The aftermath of the Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War has reshaped politics across Europe, and no party in Italy has played on immigration more than the League. Since 2014, more than 500,000 migrants have arrived in Italy, a country of 60 million people, most of them on boats from North Africa. The system for processing asylum applications is slow and imperfect. The migrants, not all of whom are asylum-seekers, are stuck in Italy, many unable to work legally, often living in squalid encampments. For years now, Italian television has shown an endless loop of migrants disembarking from boats.

Enter Salvini, who is 44 and took over the League five years ago. Now the oldest existing political party in Italy, the Northern League was founded in 1989, advocating the independence of the wealthy Italian north. It used to consider Rome the enemy, although it was a junior partner in several Berlusconi governments. Salvini has been transforming it into a national party, with foreigners, and to a certain extent Europe, as the enemy.

He has done this largely by drawing on fears of supposedly out-of-control immigration. And he is succeeding. On Salvini’s watch, the League has grown from a 4 percent showing in the 2013 elections to possibly more than 13 percent today, according to Italy’s often unreliable polls. If it outperforms the other party on the right-wing ticket, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Salvini could potentially become Italy’s next prime minister. Forza Italia is now polling around 16 percent, down from 21 percent in the 2013 elections. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement is expected to place first in Sunday’s vote. It has said it won’t form coalitions, but there’s rampant speculation about whether it might change its mind and form a coalition with the League. That scenario—Brussels’ and Renzi’s nightmare—would give Italy the first populist government in the heart of Europe.

In his Milan speech, Salvini incongruously quoted Pier Paolo Pasolini, the great intellectual of the left, about anti-fascist demonstrations of the past—Pasolini had speculated in 1973 that such demonstrations “may ultimately be a weapon of distraction aimed at capturing dissent by fighting a non-existent enemy, while modern consumerism is eroding an already moribund society.” But Salvini has mostly borrowed a lot of his rhetoric from France’s far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, with some exceptions, including the brazen use of religion, which is absent from political discourse in secular France. At the rally in Milan, Salvini also quoted the Gospel of Matthew—“the last shall be first”— several times, in his appeal to the working class, the disabled, people who feel neglected. Then he pulled out a rosary—a rosary!—which he said a woman had given him on the campaign trail. It was an obvious play for votes in the South, where the right has always had strong results, although the formerly Northern League hasn’t. And sure enough, Italian television and newspapers all carried images of Salvini, secular separatist, holding up the rosary, as if he were the second coming. His campaign posters say “Salvini Prime Minsiter” with an image of a knight wielding a sword and shield.