Matteo Salvini was re-elected leader of Italy's League on Sunday, winning a fresh mandate that runs to 2030 at an extraordinary party congress in Milan. Salvini took the clear majority of the votes of the 705 delegates — Italian reports put his share at 76 per cent — while his sole challenger, Massimo Garavaglia, took about one fifth of the vote, and the two men embraced on stage as the result was confirmed.
Salvini used the victory to declare the fight he intends to take inside the government: he vowed to press the coalition to stop sending money and weapons to Ukraine. With Italy's economic situation difficult, he argued, the time has come to question whether the country should keep funding Kyiv's war — a direct challenge to the policy Italy has followed as part of the Western effort behind Ukraine.
The congress was Salvini's own move — he called it unexpectedly in September to shore up his authority ahead of a general election due next year. He has led the League since 2013 and took it to a record 34 per cent at the 2019 European elections, but recent polls put the party below 5 per cent, behind its coalition ally Forza Italia, while National Future, a new far-right group formed in February by League dissidents, is approaching 9 per cent.
The League sits inside Italy's ruling coalition, so Salvini's Ukraine vow is now government business, not opposition talk. He said the first item on his agenda is the approval of Italy's 2027–2029 budget bill on Tuesday — and it is through that budget, and the funding decisions that follow it, that his push to cut off money and weapons for Kyiv will be tested. The same argument over how long Western funding for Ukraine can continue is running in Washington, and a governing party in one of NATO's biggest European members is now formally led by a man elected to end it.
For Salvini, the congress answers the doubts about his leadership with a mandate to 2030. For the coalition, it opens a fight: Ukraine's supporters in Rome now face a partner whose declared programme is to stop the flow of Italian money and arms, at the moment Kyiv's backers are warning that funding decisions in the coming months could decide the war's future.
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