AS ITALIANS trickled back to the cities from holidays on the coast and in the sun-baked countryside, the scene was set this week for what promises to be a difficult autumn. Over both the enduring problem of what to do about migrants arriving from north Africa and the even older problem of Italy’s dangerously anaemic economy, clashes with the EU are looming.

In the latest flexing of his muscles, Italy’s interior minister and leader of the Northern League, the pugnacious Matteo Salvini, kept more than a hundred asylum-seekers cooped up on one of Italy’s coast-guard vessels, the Ubaldo Diciotti, for almost a week as he demanded EU agreement on a policy for the redistribution of migrants. After a meeting in Brussels ended without progress, the Italian Catholic church helped to broker a deal. Most of the asylum-seekers entered Italy under its auspices; 20 each went to Ireland and, somewhat improbably, to Albania.

But this is only a temporary and partial climb-down. Mr Salvini and his political soulmate, Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, made clear during a meeting in Italy this week that they plan to build an EU-wide, anti-immigration front for the European elections next year (though they are at odds over the sharing of migrants). They plan to challenge the centrist alliance that France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is trying to forge, and which they depict as pro-immigration. Mr Salvini said they were at a “historic turning point” in Europe. With traditional conservatives increasingly clashing with hardline populists, he may well be right.

Still, Mr Salvini is in a more complicated situation than might at first appear. He is allied to another populist party, the Five Star Movement (M5S), that spans the political spectrum. How long will the M5S allow itself to be dragged along in his wake? Roberto Fico, its lower-house Speaker, criticised Mr Salvini’s handling of the Ubaldo Diciotti affair, but was slapped down by the M5S’s leader, Luigi Di Maio, who, like Mr Salvini, is a deputy prime minister. The incident highlighted the possibility of a split in the ideologically heterogeneous M5S which, as one of its lawmakers speculated, Mr Salvini may be trying to promote. Such a split would give him an opportunity to bring the right wing of the M5S into his already fast-growing League.

The dispute over immigration forms part of the Italian government’s broader challenge to the established EU order. On August 27th, Mr Di Maio threatened to withhold Italy’s contribution to the EU’s next seven-year budget if its demands over migration were not met. The next day he hinted that Italy’s own budget for 2019, due to be unveiled in September, could involve running a deficit of more than 3%, the limit imposed by euro-zone rules.

That rattled capital markets, not least because Mr Di Maio also said that he intends to introduce immediately three expensive measures that had previously been expected to be phased in gradually: income support for the poor and unemployed; lower rates of income tax; and the rollback of a pension reform.

A big deficit would add to Italy’s already sky-high public debt-to-GDP ratio of around 130%, eroding investors’ confidence in its ability to meet its obligations. Unsurprisingly, the risk premium on Italy’s benchmark bonds has more than doubled since before the formation of the government, raising the cost of state borrowing and weakening the balance-sheets of Italian banks. Mr Di Maio is playing a risky game. But what is the prize?

Unleashing demons

The most banal, and likely, answer is that he is ramping up tension with Brussels to help secure the greatest possible freedom to pump cash into the economy and stimulate growth. But his bluster inevitably kindles suspicions that the League and the M5S, neither of which is committed to euro membership, may be plotting to extricate Italy from the shared currency, if not the EU. A third possible explanation is that Mr Di Maio, whose party is nominally the senior partner in the coalition government, is trying to regain the initiative by outbidding Mr Salvini in the extravagance of his threats and demands.

The danger is that, in so doing, he will create unrealistic expectations in a country where a large share of the population feels it has been left to deal with immigration alone and where almost everyone has accepted the alibi long put forward by governments of left and right alike: that Italy’s distressingly low growth is not because of their own failure to introduce structural reforms, but entirely because of the European Commission’s stinginess.