COVID-19 Prompts Rethink of European Populist Tactics  

Euro-skeptic populist leaders are adjusting political tactics — instead of calling for their countries to follow Britain and quit the European Union, they’re focusing now on changing the bloc from within. 

“I think after the COVID crisis, the EU needs to reinvent itself and find a new soul,” Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s Lega party and a former Italian deputy prime minister, told the New Europe newspaper.   The interview came just days after Salvini met Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Poland’s prime minister, Mateus Morawiecki, in Budapest to discuss shaping an alliance of their nationalist parties at the European level, the nucleus for a broader reformist movement that will play up the sovereign rights of member states and block, they hope, deeper European integration.  They hope the grouping will attract other nationalist, conservative and reformist-minded parties to form what would be the second largest political alliance in the European Parliament — “a true alternative,” says Salvini, to the parties favoring deeper political integration of the EU’s 27 member states.