ANGELA MERKEL is not the only head of a European government with a disruptive interior minister. Since entering the Italian cabinet on June 1st Matteo Salvini has managed for different reasons to annoy the governments of Tunisia, Malta, France and Spain. And he can scarcely have endeared himself to Mrs Merkel by openly making common cause with his German counterpart, Horst Seehofer. On June 18th Mr Salvini even picked a fight with Cambodia. In the latest of several excursions outside his ministerial bailiwick, Mr Salvini, who is also a deputy prime minister and leader of the hard-right Northern League, threatened to ban ships carrying Cambodian rice from docking in Italian ports. He claimed the rice, which is exempt from EU tariffs, was competing unfairly with Italian produce.

With his bull-in-a-china-shop approach Mr Salvini has dominated the political agenda from the start, even though his party is the junior partner in a coalition with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S); polls now show his party in the lead. His cocktail of provocative sound-bites and radical action (notably his refusal on June 10th to grant entry to an NGO rescue vessel laden with migrants) has made it seem as if he is deciding Italian foreign policy. But Nathalie Tocci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali, a think-tank, is sceptical that he will make a lasting impact. “I struggle to see anything meaningful coming out of it all,” she says.

On migration, Italy’s populist government is hemmed in by constraints: the refusal of Italy’s EU partners to take an agreed quota of arriving migrants and the refusal of the countries of origin to have back those migrants who do not qualify for asylum. On June 15th the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, agreed with France’s President Emmanuel Macron on setting up facilities outside the EU where migrants could have their asylum requests processed without exposing themselves to the perils of a clandestine Mediterranean crossing. But, as both men know, the main transit country is Libya, which is in violent disarray. Actually creating these facilities will be hard.

Nor does everyone in the government identify with the rumbustious Mr Salvini. The foreign minister, Enzo Moavero Milanesi, worked for 20 years at the European Commission. The M5S, led by Luigi Di Maio, the other deputy prime minister, is also more moderate than the League. It has already shelved a demand for a referendum on membership of the euro and a plan for withdrawing Italian forces from Afghanistan. This week saw the first open disagreement between the coalition partners, when Mr Di Maio criticised a proposal by Mr Salvini to make a special count of Roma people in Italy that would lead to non-citizens being deported (“a mass cleansing, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood,” said Mr Salvini).

Mr Conte was sponsored by the M5S. But like his foreign minister, he is another technocrat without a power base, and the M5S is more interested in economic and social affairs than foreign policy. Mr Conte is painfully at sea in international affairs. At the G7 meeting this month he backed Donald Trump’s call for the readmission of Russia, only to be swiftly talked round by Italy’s EU partners. As for the 31-year-old Mr Di Maio, he is no match for the media-savvy leader of the League. Mr Salvini is still a man to watch. And, many feel, one who needs watching.