Tag Archives: bossi

Italy, Veneto

No, Venice isn’t about to break away from the rest of Italy

1 Comment

Piazza San Marco

Though it was essentially nothing more than an online poll, the Venetian independence movement has now become an international headline, with first Italian media, then Russian media and now US publications asking whether Veneto will be the next region to succumb to separatist sentiment.Italy Flag Iconveneto

Although the online plebiscite is raising more publicity than its promoters could have possibly hoped, it’s still just an unofficial, Internet-based poll. So when you see headlines that scream that 89% of Venetians are voting for independence from mainland Italy, keep in mind that it’s more a stunt than an actual referendum.

Plebiscite 2013, a Venetist group, conducted the referendum between March 16 and 21, and it claims that 2.36 million Venetians voted in the online poll for full independence from Italy, fully 89.1% of the voters who participated. There are good reasons to doubt whether those numbers are accurate — Il Corriere del Veneto today reports that, following an analysis of the web traffic data, the real total is something more like 135,000, and among those voters, there are more votes from Chile than from Padua, one of the region’s largest cities. While you should take the Venetist movement increasingly seriously, the March online poll is not the most credible evidence. Continue reading No, Venice isn’t about to break away from the rest of Italy →

Italy, Lombardia

Maroni’s Lombardy victory consolidates Northern League’s regional hold

1 Comment

CONGRESSO FEDERALE DELLA LEGA NORD

European and global stock markets whipsawed earlier this week as investors contemplated the notion of gridlock in Italy’s hung parliament following the weekend’s inconclusive vote, and what that means for the eurozone’s future. 
lombardyItaly Flag Icon

Predictably enough, European leaders took turns to warn Italy not to veer from its austerity-minded course, and Germany’s hapless social democratic leader Peer Steinbrück even managed to insult Italy’s president by referring to center-right leader Silvio Berlusconi and protest leader and blogger Beppe Grillo ‘clowns.’

But as Italians turned to counting results from regional elections yesterday, there’s another threat looming on the horizon — the specter of separatism.

Even as the autonomist Lega Nord (Northern League) fell from 60 deputies to just 18 in Italy’s lower house, the Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies), its leader Roberto Maroni (pictured above) won a hard-fought battle for control of Italy’s largest regional government on a slogan of ‘prima il Nord‘ — ‘the North first.’

lombardy president

That’s because, in addition to the general election, Italians in Lombardy, Lazio and Molise also went to the polls to elect their regional governments as well — it’s as if, on the day of the Canadian federal election, each of Ontario, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island each held their own provincial elections as well.

And there’s no bigger prize than Lombardy, the home of Milan, Italy’s financial, industrial and fashion capital, is Italy’s wealthiest region and its most populous as well — with 10 million people, one in six Italians is a Lombardian.

Maroni’s victory is pivotal because it now gives the Northern League control of the regional governments in Italy’s three largest, wealthiest regions, and Maroni has not hidden his ambitions for a more autonomous northern Italy.  In the past two decades, the Northern League has alternated between supporting greater autonomy and supporting full independence for ‘Pavania,’ its term for northern Italy.

Maroni envisions a Europe of ‘regions,’ and a more federal Italian government that allows northern Italy to keep more of its revenues:

“If I win in Lombardy, a new phase will open: it’s about the path which leads to the creation of the macro-region, and in the same time the first piece of the new Europe of the Regions. It’s an ambitious project, which is not concerning the destiny of Lombardy only, but of the entire North. And it could change history: in Italy’s Northern regions and in Europe.”

That explains, in part, why Maroni was so enthusiastic to leave national politics for local politics — he took over as national leader only last year after long-time Northern League leader Umberto Bossi resigned amid corruption charges.  Maroni has become a familiar face to all Italians over the past two decades — he served as minister of the interior in Berlusconi’s past 1994-95 and 2008-11 governments, and as minister of labor and welfare from 2001-06.

Initially, Maroni wants Lombardy to keep 75% of its total tax revenues, compared to around 66% of the tax revenues it retains currently.

Luca Zaia, the leader of the Liga Veneta (Venetian League), is the regional president of Veneto, where separatist support is strongest, having won the 2010 regional elections in Veneto in a landslide victory, heading a broad center-right coalition.

To the west of Lombardy, in Piedmont, support for the Northern League has traditionally been less enthusiastic — after all, the genesis of Italian unification in the 1860s was born in what was then the kingdom of Piedmont.  Nonetheless, Roberto Cota won control of Piedmont’s government in the 2010 regional elections, leading a center-right coalition that very narrowly ousted the previous center-left Piedmontese government.

With a 2014 referendum on Scotland’s independence from the United Kingdom scheduled and an inevitable showdown between Catalunya’s president Artur Mas and the federal Spanish government over Catalan independence, Maroni’s consolidation of northern Italy under autonomist control means that northern Italy may become the next separatist domino to follow, especially as Italy’s economy continues through a brutal recession and its national government seems unable to take any measures to ameliorate economic decline (or, following this weekend’s election, take any measures at all).

So long after the current crisis recedes with respect to Italy’s national government, Maroni will be around for some time to come to cause headaches for the next Italian prime minister — even more so if it turns out to be a center-left prime minister, such as Pier Luigi Bersani, whose centrosinistra coalition, dominated by Bersani’s Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), looks to form a stable government.

In some ways, Maroni’s victory is more stunning than the Northern League’s 2010 upset victory in Piedmont. Continue reading Maroni’s Lombardy victory consolidates Northern League’s regional hold →

Italy

Is Italy headed into a post-Berlusconi ‘third republic’ era of national politics?

8 Comments

Silvio Berlusconi this week all but conceded that he would not run as the main center-right candidate for prime minister in Italy’s upcoming elections, due to be held before April 2013 — and he even hinted he could support a moderate coalition in favor of continuing the economic reforms of current technocratic prime minister Mario Monti (pictured above).

I’m not convinced this is the last we’ve heard from Il Cavaliere, though, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t his last word on whether he’ll run in 2013.

Berlusconi has been the central figure of Italian politics since 1994, so if he changes his mind tomorrow, or next month, or next year, he has sufficient money and control over Italian media to play a huge role in the upcoming election.  Current polls indicate, however, that most Italians are ready to turn the page on Berlusconi.

Many political scientists and Italians alike consider the period from 1945 to around 1993 Italy’s ‘first republic’ — a period where Italy’s Christian Democratic party (and various allies) essentially controlled the government continuously, through less-than-stable coalitions that often split and re-formed in various permutations of the center-right and center-left.  Despite consistently strong opposition from Italy’s Communists, the Communists never had enough strength — or were permitted to gather enough strength — to enter government.

After the Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’) scandal that implicated essentially every major politician in Italian public life in the 1990s, Italy entered its ‘second republic’ — an era that’s been dominated by Berlusconi and has featured somewhat more stability — Italian politics since the 1994 general election can be seen as a struggle between a largely rightist coalition and another largely leftist coalition (despite Italy’s reputation for pizza topping politics).  Governments have been more stable, but media freedom has in some ways regressed, in large part due to Berlusconi’s overweening control of private (and sometimes public) media in Italy.

If Berlusconi indeed remains on the sidelines in the upcoming election, however, we could see a tectonic shift in Italian politics that represents yet another era — a new ‘third republic’ — one where Italy continues to develop even more engrained democratic norms and stronger liberal freedoms.  Even if that somewhat overstates the case, 2013 is set to become as much a transformative year in Italian politics as 1994.  What’s striking is that, no more than six months before the next general election, what we know about the future of Italian politics is massively outweighed by what we don’t.

The latest poll, as of October 9 from Ipsos, currently shows Berlusconi’s center-right Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, the People of Freedom) winning just 18.0% of the vote, to 28.5% for Italy’s main center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five-Star Movement), a populist protest vehicle of popular comedian and blogger Beppe Grillo, with 17.4%. Those numbers, however, are very likely to change between now and the election.

At the risk of dumping a laundry list of minor parties at my readers, it’s important to note the other actors in Italian politics and where they stand:

  • the rump of Italy’s once-dominant Christian Democrats, led by the highly respected Pier Ferdinando Casini, the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Centre) wins 6.4%;
  • the centrist, anti-corruption Italia dei Valori (IdV, Italy of Values) of former Tangentopoli prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro wins 6.0%;
  • the socialist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) of the popular — and openly gay — president of Puglia, Nichi Vendola, wins 5.6%;
  • the separatist Lega Nord (LN, Northern League), under the new leadership of Roberto Maroni following a corruption scandal involving former longtime leader Umberto Bossi, wins just 4.9%;
  • no other party wins more than 3% of the vote — the most notable of the smaller parties is the newly-formed free-market liberal Futuro e Libertà (FLI, Future and Freedom) of former foreign minister Gianfranco Fini, a former Berlusconi ally who once headed the neofascist National Alliance party (although he worked to move it from the fringes to the center).

With all of that in mind, consider exactly everything we don’t know about an election ostensibly just six months away: Continue reading Is Italy headed into a post-Berlusconi ‘third republic’ era of national politics? →

Italy

Addio to the Lega Nord

5 Comments

 

 Umberto Bossi resigned last week as the leader of the populist and xenophobic Lega Nord (the Northern League), Italy’s largest separatist party, based chiefly in the northeastern and north-central regions of Italy, especially in the Veneto and Lombardy.

Since before Silvio Berlusconi ascended to the top levels of Italian public life, first in 1994 with the Forza Italia party, later with the Casa della Libertà coalition of right-wing groups and finally the more formal Popolo della Libertà party, Bossi and the Lega Nord have been inexorable toads on the Italian right’s lilypad.  

Berlusconi often needed Bossi in order to form a coalition to govern, but the anti-immigrant tenor of the Lega Nord — in 2008, it tried to prevent the building of any Islamic mosques in Italy — was always a bit of a distraction for the Berlusconi government.  Indeed, in 1995, Bossi and the Lega Bord caused the first Berlusconi government to fall after losing a vote of confidence.  In the late 1990s, the Lega called for the independence of northern Italy under the name of “Padania.”  While Berlusconi’s forces have largely supported the austerity measures of new, technocratic prime minister Mario Monti, Bossi and the Lega have been remained in somewhat bitter opposition.

The party vacillated between a high of 10.1% in the 1996 election to a low of 3.9% in 2001, only to re-emerge with 8.3% and 60 seats in the most recent 2008 election that restored Berlusconi to power.  It’s an even bet, though, that we’ll be saying “addio,” and not the more we’ll-meet-again breezy “arrivederci” to the Lega Nord, which may crumble with the fall of Bossi, whose resignation stems from the kind of sleazy corruption reminiscent of the Bettino Craxi era of Italian politics — abuse of the party’s coffers for improvements to his own property and kickbacks to family members.

Despite his protestations, it is difficult to understate just how intertwined Bossi and the Lega Nord have become: Bossi is the Lega Nord and has been for two decades. Continue reading Addio to the Lega Nord →