Matteo Salvini, Italy's deputy prime minister and transport minister, has publicly criticised the budget law his own cabinet approved, taking issue with its provisions on schools, pensions and public health, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. The League leader said his party would put forward amendments and that he did not share the planned staffing cuts in education or the approach to public healthcare. His remarks drew responses not only from opposition parties but also from within the governing majority.
Salvini, who also leads the League, told reporters he had not been aware of the school cuts in advance. He said the party's technical staff and MPs were already working to find the money needed to avoid the proposed reductions in school staffing. He also defended the Lombardy model of mixing public and accredited private providers, saying it can shorten waiting lists and widen the range of treatments available, and argued the same logic applies to schools.
Why it matters
The episode exposes friction inside the coalition over a budget that has already cleared the Council of Ministers, the cabinet meeting where the text was signed off. Salvini sits in that meeting, and the economy minister, Giancarlo Giorgetti, is a fellow League member — a detail opposition senators seized on. If the League's amendments go anywhere, they would reopen a fiscal package the government has presented as settled; if they do not, the party's complaints may read as positioning rather than policy.
FdI pushes back on the pension demand
The sharpest exchange concerned pensions. Salvini said the fund in the budget for early retirement is meant to let people leave work at 64 from 2027, describing it as a step toward dismantling the Fornero pension law, a long-standing League objective. He stressed that early exit would be a choice rather than an obligation, and said he expects the same respect for the League's priorities that he shows for others'.
Marco Osnato, Fratelli d'Italia's economic chief and chair of the lower house finance committee, responded that agreements must be honoured and that in this case the agreement is set out in the budget law. Claudio Durigon, a League undersecretary at the labour ministry, answered him by saying there was no cause for concern: the government is doing what the country needs and what the 2022 coalition programme promised, including flexibility on retirement. Durigon described the change as a historic League goal, noting the party did not vote for the Fornero law but backed measures such as quota 100 that softened it, Il Fatto Quotidiano reports.
Opposition: did he sleep through cabinet?
Opposition politicians used Salvini's claim of ignorance to attack the government. Senator Barbara Floridia of the Five Star Movement noted that Salvini is not only deputy premier but also secretary of the same party as Giorgetti and education minister Giuseppe Valditara. Either he was not told about the cuts, she argued, or he knew and is now distancing himself — in effect withdrawing confidence from his own ministers and from himself. She said the only serious response is to withdraw the cuts and apologise.
Angelo Bonelli of the Greens and Left Alliance asked whether Salvini sleeps during cabinet meetings and described the government as incompetent, accusing it of approving what he called a social robbery while pretending to know nothing. Francesco Boccia, who leads the Democratic Party group in the Senate, called the situation an absurd comedy. Carlo Calenda mocked the deputy premier on X, tagging Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, with a jibe that Salvini was either absent from the meeting or asleep during it.
The next test is whether the League tables concrete amendments with identified funding, as Salvini promised, and whether the coalition absorbs the dispute or lets it spill into parliament's scrutiny of the budget.
