Italy's far-right Northern League may need to soften its anti-euro stance in order to enter into a governing coalition with Forza Italia | Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images Italy’s Northern League goes soft (on the euro) The Italian far-right party wants to be back in government and is softening its line on Europe to get there.

Italy's far-right Northern League is eyeing a return to government next year, taking advantage of a surge in support in local elections over the summer.

However, if it wants to join a coalition with its old ally Silvio Berlusconi, the Northern League may have to soften its tough line on Europe — and especially on the single currency, long a bugbear of the Italian right.

The shift is already happening. Party leader Matteo Salvini — who's spent years campaigning against the single currency (and occasionally wearing a T-shirt saying "Basta euro") — appears to have changed his tone.

Speaking to POLITICO last week, he didn't attack the single currency or even the EU, instead saying “we want to give Europe one last chance, but in return we want to see real change, especially when it comes to Schengen and the Dublin treaty” — the two EU treaties that regulate cross-border movement in the bloc.

Libero, an Italian daily that follows the Northern League's line, described Salvini's comments (first reported in Brussels Playbook) as “a small shift in foreign policy,” with the party moving “from euro-nihilism to Euroskepticism.” It said that shift has become more marked since Marine Le Pen's defeat in the French presidential election.

There's method behind the change in attitude.

“It's realpolitik,” said Paolo Grimoldi, a Northern League MP who has known Salvini since they were teenagers. “We don't have the 51 percent of votes [needed to govern alone] and it's not very clear how to leave the euro.”

Grimoldi said a softening of the party's anti-euro position would be needed to form a coalition with Berlusconi, the controversial former prime minister whose Forza Italia party is key to setting up a united center-right front.

In all three Berlusconi coalition governments, he has found a place for the Northern League and that will be the case again if talks to create a center-right bloc succeed. When the Northern League was in power in the past, it didn't have a clear anti-euro line, which has emerged since Salvini took over the leadership.

To court Salvini, Berlusconi has even been floating the idea of a double currency: using the euro for international transactions and the old Italian lira internally. Marine Le Pen had a similar proposal, but it didn't fly with French voters.

If a third party is needed for a center-right-led coalition, it would likely be the far-right Brothers of Italy, a small group with roots in Italy's fascist past, and there could be room for some small, moderate parties.

But it's the Northern League that is in pole position when it comes to creating a new center-right coalition, especially after being the only big party to make gains in June's local elections. That would make the League "the engine" of a governing coalition, wrote Istituto Cattaneo, a political research institute, commenting on the local elections' results.

Lofty ambitions

Salvini doesn't just want to prop up the old warhorse Berlusconi. This admirer of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin wants to be prime minister — and he could achieve that ambition if his party gets more votes than Berlusconi's. (The tycoon, who turns 81 next month, won't be prime minister anyway, as a conviction for tax fraud means he cannot be elected to parliament).

Since becoming leader in 2013, Salvini has saved a party that was on the brink of collapse in the wake of a corruption scandal that brought down his predecessor and party founder Umberto Bossi. (The scandal hasn't completely gone away; a tribunal recently ordered the party to refund the Italian state to the tune of €48 million.)

He has succeeded in turning the Northern League from an anti-migrant party that wanted to split from the poorer Italian south into a stronger force that campaigns against the euro (and still doesn't like migrants), and has no qualms about forging ties with the likes of the neo-fascist Casa Pound activist group.

It helps that he's young — 44 — and charismatic. Almost always casually dressed, Salvini is a regular on TV talk shows and in gossip magazines where he makes headlines for his colorful love life.

“I will be the candidate [for prime minister], not [European Parliament President Antonio] Tajani, not Berlusconi. The party with the most votes gets to choose and so far that party is the Northern League,” he told POLITICO.

To get the top job, he'll have to elbow his way past Tajani, a schoolmate of current Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, and a long-term Berlusconi ally.

“The candidate for premier that Berlusconi thinks of, in case of victory, remains the president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani. Soft, prudent, institutional: the Paolo Gentiloni of the center-right,” political analyst Marco Damilano wrote last month.

Salvini's change of tone will have wider implications for Italian politics. Another potential governing party, the anti-establishment 5Star Movement, has often been accused of ambiguity on the single currency. The Northern League's less harsh language may force the 5Stars — neck-and-neck with Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party in the polls — to take a firm line one way or the other.

After a year in which the far-right fell short of its ambitions to govern across Europe, and with the eurozone enjoying sustained growth, Salvini's new stance could just be smart politics.

“Today, from an electorate point of view, it pays a bit less to denounce these problems [with the euro]," said Northern League MP Grimoldi.