Italy’s Matteo Salvini has all but abandoned his long crusade against the euro and told his party to drop the vote-losing subject, deeming the single currency to be an “irreversible” fact of history.

The leader of the right-wing Lega party and the towering figure of Italian politics stunned his eurosceptic followers with a forensic mea culpa and a repudiation of past errors in Il Foglio newspaper.

“I say this once and for all, and I hope that nobody inside or outside my party will raise this issue again. The Lega does not have any intention of taking Italy out of the euro or the European Union,” he said.

“Let me be clearer still, to stop journalists from fantasizing: the euro is irreversible,” he said. Mr Salvini has since rowed back slightly, saying that ‘Italexit’ remains desirable but that it is technically impossible for one country to leave monetary union unilaterally.

Mr Salvini’s emphatic comments are a heavy blow to Italy’s once vibrant eurosceptic movement. They follow a similar shift by Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France two years ago after her electoral defeat by Emmanuel Macron.

Both found that their monetary nationalism was frightening voters and undermining the appeal of their parties as broad-church movements fit for government. It was also preventing a concordat with business.