Italy’s Most Powerful Populist Rules From the Beach
SABAUDIA, Italy — Like a nationalist gone wild, Matteo Salvini took off his shirt, picked up his mojito and partied with Spring Break abandon.
In the D.J. booth of the Papeete Beach club on the Adriatic coast, Mr. Salvini, Italy’s interior minister, spun Italian rap music and joked with his boys as strutting go-go dancers in skimpy leopard skin bathing suits solemnly put their hands on their hearts during the playing of the national anthem. He blew kisses as fans chanted his name as if it were the song of the summer.
For much of August, Mr. Salvini, 46, a populist Everyman with a talent for expressing Italy’s id, whether he’s scarfing down Nutella or locking out migrants, has moved the seat of Italian government to the beach chair. After weeks of a highly visible vacation in Milano Marittima, Mr. Salvini, was rested and ready to force a government crisis that could make him prime minister.
“Like in a marriage, when you spend more time arguing than getting along and making love, it’s better to look each other in the eye and make the choice that two adults should make,” Mr. Salvini said at a political rally in the beach town of Sabaudia Wednesday night, noting that, as a divorcee, he had experience in the subject.
Then on Thursday, he did just that. He took a break from the beach just long enough to go to Rome and announce that he’d had enough of his coalition government with the populist Five Star Movement. Less a love affair than a marriage of convenience, they were over.
The announcement could potentially set the stage for elections in the fall, which meant a summer full of Mr. Salvini’s favorite activity — campaigning — in the country’s beloved beach clubs, seashores and vacation villages.
“They gave me a hard time because I went on vacation in Milano Marittima,” he said in this beach town Wednesday night, where he talked up the sandy beaches. “I confess this culpa” for cocktails and music and dancing and promised, he said dismissively. “Next time you see me, I hope to come back in my bathing suit, with the paunch.”
The paunch. In a country full of paunch proverbs, (“A man without a paunch is like a sky without stars”) Mr. Salvini has made his soft stomach a validator of his Made-in-Italy authenticity and a feature of his common touch. But also his muscle. It has become Italy’s ultimate power paunch.
“A man with a paunch,” he said in Sabaudia on Wednesday, “is a man with substance.”
This summer, Mr. Salvini’s midriff has moved to the center of Italy’s navel-gazing political universe. (“The Chic Little Tummy vs the Proletarian Paunch” read the front page of Tuesday’s Libero, a hard-right newspaper based in Milan that took Mr. Salvini’s side.) Opponents found Mr. Salvini’s naked torso unfit for his high office.
“Mussolini did something like this, but he was in better shape,” said Achille Occhetto, the last leader of Italy’s Communist Party, as he vacationed at Bagno delle Donne, a beach club in Tuscany. With his own paunch curving out of his unbuttoned shirt, the leftist said that the country had momentarily gone mad. “Salvini makes us all watch him on vacation,” he said. “It’s absurd.”
Other critics started quoting Article 54 of the Italian Constitution (“The citizens entrusted with public office have the duty to adhere to it with discipline and honor”) and a Wikipedia user momentarily amended its entry for the Interior Ministry to read “the current minister is Matteo Salvini, his duties include the organization of beach parties where he presides over D.J. consoles.” Photos on the web contrasted a shirtless Mr. Salvini with the former prime minister Aldo Moro walking the beach in a suit, tie and black shoes.
There were plenty of images of Mr. Salvini to choose from, because this wasn’t the first year Mr. Salvini has vacationed at Papeete, owned by Massimo Casanova, who has been elected to the European Parliament as a representative of his League party.
Mr. Salvini sticking his tongue out in selfies next to women in black bikinis and men in mirrored sunglasses? Check.
Mr. Salvini staring into, or below, the eyes of a bikini-clad woman dancing on a raised platform? Check.
Mr. Salvini holding a mojito next to a guy in a “Party Crusher” cap? Double check.
But much of that predated his ascent to real power. And while Mr. Salvini’s style of R & R bothered much of the establishment, it was his power trips on the beach that really upset them.
In one beach town, he dodged a reporter’s questions about whether the League had negotiated for funding from Russia with a flippant, “My friend, it’s Aug. 3.”
When a reporter with the left-leaning La Repubblica filmed Mr. Salvini’s teenage son riding a police jet ski (Mr. Salvini oversees the country’s police, and often dresses in their uniforms), men in bathing suits who identified themselves as police officers harassed him.
At a subsequent news conference, at Mr. Salvini’s Papeete headquarters, the reporter asked who exactly had threatened him. Mr. Salvini responded by accusing the reporter of enjoying filming children and offered to “take you for a ride on the pedal boat.”
That attitude led the “Milano Marittima correspondent” of the newspaper La Stampa to call Mr. Salvini the “Dictator of the Free State of Papeete.”
By now, Mr. Salvini’s talent for communicating with the masses is familiar to his critics on the left. At Ultima Spiaggia, the beach club in Southern Tuscany that for decades served as the summer headquarters of left-wing power brokers, Corrado Clini, a former minister for the environment, said Mr. Salvini’s constant campaigning, but also his summer high jinks and extra pounds, were part of a “cult” approach to leadership that favored simple messages over addressing Italy’s complex problems.
“Leaders presenting themselves in bathing suits is very populist,” he said.
And apparently it’s very popular.
For months now, the Italian gossip magazines have obsessed over Mr. Salvini’s physique. In June, Oggi magazine featured photos of Mr. Salvini, clad only in his gray boxer briefs, watering the plants on his house’s balcony.
Those photos also showed him canoodling with his current girlfriend, Francesca Verdini, the 26-year-old daughter of a former senator in Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. (The couple debuted at a screening of “Dumbo.”) Their romance has likewise figured into Italy’s infatuation with Mr. Salvini, who is called The Captain by his fans.
In what Diva e Donna magazine called “The Scoop of the Summer,” Ms. Verdini was photographed at a beach club crawling over Mr. Salvini as he reclined on a lounge chair. (“The Captain Relaxes in an Ecstasy of Love,” the headline read.)
Even his ex-girlfriend, Elisa Isoardi, 36, has bathed in the reflected adoration. A television cooking show host, she graced the cover of another weekly, Gente, last month with her hands substituting for a bikini top. (“Never So Sexy,” read the headline. “My Summer of Freedom.”)
Attention, on social media, television, radio, in the newspapers and even in the gossip magazines, is Mr. Salvini’s currency. His latest campaigning is but the summer season of a rolling reality show that an increasing number of Italians can’t get enough of.
His supporters said the liberal politicians getting all bent out of shape over his parties and paunch were the same politically correct party poopers who begrudged former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi having his fun.
“It’s not a big deal that he’s at the beach. The polls show that he’s right and that the Italians agree with Salvini,” said Senator Daniela Santanchè, a member of the right-wing Brothers of Italy, who said she hoped Mr. Salvini would ditch his coalition partner and join with her party in new elections.
She added that she could “never attack beach culture” because she herself owned a beach club in Tuscany. As for his paunch, she reminded that “many Italian women like a man with a belly,” but said she was not one of them.
“If I were him,” she said. “I’d be on a diet.”
Post a Comment