The Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has made a rare foray into the political arena, warning of the dangers of underestimating the “xenophobic and racist” new interior minister Matteo Salvini who heads up Italy’s far-right League party.

Writing in her column for the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, the reclusive Ferrante, who has kept her identity hidden, said she had never been politically active, and while she has “feared for the fate of democracy” in Italy, she has more often “thought our worries have been deliberately exaggerated”.

While she has never voted for the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, she has seen it as an “important receptacle for the mass discontent generated by the inadequate, often disastrous way” European governments have dealt with the economic crisis, she said.

But the author of the bestselling Neapolitan series said she now fears that the war against Five Star has hidden the real danger: Salvini’s League, now in coalition with Five Star, and Salvini himself, a former talk radio host who is fronting Italy’s hardline approach to refugees.

Last week, Salvini refused to allow a boat carrying more than 600 refugees and migrants to dock in the country. This week, he pledged to conduct a census of Italy’s Roma community and expel those living in the country illegally, a policy that critics say is reminiscent of the country’s fascist past.

Describing Salvini as “in line with the worst of the Italian political traditions”, Ferrante said the politician was widely underestimated and “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,” she argued. “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.”

Ferrante also predicted that Salvini would eventually turn on Five Star. “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,” she wrote, in the column translated by Ann Goldstein. “Their first accuser, in due course, will be Salvini.”