Putin traces. Is the Kremlin involved in Mario Dragi's resignation?

However, these actions required overcoming resistance from populist parties within his own leading coalition of national unity, namely the "Five Star Movement", led by former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and the League Matteo Salvini. When the war was delayed, the dissatisfaction of these Pututin forces began to grow.

Probably, seeing a chance here for himself, the Russian Embassy in Rome has been pleasing to Salvini for several months and even bought him a plane ticket to Moscow to fulfill the Mission of Peace (which he did not care about to inform Dragi). Against the backdrop of public indignation, this trip was canceled in the last minute. However, Lunch with Ambassador of Russia in early March was held in Salvin - only a week after the Russian invasion.

Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Putin's longtime friend, spoke with the Russian ambassador at least once in the days preceding Dragi's resignation. And in May, an official of Berlusconi's party, Italy, and a high -ranking Russian diplomat, was reported, asked a source in the League Party when Salvini plans to stop supporting Dragi's government. We know all this, since Italy's political system is too chaotic and fans full of lovers to be truly opaque.

Many parties and politicians simply do not have the discipline to carry out secret frauds. And so, most likely, further details about Russian attempts to accelerate Dragi's resignation will be known. There is nothing new in such actions. In 2018, League functionaries went to Moscow, trying to get Russian funding, and in early 2020 the Conte government allowed Putin to send a large military mission to Italy under the pretext of providing humanitarian aid during the pandemic.

Considering all these suspicious cases in the past, Italian political observers and figures now consider the fact that the Kremlin pressed on its Italian proxy to remove the Dragi government from its way. The Kremlin is truly known for its interference with Western democratic policy: from interfering with a 2016 Brexit referendum and a presidential election to the United States to financing an extreme right national association, led by Marin Le Pen in France.

There is no reason to believe that it does not use similar tactics in Italy, given the possibility of sowing split within the European Union. The Wagner group, related to the Kremlin, the organization of military mercenaries is likely to help organize refugees to Italy from the territories of Libya where it operates. This gives Salvini the reason to keep an election campaign on the usual platform for the fight against immigration on the eve of the extraordinary elections in September.

Again, there is nothing new here: Belarus applied the same strategy against Poland and Lithuania last year, moreover, almost undoubtedly with the tacit consent of Putin. The latest public opinion polls show a clear advantage of the extreme right coalition, consisting of the League, Forward, Italy, and the Post -Fascist Party "Brothers of Italy" under the guidance of George Meloni. However, it is still necessary to see how the Italian elections will affect Russia so clearly in the fall of Dragi.

Although the facts published today are really resting, this issue has quickly come to the background. No, of course, the latter polls show that Putin is extremely unpopular in Italy: 56% of Italians consider Russia guilty of this war. But the Italians do not differ in their tendency to vote, thinking about "butter with bread", not in response to international intrigues. And here the extreme right coalition is ready to offer something.

Pro -Russian voters can vote for the League or Forward, Italy, and those who are more configured with pro -Ukraine and pro -Ukrainian can cast a voice "Italy's brothers" who are now confidently leading in polls. In the 2018 elections, Meloni opposed anti -Russian sanctions, but in the future she took a different position, supporting Dragi's decision to start supplying weapons to Ukraine and opposing that Italy looks like a "weak link in the Western Alliance.

" However, it is absolutely unclear what a foreign policy, headed by melon, may look like. For the most part, his political ascent of melon is due to the personal charisma and always blurred political program "God, Family and Fatherland". This allows her to evade the details about what she really thinks and what she intends to do in the government.

She says almost nothing about her economic policy program, the fascist roots of her own party or her friendly relations with Hungarian authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orban, as well as the Spanish Non-Frankish Voice Party. And so many Italians accept her declarations of Western loyalty for sincere truth. But will melon go the way of Dragi in the implementation or even strengthening of sanctions against Russia? Most likely, it will be much smaller than Dragi's true sanctions regime.

In early spring, she not only argued that Italy should receive an "compensation" from the EU for the cost of sanctions, but also stated that the United States should not expect that Italy would be a "working horse of the event" by reducing exports to Russia.