How Italy’s most polarizing politician hitched his comeback to the Winter Olympics

Matteo Salvini is betting on the infrastructure boost the Games will provide to reassert himself on the national stage, but it may not be that simple.

By HANNAH ROBERTS

^{Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO}

For Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics are not about sport. They are about survival.

It has been a bruising stretch for Italy’s most polarizing politician. Once the dominant force on the right, the far-right leader is now a junior partner in a government led by right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. And a public split within his League party this week, with deputy Roberto Vannacci leaving to form a rival party, has underlined Salvini’s waning authority in domestic politics. 

As he struggles to reassert himself on the national stage, the Games offer something more tangible than political slogans. Sprawling across northern Italy — the League’s traditional stronghold — and fueled by billions in public money, the Games have become a chance for Salvini to demonstrate concrete delivery of new funds, infrastructure and jobs to his voter base at a moment when his leadership is in crisis.

In other words, a global sporting event repurposed as a regional infrastructure push.

On a recent visit to an Olympic-linked construction site in Lombardy, Salvini, wearing a blue Armani Italian team ski jacket, framed the Winter Olympics not as a sporting spectacle, but as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build infrastructure that would outlast the event itself.

“I confess,” he said in an ironic response to criticism, “we are exploiting the Olympics to build things for Lombardy that will remain for the next 50 years.” 

However, it’s a plan with a number of risks and detractors, both outside and within Salvini’s party.

King of the north?

For critics, Salvini’s Olympic strategy is less about legacy building and more about damage control.

Gaetano Amato, an MP for the opposition 5Star Movement, said Salvini has been trying to repair discontent among the League’s northern base, which is angered by the party’s shift from its secessionist roots toward nationalist populism, the elevation of hard-line figures such as Vannacci, and Salvini’s push for the stalled Messina Bridge project. 

The Olympics offer a way to rebalance that equation, Amato said. Salvini, who declined to be interviewed for this article, is seeking to rebuild support in the north through the flow of funds, jobs and contracts tied to the Games. The party can now point to new roads, rail links and construction jobs, and argue that it succeeded in forcing the central government to bankroll public works in its strongholds. 

The League is “dividing the spoils between the northern regions, and Salvini hopes to win back votes in the north by giving out money and contracts,” Amato said.

For scholars of Italy’s populist right, the appeal is straightforward. Daniele Albertazzi, a professor of politics at the University of Surrey, said the Games neatly reinforce Salvini’s narrative of himself as a man of action, versus his opponents, whom he portrays as obstructionist. 

“It’s kind of perfect for him,” Albertazzi said. With problems mounting, Salvini risked “gliding towards a future leading a party that doesn’t have a reason to exist any more.” His influence over strategic decisions has already narrowed, with his priorities on issues such as pension reform and support for Ukraine being repeatedly diluted or sidelined by Meloni.

But the risk is high: By tying his relevance so closely to execution of Games-related infrastructure, Salvini also risks absorbing the political fallout if costs spiral, contracts are mishandled or the promised legacy fails to materialize, Albertazzi said. 

In-house critics

The League has been able to exert unusually tight control over the Olympics. It oversees the key ministries of infrastructure and finance, governs the two principal host regions, and holds sway over both the public company delivering the projects and the extraordinary commissioner appointed to fast-track them, according to Duccio Facchini, author of “Oro Colato” (Pure Gold), who has tracked the financing of the 2026 Olympics since they were assigned in 2019. 

That concentration of authority, Facchini said, has allowed the party to unlock funding for long-delayed infrastructure in the north, reviving projects not just related to the Games, but conceived decades ago and repeatedly shelved in favor of other priorities, such a bypass in Belluno.

But the strategy has its pitfalls: Prominent projects carry geological risks, or environmental costs, including a cable car built on an area at risk of landslide and a bobsled run that necessitated the felling of 850 trees on a sensitive mountain landscape (the League says it will plant 10,000 trees in compensation).

Costs have ballooned while public services remain underfunded, and opposition has flared in parts of the north, including host area Valtellina, where some infrastructure is unfinished and major disruption to transport is feared. 

Those tensions have spilled into the League itself, where Salvini’s effort to turn Milan Cortina into a personal political showcase has met resistance.

Former Veneto President and League member Luca Zaia pushed back against attempts to frame the project as “Salvini’s Olympics,” insisting that the bid and much of the delivery rested with the Lombardy and Veneto regions, not with Rome. “The Games in Veneto were my invention,” he told POLITICO. “If they fail, I am responsible. Now that they are a great success, there will be many people who will claim to be the father.”

The Games, Zaia said, were neither a favor to the north nor a national political trophy, but infrastructure Italy should have built regardless. He pointed to the new rail link to Venice airport, Italy’s third busiest, as a national gateway, calling it “a business card for Italy,” and dismissed criticism by noting that Rome regularly receives major infrastructure upgrades around Vatican Jubilee years without comparable controversy.

Amato, the 5Star MP, questioned the durability of Salvini’s strategy. The deputy PM’s two flagship infrastructure bets, he argued, were the Messina Bridge and the Olympics.

“The bridge is not happening,” Amato said, adding that the Games risk becoming “a disaster,” citing environmental damage, unfinished works and the prospect of white elephants and abandoned sports infrastructure — as was the case with the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics.

If that happens, Salvini may find himself without another project to fall back on, he warned.