Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said Thursday he will remain in office even if he is initially convicted of charges related to blocking a migrant ship at the Italian port.
He hopes for an acquittal, but if that doesn’t happen, he will still be in his ministerial office the next day, working, he said in Rome. Salvini, 51, is head of the right-wing ruling Lega party.
“I count on an independent judge to come to the conclusions that seem clearest to me. If that is not the case at first, fortunately there are two other cases in Italy,” he wrote.
Whether he is acquitted or convicted, he will continue working. But if he is convicted, he will be “a little angry,” he said.
The Palermo Public Prosecutor’s Office is demanding a six-year prison sentence in the trial over the treatment of migrants in the Mediterranean.
The Lega politician is accused of denying a Spanish aid agency ship carrying migrants access to a port for weeks in 2019, when he was interior minister.
In a court in the Sicilian capital, the prosecution classified this as deprivation of liberty and abuse of power. The verdict against Salvini, Italy’s current transport and infrastructure minister, is expected to be announced next month.
Salvini still has no regrets about the tough measures he took as interior minister from 2018-2019. “I would do it again,” he wrote on his Instagram profile.
He made an international name for himself at the time with his actions against ships of private aid organizations that took on migrants in the central Mediterranean.
Today he is one of the central figures in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s three-party right-wing coalition.
Salvini described the process as a political process initiated by left-wing parties.
