Matteo Salvini is not yet the prime minister of Italy — just his deputy, minister of interior and leader of the anti-immigration Lega party.
But this week on a short visit to Israel, he was received as if he was PM. Upon landing at Ben Gurion Airport on Tuesday he was whisked off in a helicopter to tour the northern border.
Later, in Jerusalem, he was taken to the Western Wall, on a bar crawl in the Mahane Yehuda market, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and had a succession of meetings with senior ministers, including a couple of hours on Wednesday morning with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
All this for a politician who invited himself.
“He’s de-facto the most powerful man in Italy, by all the polls likely to be its next prime minister and he’s extremely pro-Israel,” explained a senior Israeli diplomat of the fuss made of the 45-year-old populist from Milan.
He was very eager to meet Mr Netanyahu for the first time, saying on Tuesday night that he saw the prime minister as “an inspiration.”
For most of the visit, Mr Salvini, who is labelled by some of his domestic critics as a “neo-fascist”, tried to maintain a diplomatic demeanour. He ducked reporters’ questions over whether he would support a move of Italy’s embassy to Jerusalem when visiting the Western Wall, saying “it belongs to everyone.”
But there was no hiding his partisan support for Mr Netanyahu’s policies.
Unlike most senior western politicians, he scheduled no courtesy call in the West Bank to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Ramallah compound.
He also called the European Union’s attitude to Israel “unbalanced”, and at least one of his statements drew criticism back home.
During his visit to the northern border, where he was briefed on the operation being carried out by Israel against cross-border tunnels, he called Hezbollah a “terrorist organisation”.
This led to a rebuke from the Italian Ministry of Defence in Rome, which called his comments an “embarrassment” that undermined Italy’s “role as impartial brokers in the area”.
While Mr Salvini received the red-carpet treatment from the government, time was not found for him to meet President Reuven Rivlin — for “scheduling reasons.”
An official in his office said that “there was no reason of protocol to meet Salvini, he isn’t a head of state.”
But it was hard to detach Mr Rivlin’s decision not to host the Italian nationalist from recent remarks the president made in a CNN interview: “You cannot say ‘we admire Israel and want relations with your country, but we are neo-fascists.’”
Mr Rivlin says that his refusal to engage with “new-fascists… is a statement that makes clear that memory is important and that we will not compromise on for the political expediency of the state of Israel.”
But the president’s remarks were seen as a direct criticism of his prime minister’s policy of maintaining close relations with nationalist right-wing governments in Europe. Benjamin Netanyahu believes such relations will help disrupt EU foreign policy which is critical of Israel on the Palestinian issue and continue to support the Iran deal.
