ROME – He was fired by the Minister of Defense after writing a book considered offensive to women, gays and black people. He is being investigated by Rome prosecutors for allegedly inciting racial hatred. He set off a firestorm with suggestions that children with disabilities be taught separately at school.
And on Tuesday, General Roberto Vannacci, one of Italy’s most experienced army generals, joined Italian Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the right-wing League party, Matteo Salvini, as the League’s leading candidate for the upcoming elections for the European Parliament.
Salvini’s bid to put the provocateur Vannacci ahead for the June 6-9 vote is a kind of Hail Mary pass for the League, which has lost support in recent years to the far-right Brothers of Italy party, by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
By taking advantage of the media storm over Vannacci, Salvini is trying to breathe new life into his party, a junior partner in Meloni’s government, analysts said.
“Matteo Salvini has a party in crisis,” said Lorenzo Castellani, professor of political history at Luiss University in Rome. He noted that the League obtained 34% of the vote in the 2019 European Parliament elections and today it receives no more than 8%.
“He (Vannacci) has become a media personality that Salvini is using to try to get more support, let’s say a few tens of thousands more votes than this general could bring to the League,” Castellani said in a telephone interview.
Vannacci’s candidacy dominated Italian political discourse, headlines and news for days and drew a standing-room-only audience on Tuesday at Rome’s Temple of Hadrian, an ancient Roman temple turned conference center not far from the Parliament.
Officially, Salvini presented his new memoir manifesto “Against the Wind: The Italy that Does Not Surrender”. But the event represented Salvini-Vannacci’s first outing, and Vannacci used it as a campaign stop to outline his views on migration, Europe’s Christian roots and the need to defend Europe’s borders.
He regretted, for example, that the official poster for the Paris Olympic Games, an artistic representation of the French capital, does not feature any cross at the top of the Hôtel des Invalides. His absence created a brief controversy last month in France when the poster was unveiled.
“Unfortunately, all these symbols that should inspire us with a feeling of belonging have been erased, blurred, diluted, almost as if to give an image that Europe should look like another pile of rubbish, where everyone is included, but no one feels like they belong. . ,” Vannacci said Tuesday.
Vannacci led Italian troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya – and before that in the Balkans, Rwanda and Somalia – and was awarded the US Legion of Merit in 2018 for his leadership against the Islamic State group.
But Italy’s defense minister fired him in August as head of the military geographic institute, and later disciplined him after he self-published “The World In Reverse,” a manifesto in which Vannacci laid out his beliefs about LGBTQ+ people, the environmental lobby, multiculturalism and migration.
“Gen. Vannacci expressed opinions that discredit the army, the defense ministry and the constitution,” Defense Minister Guido Crosetto tweeted at the time, announcing disciplinary action against him for writing the book without authorization from his superiors.
In February, prosecutors in Rome opened an investigation into alleged incitement to racial hatred, according to Italian reports. And this week, Vannacci kept the outrage alive, on the left and right, by telling the newspaper La Stampa that children with disabilities should be taught separately in schools.
“This has nothing to do with freedom of opinion, but it is offensive to the history and culture of our country,” said Sandra Savino, regional leader of the center-right Forza Italia in Fruili Venezia Giulia.
Salvini defended Vannacci’s right to express his opinions and accused the media of taking his comments about disability out of context. On Tuesday, he said he approached Vannacci after the storm about his book over the summer, and the two hit it off.
He said he didn’t share all of Vannacci’s ideas, but he said Vannacci didn’t share all of his either.
Vannacci, in turn, said he knew he was taking a risk by publishing his book, but he believed he owed it to his children to speak their truth and now fight for them in politics.
“I wanted to give them a better future, a better Europe,” he said.
Salvini’s choice divided the League, with its more center-right base opposing the more far-right choice that Vannacci represents.
Castellani, Luiss’s teacher, said such internal dissent highlights the problems the League faces and the risks that Salvini could be replaced.
“Salvini is creating a media personality, which could be an opportunity for him,” he said. “But a personality is always dangerous because he can become a political adversary, or he can become embarrassing or voters can get bored with him.”
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