“We are the ones who are stronger,” League leader Salvini told an audience in Sorbolo, near Parma, at a ceremony for the handover to the finance police of accomodation from property seized from the Calabrian-based ‘Ndrangheta mafia.
“They can hang on for a few months or a few years, but the Mafia, the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta will be wiped off the face of this splendid country. We’ll give our all”.
Last month, Salvini, wearing a white hard hat, personally started the demolition of a luxury villa illegally built in Rome by the a mafia syndicate.
Known as “the Captain” to his supporters, Salvini tweeted a video of him manipulating the digger. “The captain activates the bulldozer!” he announced as he sat behind the levers of a digger and knocked down parts of the roof of the villa before the Italian army moved in to demolish the building.
The property will be turned into a children’s playground, Salvini said. Eight other villas belonging to the Casamonica mob were also confiscated, Reuters reported.
Salvini has promised to take on not only illegal immigration but also organised crime. He said that the authorities will go after the mafia “neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, villa by villa and shop by shop”.
In July he sued Italy’s well-known anti-mafia writer over his “minister of the underworld” tweet, after Roberto Saviano complained about Salvini’s hardline migration policy. Saviano has lived under armed guard since publishing his mafia bestseller Gomorrah in 2006.
“I filed a lawsuit against Saviano, as promised,” said Salvini. “I accept any criticisms, but I do not allow anyone to say that I help the mafia.” The Interior Minister has also threatened to remove the author’s police protection.
Saviano, a critic of Salvini, tweeted an image of dead bodies floating in the Mediterranean, suggesting Salvini derived “pleasure” from seeing the image.
“Italians are going backwards, socially, amid an upsurge of nationalism that displays racist animus against anything perceived to be an alien body,” he told the Guardian.
But official figures from ISTAT released on Tuesday meanwhile show that Italian people have little faith in the country’s mainstream political parties, with citizens giving them a confidence rating of 2,4 out of 10 on average.
The statistics agency said confidence in parliament and the justice system was low too, with average marks of 3,4 and 4,2 respectively. The institutions involved in security, rescue and civil protection came out well of the study, however.
The fire brigade, for example, got an average score of 7,3 out of 10.