only 43 percent, are convinced about the benefits of belonging to the European Union, according to the latest Eurobarometer survey.
The is well down on the European average of 68 percent who believe their countries benefit from being in the EU. Furthermore, if Italy held a referendum on EU membership, only 44 percent said they would vote to remain, compared to an EU average of 66 percent, according to the poll conducted between September 8 and 26, 2018, by Kantar Public.
This is by far the lowest level in the EU, lower even than in Britain. The percentage of Italians who said they were undecided about how they would vote in an EU referendum was 32 percent – the highest in the bloc.
Only 17 percent of the Europeans interviewed said they were in favour of their countries’ leaving the EU.