"Salvini wants to forge while iron is hot"

Matteo Salvini, Italy's interior minister and deputy prime minister, wants to forge while the iron is hot. That is why the Lega leader today filed the motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and his own government.

This is despite the fact that the Italian Parliament two chambers have actually taken the summer closed after this week's much-debated votes. Italian political appraisers call what now happens to be rather unique, that Salvini and Lega manage to get into a government crisis and a rapid acceleration against new elections despite this.

But after the Five-Star Movement voted against the high-speed connection with France, TAV, Matteo Salvini felt that the divorce that had so long threatened the country's government was now inevitable. Something that Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte does not agree with and he accuses Salvini of not wanting to save the government but actively seeking new elections.

Most of Italy's political experts agree that this is true. Matteo Salvini did not take a holiday, but in July he campaigned on the beach in the seaside resort of Milano Marittima, where he let voters take selfie pictures with him in bathing suits and played the national anthem as a DJ on the beach. The day before yesterday, Salvini's summer tour began around a number of famous seaside resorts in southern Italy and Sicily. A tour that, even before the government crisis, was seen as a masked election campaign - planned and prepared for a long time.

With the strengths that prevail today between the parties in the government, there is no longer any interest in Lega in keeping it together. In the March 2018 election, the Five Star Movement was the big winners, but just over a year later, conditions are the opposite. Party leader Luigi Di Maio has fallen completely into the shadow of Matteo Salvini. Something that showed up in the EU elections and that is also visible in several of the latest opinion polls where Lega has a full 39 percent of the vote and the Five Stars only 15 percent.

Matteo Salvini's leadership style and hard line and rhetoric about migration policy combined with the promises of lower taxes go home to large voter groups. The five stars, who were primarily born as a protest party, have increasingly fallen into the trap of becoming reluctant neo-owners. At the same time, the opposition with Social Democrat Partito Democratico remains relatively weak and divided, with around 22 percent of voters.

Matteo Salvini wants to seize the opportunity and now take power himself, probably with the support of the even more right-wing nationalist party Italy's brothers, led by Giorgia Meloni. What this would mean for EU co-operation and Italy's hard-hit economy is unclear, but the stock exchanges reacted during the day with concerns about political developments in Rome.

On Monday, Senate President Elisabetta Casellati convenes group leaders for the various parties to set the date for the vote of no confidence in the final week of August.

Matteo Salvini wants to see new elections already in October and is pushing hard for that scenario, ready to try to become prime minister, or as he himself puts it:

"I ask the Italians to give me full power".