Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said on Thursday that he will remain in office even if he is initially convicted of charges relating to his blocking a migrant ship from entering an Italian port.
He is hoping for an acquittal, but if not, he would still be back in his ministerial office and working the next day, he said in Rome. Salvini, 51, heads the right-wing governing party Lega.
“I am counting on an independent judge to come to the conclusions that seem clearest to me. If this is not the case in the first instance, there are fortunately two further instances in Italy,” he wrote.”
Whether acquitted or convicted, he will continue to work as usual. But if he is convicted, he will be “a little angry,” he said.
The public prosecutor’s office in Palermo is demanding a six-year prison sentence in the trial concerning the handling of migrants on the Mediterranean.
The Lega politician is accused of preventing the ship of a Spanish aid organization with migrants on board from entering a port for weeks when he was interior minister in 2019.
In a court in the Sicilian capital, the prosecution categorized this as deprivation of liberty and abuse of office. The judgement against Salvini, who is Italy’s current minister of transport and infrastructure, is expected to be handed down next month.
Salvini remains unrepentant of harsh measures he ordered as interior minister from 2018-19. “I would do it all over again,” he wrote on his Instagram profile.
At the time, he made a name for himself internationally with a crackdown on the ships of private aid organizations that take migrants on board from boats in the central Mediterranean.
Today, he is one of the central figures in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing three-party coalition.
Salvini described the trial as a political process brought about by the parties of the left.
