I’ve never been politically active. I’ve never organized marches or demonstrations, or helped organize them. I’ve confined myself to taking part in initiatives that seemed urgent, and necessary for the common good. There have been times when I was truly alarmed, and feared for the fate of democracy in my country. But more often I’ve thought our worries have been deliberately exaggerated.

I’ve never shared the apprehension about the political rise of the Five Star Movement, and find the term “populism” – today applied to all political forces, old and new – to be useless. The Five Star Movement has seemed an important receptacle for the mass discontent generated by the inadequate, often disastrous way – on right and left, in Italy and across Europe – governments have dealt with the economic crisis and epochal changes we are living through.

I’ve never voted for Five Star: its muddled, sometimes naive, sometimes banal language is alien to me. But I still think it’s an extremely serious mistake to portray the movement as a danger to Italian democracy and, more generally, to Europe. The war against Five Star has prevented us from seeing that the danger is elsewhere. I’m referring to Matteo Salvini’s League, a political force that is much better organized, and deceptively tamed by years of governing with Berlusconi. I have no fondness for Salvini. I dislike what he represents, just as I dislike what those to whom he gives a lot of credit represent on this planet: Putin, Trump and, in their wake, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán and others.

Salvini, federal secretary of the League – the most significant part of our new government – is in line with the worst of the Italian political traditions. Widely underestimated, used by television producers to enliven debates and generate publicity, he has become increasingly persuasive, giving the appearance of a good-natured common man who thoroughly understands the problems of the common people and at the right moment bangs his xenophobic and racist fists on the table.

Sometimes I imagine, anxiously, that the consensus around the bad feelings Salvini embodies (and stimulates) may spread beyond his intentions and slide into the mass brutality that in times of crisis is always lying in wait, welding divergent motives: those of profit, and broad sectors of society demoralized by their economic precariousness and fear of the future.

Five Star wanted to govern to rescue the country from inefficiency. But today they seem to be sitting on the benches of parliament – prime minister Giuseppe Conte at their head – in order to assume all the blame that normally goes to the politicians in power. Their first accuser, in due course, will be Salvini.

• Translated by Ann Goldstein