In an interview in his office in the Viminale, the interior ministry headquarters in downtown Rome, Salvini held out several olive branches to Brussels, which has been the main target of his anger since he was elected leader of the far-right League in late 2013. The one exception is the Italian budget, which the European Commission rejected for breaking its deficit rules.[...]
The 45-year-old, who has taken his party from 4 percent support when he became leader five years ago to 17 percent in March’s general election, to about 34 percent in the most recent polls (“for me that’s too high,” he said), reckons it’s clear that austerity budgets don’t work. [...]
Nor does Salvini believe that the Commission would ever cut EU funding to Italy, as some diplomats have suggested. “Italy is one of the [EU] founding countries, Europe’s second manufacturing power, they cannot treat us like Luxembourg [also a founding EU member],” he said.[...]
Sanctions on Russia, a country with which he has close ties, are “counterproductive and useless,” he said, adding that “we’ll try to convince as many countries as possible of how useless they are.” However, he said that at the December EU summit, when leaders will decide whether to roll over the Russia sanctions, “no veto” will be used by Rome. [...]
He said he still believes the single currency “has been an experiment that was socially and economically wrong” but at the same time “we are not in government to leave [the eurozone], or to destroy it. We work with what we have, we stay in the EU and in the single currency system.”
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