On a visit to Genoa, Infrastructure and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini responded to the controversy raised by Marina Berlusconi (Forza Italia) against the European Union succumbing to “bully” Donald Trump. The League leader Salvini went so far as to propose the Nobel Peace Prize for the 47th president of the United States.
“Those who criticize Trump are either jealous or do not understand him. He is not the enemy, in fact, he is doing more in a few weeks than Biden in four years. If one manages to put Putin and Zelensky, Netanyahu and the Arab countries at the same table we give him the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s anything but a bully!” Salvini said.
In a lengthy interview with the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, Berlusconi was very hard on the European Union for being “asleep” and needing to “wake up” in the face of the measures put in place by Trump in his first weeks in the White House: “Many of his first moves, unfortunately, resemble acts of political bullying, in which the United States poses as the sole and unchallenged number one, while other allies are treated as satellite countries.” The eldest child of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi commented that this strategy “in the long run will turn into an increasingly violent centrifugal force, capable of separating and dividing the Western community. I really hope that the country that has always been the main guarantor of the West does not now have a president who aspires to become the scrapper of the West itself, thus demolishing everything America has been for the past eighty years.” The Fininvest chairwoman called the image of migrants in chains released by Washington “horrifying and disturbing.”
The leader of the Lega party is known for a much harsher stance on immigration that mirrors Trump’s, putting it at odds with centrist parts of the right-leaning governing coalition. Fratelli d’Italia, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party, is maintaining the diplomatic line between the center-leaning Forza Italia and far-right Lega. House caucus leader Galeazzo Bignami commented to La Stampa, “Marina Berlusconi’s is a businesswoman’s speech,” as opposed to a politician’s. As for the photo, “I think Trump just wanted to make it known that he kept an election promise. The Italian government has increased the number of repatriations, but we did not use any pictures. It’s not a method that we employ.”
