Is Matteo Salvini's rightwing populism getting wobbly? Or is it uniquely potent?

Paul Taylor has a cautioously optimistic take on the possible weakening of rightwing populism in Europe, Has Europe reached peak populism? Politico EU 09/05/2019:

... a series of events and votes in Italy, Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic suggest the tide could be turning against the anti-establishment nationalist movements that have upended politics across the Continent, leaving the barbarians howling in frustration at the gates.

That doesn’t mean that the social and economic distress that turned many working-class, rural and poorer voters against the traditional political parties, the parliamentary system and the European Union has gone away. But the populists seem unable to secure a majority for their radical, anti-European course almost anywhere.

In thinking about authoritarian movements, it's important to be realistic in seeing both their strengths and their real limitations. But the difference between complacency and realitic optimism can sometimes be difficult to perceive. So can the difference between complacency and excessive pessimism. But in dealing with authoritarian movements will real strength, complacency is probably the worst attitude that pro-democracy voters and activists can take.

Rachel Donadio takes a look at The New Populist Playbook The Atlantic 09/05/2019. She describes his very recent setback when he tried to force new elections but was surprisingly thwarted by the left-populst Five Star Movmement and the center-left social-democrats:

The seemingly unstoppable momentum emboldened Salvini to put his popularity to the test. He withdrew his party’s support for the government, forcing a crisis in a bid for new elections that he hoped would make him prime minister of the first far-right government of a major European power. He didn’t get his wish this time. Instead, the Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party - one representing the populist anti-establishment, the other the establishment - put aside their long-standing mutual animosity to form the strangest new government in recent Italian history, one with a sole purpose: to block Salvini.

But her analysis strikes me as exaggerated in describing the innovative appeal of Salvini. "He is not simply a Donald Trump facsimile in Europe, nor merely the archetype of an angry anti-immigrant nationalist in the Viktor Orbán mold. Salvini has been writing an entirely new playbook for 21st-century populism."

Donadio's article didn't convince me that Salvini has a strongly innovative approach to far-right demagoguery. But it's an in-depth look at Salvini and his movement that provides a much more detailed account than we usually see in the American press when it comes to continental European politics. She provides this illustration of how Salvini and his Lega party exploit a very legitimate issue, the EU rules banning procyclical Keynesian policies during recessions, and give it a rightwing, anti-Semitic spin:

Salvini and other senior League officials have said they want the EU to change its rules, including the one requiring countries using the euro to keep their budget deficits under 3 percent of GDP.

This would require changing European treaties, which is a long shot. It’s also too technical for most voters to comprehend. Instead, Salvini rails against what he calls a Europe run by “bankers, do-gooders, and bureaucrats.” And he often singles out the billionaire financier George Soros in conspiratorial tones. In Salvini’s speech in Milan before European Parliament elections in May, he accused some “elites” - Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Soros - of betraying Europe, and said Soros was paying NGOs to bring immigrants to Europe. Is his targeting of Soros not a classic anti-Semitic trope? I pressed [Lega spokesperson Claudio] Borghi on this. “Salvini talks about Soros because he’s a speculator, not because he’s Jewish,” he said. The Hungarian-born financier was indeed a currency speculator in the ’90s, but Salvini mentions him only in the context of immigration. Here Italy seems to be following Orbán’s Hungary: a country with few Jews but dog-whistle anti-Semitism. [my emphasis]

Salvini's Lega (the League) is also a Putinist party:

... it’s the only party in the country to have signed a cooperation agreement with Putin’s United Russia party, which it did on Salvini’s watch, in 2017. Sebastian Kurz’s People’s Party (ÖVP) in Austria and Le Pen’s National Rally signed similar accords with United Russia. (Kurz'

There's a flat-out mistake here. It was Austria's far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), not Sebastian Kurz' Christian Democratic People's Party (ÖVP), who signed the agreement with the United Russia party. The ÖVP and FPÖ were partners in a coalition government from 2017 to 2019. [Update 09/09/2019: The error has been corrected and acknowledged at The Atlantic website.]

After Le Pen’s party signed the agreement, it secured a loan from a Russian bank. The League has said that no money changed hands in its agreement.

Yet the relationship with Russia could damage the League’s credibility. In recent months, the Italian magazine L’Espresso and BuzzFeed News have published damning scoops about a meeting in Moscow last fall in which close associates of Salvini discussed an energy deal that allegedly would have diverted funds to the League ahead of European Parliament elections in May, in violation of Italian campaign-finance law. In July, BuzzFeed published audio recordings of the meeting - one of the clearest signs to emerge yet of how Russia is trying to influence and destabilize European politics. There’s no evidence that the energy deal happened, and Salvini and his associates have denied wrongdoing, but magistrates in Milan have opened an investigation. [my emphasis]

That's a reminder of an important one of many ways that far-right parties in Europe share themes and techniques and actively cooperate to some degree. Even though the notion of a Nationalist International is inherently strange, and problematic in practice.