Italy’s Matteo Salvini will convene a meeting of Europe’s populist and nationalist parties on Monday in a bid to build a bloc that can contest the European Parliament elections next month, but key figures from the far-Right will be absent.
The meeting in Milan is being billed as the launch of a major election campaign by Mr Salvini, who is deputy prime minister, interior minister and head of the hard-Right, anti-immigration League party.
The conference, themed “Towards a Europe of Common Sense”, will be held in a five-star hotel in the heart of Italy’s financial hub.
The aim is to build an alliance of likeminded parties that oppose immigration and further integration into EU institutions.
Mr Salvini, who has emerged as Italy’s most powerful politician since his election last year, is seeking to cast himself as the leader of a Eurosceptic grouping that includes the likes of Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban and Germany’s AfD party.
Reuters
But Ms Le Pen, the leader of the far-Right National Rally, will not attend the meeting in Milan.
“She is busy with her election campaign. She’ll be in Brittany this weekend and next week she has other appointments in her diary in other parts of France,” Alain Vizier, her spokesman, told Italy’s Ansa news agency.
Nor will Mr Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, turn up at the summit in Milan, according to reports in the Hungarian press.
Hungarian newspapers cited sources within Orban’s Fidesz party, saying he does not want to break with his grouping within the European Parliament, the conservative European People’s Party.
Austria’s Right-wing, populist Freedom Party will also not be making the trip to Milan.
The Five Star Movement, which has sharp policy differences with the League despite governing with the party in the national coalition, said the Milan conference was shaping up to be a failure.
The absence of so many leading far-Right figures “shows the political flop of the League’s European project,” said Laura Ferrara, an MEP from Five Star. “Even Le Pen has ditched her ally.”
Reuters
A spokesman for The League told The Telegraph that the list of parties planning to attend the event in Milan would be released late on Thursday or on Friday.
Mr Salvini pledged recently that 20 populist parties from many different countries would attend the conference.
Hard-Right parties are in government in Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary and are expected to do well in the European elections at the end of next month.
But differences of political outlook and policies may prevent them from forming a united front.
One party that has confirmed it will turn up is Germany’s AfD. The party enjoyed a surge in support after Angela Merkel’s decision to allow a million asylum seekers to settle in Germany during the 2015-2016 migrant crisis.
Joerg Meuthen, the AfD’s chief candidate for the European elections, expects populist and nationalist parties to perform well but thinks they will have trouble forming an alliance to advance an agenda.
The AfD is in favour of the free market whereas National Rally in France was more inclined towards protectionist policies, he said.
The German party’s natural allies would be among "northern Europeans such as the Danes, the Finns and the Irish who favour an open economy and not strong statism as is the tradition in France,” he told AFP.
Mr Meuthen, one of two leaders of the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam AfD, said diverging interests and clashing personalities would likely prevent a "patriotic alliance" forming in the European Parliament.
Hard-Right parties "have the same or similar positions on migration policy but very different views in other areas," he said. The AfD is currently polling at around 10 percent.
Mario Borghezio, an MEP with the League, also conceded there were wide differences between Europe’s nationalists.
“The Finnish nationalists, for example, are critical of and fearful towards Russia, us much less so. There are very different situations in what is a huge continent, but with some common denominators. The challenge of Salvini will be to identify them, so as to build a common political approach which can be presented at the elections.”
Mr Salvini has pledged to bring about a “new European spring” by working with nationalist parties across the continent.
His party has gone from strength to strength in Italy, doubling its support since the general election last March.
The centre-Right has won five out of the last five regional elections, the most recent victory being in the southern region of Basilicata last month, which had been governed by the centre-Left for 25 years.
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