Salvini rejoices at the success of the AfD in Germany and calls for respect for the vote

Matteo Salvini doesn't even wait for the polls. It's still morning when he sends a message to Alice Weidel, a wish but also a signal that looks beyond the German borders: stop waving the Alternative fuer Deutschland like a bogeyman, the vote must be respected. A few hours later the numbers arrive and the cheering becomes a celebration. It is a "sensational success" which demonstrates that "another Europe is possible", says the leader of the League, responding to those who see a danger in the rise of the AfD with a word in capital letters: 'Democracy'. However, Roberto Vannacci is thinking of pushing photography even further to the right. "Europe is changing", exults the leader of National Future, before lashing out at Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who "has an ulcer" and warning the entire continent: "No one sleeps". And the vote in the heart of eastern Germany thus opens a crack in the majority. Salvini's toast to his "friend Alice" immediately finds Antonio Tajani's wall, far from a force "antithetical to liberal and Western values". His statement, observes the blue leader, Merz's European ally, is "bad news". Between the two partners, Meloni chooses silence, leaving FdI to read a result which - limited to the analysis of MP Emanuele Loperfido, member of the Italian parliamentary delegation to the OSCE - sees a "clear request for a change of pace".

Salvini has always remained outside the sanitary cordon built around Weidel's party. The League and AfD shared the house of Identity and Democracy in the European Parliament for years, until the expulsion of the AfD in 2024 after Maximilian Krah's statements on the SS and the break wanted above all by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. The parliamentary paths have separated, the political ones have not. At the 2025 federal elections, with the AfD doubled in size, Salvini had already rejoiced: "Carry on like this!". A year and a half later he raises the bar: "Fear? Terror? Danger? No, it's called democracy." A closeness which, according to what is filtered, is not looked upon favorably by everyone in the League. Also because on his right there is now Vannacci, who with the AfD has taken a step further, sitting together in Brussels in the Europe of sovereign nations. From Cernobbio, the general had already hailed the advance of the AfD as the sign of a continent ready to change its skin, predicting that Merz - like Pedro Sanchez and Emmanuel Macron - will not eat "panettone in 2027". And Maurizio Lupi is also setting another boundary in the majority, asking not to back down on the "prejudice against extremist parties".

Among the opposition, the black wave is scary and also forces us to look in the mirror. "The European Union is at risk", warns Carlo Calenda, evoking the return of nationalisms that look "to past totalitarianisms" with a strength never seen in the post-war period. Giuseppe Conte finds the roots of the vote in the choices made by Europe itself, which he said was guilty of having "thought about rearmament rather than about social issues". And now that the "black cloud" is gathering over Saxony-Anhalt, fueled by "xenophobia" and "nationalist demagogy", Riccardo Magi (+Europe) warns that stopping it is a "duty" in Italy too. But it is from the Democratic Party that the most bitter reading comes. "Fear won" and, observes Filippo Sensi, the record turnout that accompanies the rise of the AfD "questions us and slaps us". The CDU has "got everything wrong", the SPD has collected "shameful" numbers. Even the possible barrier, that "republican front" called to stop the ultra-right, appears to the Democratic senator to be merely "a heap". In the end, only darkness remains in his photograph: "It's the middle of the night in Magdeburg."