As the likelihood of earlier election causes the left-wing governing coalition to despair, the League’s leader Matteo Salvini was summoned to his first hearing in a trial intended to make him ineligible to run again for office for years. This follows the same sinister pattern as was done with Silvio Berlusconi when he was the uncontested leader of the ‘centre-right’ bloc.

What is being done to Salvini in the courts has already been done before to Berlusconi in a sign that the Italian judicial system has become a political weapon.

Salvini, whose party has led in opinion polls since the creation of a new two-party far-left coalition, now has to face two trials for decisions he had made when he was the interior minister and vice-premier in Conte’s first government.

One case concerns the Gregoretti Italian coast guard vessel whom Salvini forbade to disembark illegal immigrants in July 2019. The second case is about the Open Arms, a Spanish ship belonging to a Globalist consortium sponsored Spanish NGO, Activa Open Arms, which was faced with closed Italian ports in August of the same year. In both cases, the illegal immigrants were finally disembarked after a few days after other EU countries agreed to take their share.

In both impending cases, Salvini is charged with having supposedly kidnapped migrants, i.e. with forcing illegal immigrants to stay onboard against their will when they wanted to land in Italy against the will of a majority of the Italian people

The Italian Senate, where the left-wing coalition held a majority before the split with Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva gave its green light for the Gregoretti trial against Salvini in February last year and for the Open Arms trial at the end of July.

It appears that the M5S senators voted against giving the green light to put Salvini on trial in the Diciotti case because he was a political ally but in favour of the same in the Gregoretti and Open Arms cases because he had become a political opponent.

Salvini now faces up to 15 years in prison, knowing that any sentence of over 24 months will make him ineligible to run for office.

The man who first opened the Diciotti case was Luigi Patronaggio, the chief prosecutor in Agrigento, Sicily. Two days after Patronaggio opened the case on Aug. 22, 2018, CSM member Luca Palamara, a prosecutor whose conversations and chats were tapped because of a corruption inquiry wrote to him: ‘Dear Luigi, Legnigni will call you too, we are all with you’.

Giovanni Legnini was the vice-president of the CSM. This former Communist Party member was one of the parliament’s appointees to the CSM and he had been chosen to sit on the Italian judicial council while being a member of the Democratic Party (PD) and a minister in Matteo Renzi’s government.

The La Verità daily newspaper who first disclosed Palamara’s leaked conversations also published several other chats showing that other members of the CSM and of the Italy’s main magistrates’ association, the ANM, were discussing the best strategy to attack Salvini.

Prosecutor Luigi Patronaggio is also the magistrate who first opened the case which led to the current Open Arms trial against Salvini. As Salvini’s defense team argued, the case is all the more ludicrous that the Open Arms’ captain, a Spaniard who faced charges of aiding illegal immigration in Aug. 2019, refused offers from Malta and Spain to disembark the illegal immigrants he had taken on board and deliberately chose to wait several days off Lampedusa’s shore to force Italy to open its ports to migrants.

There can therefore be little doubt that those two trials against Salvini are political trials organized by the Italian parliamentary and judicial Left at a time when the Left, due to its own divisions and its lack of popular support risks losing power in favour of a right-wing coalition led by Salvini.

In June 2020, Italian newspaper Il Reformista published on its website an audio recording in which the now-deceased Cassation Court Judge Amadeo Franco said to Berlusconi in a private conversation how sorry he was for having taken part in the 2013 judicial farce which was ‘steered from above’.

Surprisingly, while the European Commission has been very active in fighting Poland’s reforms of the judiciary on the grounds that those reforms could make the judicial system too political and not independent enough from the executive and legislative powers, in the case of Italy, where there have been proven cases of successful efforts by the Left to eliminate political opponents with the help of politicized, left-leaning judges and prosecutors, the same European Commission has failed to react. This is yet another illustration of the Commission’s double standard when it comes to monitoring the rule of law in EU member states. Source