Matteo Salvini

Matteo Salvini ( born 9 March 1973) is an Italian politician who has served as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Minister of Infrastructure and Transport since 2022.

Matteo Salvini was born in Milan in 1973, the son of a business executive father and a homemaker mother.

In 1985, at the age of 12, he took part in game show Doppio slalom (the Italian version of Blockbusters), hosted by Corrado Tedeschi on Canale 5 and in 1993, at the age of 20, he participated on Il pranzo è servito, hosted by Davide Mengacci, which was broadcast by Rete 4.

Salvini studied at the Classical Lyceum "Alessandro Manzoni" in Milan.

He later attended the University of Milan where he first studied political science before switching to history.

However, he interrupted his studies to start his political career and never graduated.

Salvini has sometimes claimed that, as a teenager, he used to visit the left-wing self-managed social centre Leoncavallo.

However, in his autobiography, he writes: "I went to the Leoncavallo just one time. For a concert. When I wasn't even interested in politics".

An investigation by Jacobin magazine found that according to some witnesses, Salvini in that occasion was already a sympathizer of The League, the same party that was trying to close down the center, and that the narrative of Salvini at Leoncavallo serves the purpose of depicting him as beyond left and right.

In 1990, Salvini became a member of the Lega Nord, the regionalist and separatist movement founded by Umberto Bossi in 1989.

He was an active member of Young Padanians Movement, LN's youth faction, of which he became city coordinator for Milan in 1992 and city secretary in 1997.

In the same year, he started working as journalist for La Padania, the official newspaper of Lega Nord.

In 1993 he was elected in the City Council of Milan, a post that he would hold until 2012.

While in 1997 he participated in the Padanian elections and was elected within the list Comunisti Padani (Padanian Communists), which gained 5 seats out of 210.

In the following year, he was elected provincial secretary of the League for Milan.

In 1999 he also worked on Lega's radio broadcaster Radio Padania Libera and since July 2003 he has been registered as a journalist on the list of Italian professional journalists.

In 1999, during an official visit of Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in Milan, Salvini refused to shake his hand, stating that Ciampi did not represent him.

Salvini represented Northwestern Italy in the European Parliament from 2004 to 2018.

Salvini has been considered a hardline Eurosceptic politician, holding a starkly critical view of the European Union, especially of the euro.

He opposes illegal immigration into Italy and the EU as well as the EU's management of asylum seekers.

Salvini was elected with 14,000 votes a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the North-West region in 2004 and participated in the European Parliament as a part of the Non-Inscrits.

During the legislature he selected Franco Bossi, brother of the party's secretary Umberto, as his parliamentary assistant.

In 2006, he lost his office as member of the European Parliament and was replaced by Gian Paolo Gobbo.

Salvini was then re-elected city councilor in Milan, in the municipal election of that year, with over 3,000 votes.

In the same year, he became deputy secretary of the Lombard League, along with Marco Reguzzoni, and the party leader in the city council.

He sat on the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education, and was a substitute for the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety and a member of the delegation to the EU–Chile Joint Parliamentary Committee.

He stood down from the European Parliament in November 2006.

Salvini ran in the 2008 general election and was elected in the Chamber of Deputies for the constituency Lombardy 1.

However he resigned on 13 July 2009, after being elected once again in the European Parliament in the June election.

In the Parliament, he sat in the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group.

After he was re-elected in 2009 as an MEP, he sat on the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and was a member of the delegation for relations with India, and the delegation for relations with the Korean peninsula.

He was a substitute on the Committee on International Trade and the delegation for relations with South Africa.

He is also considered one of the main leaders of the populist wave in Europe during the 2010s and a member of the neo-nationalist movement, which is a rightist ideology that emphasizes de-globalization, nativist and protectionist stances.

On 2 June 2012, Salvini became the federal secretary of the Lombard League, defeating Cesarino Monti with 403 votes against 129.

Following the election, on 12 October he decided to leave the office of group leader and city councilor after 19 years.

He has been Federal Secretary of Italy's Lega Nord (Northern League) party since December 2013 and an Italian senator since March 2018.

Salvini was later elected deputy in the 2013 general election, but he renounced his mandate on the first day of the legislature, and was replaced by Marco Rondini; Salvini maintained the position of MEP.

During his first stint as Deputy Prime Minister, many international political commentators and newspapers, such as The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist, and The Huffington Post, characterized him as a strongman and the most influential politician in Italy after the 2018 elections.

Salvini condemned the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

He was previously a strong supporter of Russia's president Vladimir Putin, describing Putin in 2019 as "the best politician and statesman in the world".