Enemies of the People: Matteo Salvini’s Politics of Delegitimation in Italy

In April 2025, Matteo Salvini and his party, the far-right Lega (League), sparked outrage after posting a series of AI-generated images on their social media accounts. The pictures, which quickly circulated online, showed men of color attacking women and police officers—dark, violent scenes meant to suggest that immigrants were a direct threat to public safety. What made it worse is that these images weren’t real. They were generated using artificial intelligence and presented without context or disclaimers, giving the false impression that they documented actual events. Italy’s opposition parties called the campaign “dangerous and deceptive,” and filed a formal complaint with the national media regulator, accusing the League of spreading racist and Islamophobic content to stoke fear and division.

This wasn’t the first time that Salvini’s party had turned to digital deception. Just months earlier, during the campaign for the 2024 European Parliament elections, the League had already made headlines for using similar AI-generated imagery—this time to paint a cultural clash between “Italian values” and what they framed as a morally corrupt, foreign-dominated European Union. The campaign featured posters and social media graphics showing synthetic meat, surrogacy, and insect-based food supposedly endorsed by Brussels. In one image, Muslim men were shown burning Dante’s Divine Comedy, symbolizing an EU that, according to Salvini, supports Islamism over Italian heritage. While the League had signed a code of conduct for ethical AI use during campaigns, the images were shared without any disclaimer, raising more than a few eyebrows—and questions about manipulation and misinformation.

Salvini’s messaging has never really been about policy in the traditional sense—it’s about identifying and attacking enemies. Over the years, he has built a political persona rooted in the idea that he’s the only one standing between “ordinary Italians” and the chaos unleashed by elites, migrants, globalists, and “radical do-gooders.” And when it comes to his critics, he doesn’t just push back—he discredits them completely. One of the clearest examples of this strategy is his treatment of Carola Rackete, the German sea captain who docked her rescue ship in Lampedusa against government orders in 2019. Salvini chose not to debate migration policies but to launch personal attacks, labeling her a “spoiled German communist” and a “pirate,” framing her as a privileged outsider endangering Italians. A similar tone was used against Laura Boldrini, former President of the Chamber of Deputies, whom Salvini blamed for everything from terrorism to the decay of Italian values, encouraging online harassment against her. Even the judiciary has been portrayed as an enemy: when acquitted in December 2024 for blocking the Open Arms NGO ship, Salvini claimed the trial itself was a political attack, declaring, “Defending the homeland is not a crime.”

As political theorist Jan-Werner Müller (2016) explains, populists don’t simply oppose elites—they reject pluralism altogether. They claim to embody the one true people and depict any dissent as illegitimate or corrupt. Populists treat elections not as contests between legitimate alternatives, but as battles between the righteous and the traitorous. Salvini’s communication style exemplifies this: rather than engaging political rivals, he frames them as existential threats to Italy’s survival. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Salvini acted as a “crisis entrepreneur,” turning health authorities and humanitarian NGOs into scapegoats, fueling distrust and division when unity was most needed (Campolongo, Scanni & Tarditi, 2024).

On social media, this strategy becomes even more toxic. Salvini’s social media presence is a constant stream of moral outrage, sarcasm, and mockery. His posts rarely address policies—instead, they focus on personal attacks. According to Carlo Berti and Enzo Loner (2021), this is a classic case of “character assassination,” where political rivals are delegitimized by attacking their identities and motives, as the case of Laura Boldrini shows. On platforms like Facebook and Instagram, this approach is especially effective—outrage spreads faster than facts. The Yale Review of International Studies (YRIS, 2021) also found that Salvini’s posts criminalizing migrants often translated into measurable boosts in political support.

According to political scientists Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018), this tactic of attacking political opponents is part of a broader process that they identify as a warning sign for democratic backsliding. In How Democracies Die, they argue that one of the clearest indicators that democracy is at risk is the refusal to accept the legitimacy of political rivals. When elected leaders start presenting opponents not as alternative voices in a shared democratic system, but as enemies of the people, the foundations of democracy begin to erode. Salvini’s portrayal of NGOs as “accomplices of traffickers,” his open disdain for judges, and his tendency to paint critical journalists and opposition politicians as traitors all follow this pattern. As Levitsky and Ziblatt warn, this framing allows leaders to justify bending—or even breaking—democratic rules, in the name of protecting the nation.

Despite the League’s sharp decline in support—from 34% in the 2019 European elections to around 8.5% in 2024, as many right-wing voters migrated toward Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia—the political threat Matteo Salvini represents has not vanished. In fact, it may have already left a deeper, more lasting imprint on Italy’s democratic culture. Over the years, Salvini has normalized a way of doing politics that is not centered on policy proposals or constructive debate, but on constant confrontation, moral polarization, and the systematic delegitimization of opponents. As The Atlantic put it, Salvini didn’t reinvent populism—he refined it. With selfies, memes, and dramatic declarations, he built a political brand that feels more like a lifestyle channel than a party page. But beneath the surface is a strategy that has deeply damaged democratic norms. By delegitimizing opponents, creating moral panic, and using digital platforms to bypass accountability, Salvini has shown just how fragile the space for democratic dialogue can be.

This style of populist moral warfare closely mirrors strategies used by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, where the goal is not to govern through consensus, but to dominate through polarization. As scholars have noted (Barisione & Ceron, 2024), both Salvini and Bolsonaro construct democracy as a battlefield between the righteous people and their corrupt enemies, often undermining the legitimacy of courts, civil society, and democratic institutions to strengthen their personal authority. Thus, the real danger lies not just in Salvini’s rhetoric, but in how he has shifted what is politically acceptable. By framing politics around identity battles and betrayal, he has helped replace respect for institutions with an emotionally charged notion of “the people.” Even as his personal influence fades, the divisive style he championed—based on confrontation and exclusion—remains deeply rooted in Italian politics, threatening democratic norms and the rule of law.

REFERENCES

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