As Meloni concocts cabinet, Salvini loses bid for Interior ministry

 ROME -- "Post-Fascist" Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni began planning her putative coalition government cabinet Friday by indicating that League leader Matteo Salvini will not return to his old job as interior minister because of his pro-Russian sympathies, political sources said.

 Anti-migrant demagogue Salvini had been agitating for months for the high-profile job but the United States unofficially indicated it would take a dim view of the League leader returning to the top security post in the cabinet given his open support for Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past. Meloni was expected to make Salvini a deputy prime minister as a consolation prize with Forza Italia blowhard Antono Tajani another possible deputy premier, the sources said.
  
 The well-informed la Repubblica newspaper commentator Stefano Folli wrote that "everyone knows that Matteo Salvini will not return to the Viminale ... for at least a couple of weeks now, the US State Department, in dealing with the Italian 'dossier', has made it unofficially clear that it does not like one of Putin's closest Western politicians in a strategic government position."
 
 Salvini's star has been waning since the League scored only 8 percent of the vote in the Italian general election last Sunday with many of its past supporters decamping to the Brothers of Italy, which campaigned with a Fascist tricolour flame symbol in its party logo and was founded by politicians nostalgic for the regime of Second World War dictator Benito Mussolini.
 
 Ms Meloni has always supported Ukraine's fight against the Russian invasion, distinguishing herself from the pro-Russian stance of the League and Forza Italia patriarch Silvio Berlusconi.
 
 Italian President Sergio Mattarella is expected to begin consultations with institutional figures and party leaders next week prior to giving Ms Meloni a mandate to form a government that she then will present to Parliament for approval in confidence votes.
   
 In another development in Kiev, however, Mykhailo Podolyak, 50, an advisor to the Ukrainian president's office and head of the negotiating team that tried the impassable path of a diplomatic agreement with the Russians months ago, was quoted by la Repubblica saying "We have elements to say that someone in Europe, even among Italian parties, has taken money from the Kremlin, but we cannot reveal this because it would mean interfering with the politics of your country."
 
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