Separatist Offers ‘Friendship’ To South in Political Rally

By Christopher Emsden

ITALY DAILY STAFF

Roberto Maroni, the No. 2 official of the Northern League, made a rare appearance south of Rome on Tuesday, when he joined other leaders of the center-right coalition in a campaign appearance near Naples.
“The South should see the League as a friend,” Mr. Maroni said in Teano, the town where Giuseppe Garibaldi, fresh from having defeated the armies of the Bourbon monarch, met in 1860 with Vittorio Emanuele II and hailed him as the king of a united Italy.
“We are talking about leading a second Risorgimento,” declared Beppe Pisanu, a parliamentary whip for Forza Italia, the largest party in the coalition.
All top Polo leaders assembled with Mr. Maroni to unveil a “pact for the South” they claimed would spur economic growth in the long-depressed Mezzogiorno. Two weeks ago, Antonio Bassolino, the mayor of Naples and favorite to become the president of the Region of Campania, invited fellow center-left candidates to meet in Eboli to unveil their own “manifesto” for Italy’s five southern regions. Eboli, near Teano, has its own claim to symbolic fame as the setting for Carlo Levi’s novel “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” which tr decried the forlorn poverty of the South during the author’s internal exile imposed by the Fascist police.
The Polo outlined a series of tax breaks for companies in the depressed South and promised extensive public as well an Internet portal for local products as the recipe for growth. The program differed only in minor details from the center-left’s proposals.
Yet because Sunday’s elections are for regional governments, which are slated for greater autonomy in the future, political forces are vying with each other to claim that they have better plans for the “federalist” future.
In that light, the presence of Mr. Maroni in Teano was significant — as was the absence of Northern League leader Umberto Bossi, who had pressing campaign engagements in Bergamo.
Until recently, the League insisted on the outright secession of the North, claiming its citizens’ resources were unfairly dragged down by the poor South, whose inhabitants League militants often described as lazy.
Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema said the alliance of the League with the Polo was destined to “create a wound” in Italian unity. He decried the choice of Teano, which he said should be considered as “belonging to all Italians.”
The opposition leaders noted that the center-left had courted the League while it was an outspoken secessionist party earlier in the 1990s, while they, the opposition leaders, had successfully persuaded Mr. Bossi to drop official references to secessionism and to Padania as an eventual nation state.
They also vehemently denied an editorial in Rome-based daily La Repubblica that claimed that Polo leader Silvio Berlusconi and Mr. Bossi had initiated a covert agreement to drastically extend the powers of regional governments across the wealthy North, where they expect to win many votes. That report claimed that the accord included plans to introduce an American- style devolution of control over the police, a controversial measure that would at any rate require a constitutional amendment in Parliament.
The tax breaks promoted by both sides would require decisions made in Rome. The European Union is likely to frown on all of them, and in fact Mr. Berlusconi agreed to phase out similar incentives during his brief stint as prime minister in 1994. The center-left has run through several high-profile and costly programs in the last four years, but jobless rates of above 20 percent in the South have not budged.
The day was dominated by talk of “federalism,” and Mr. Maroni claimed that the center-left had “copied” his program from the Polo’s models for the North. “He accuses us of subversion and then copies us,” he said. Mr. Bassolino — who is often dubbed “the King of Naples” — said the arrival of the League in Teano was a “profanation of Italy’s patriotic history,” saying that the town represented the merger into one country of “the hard-working rigor of the North and the generous heart of the South.” Historians say Garibaldi’s meeting with Vittorio Emanuele actually took place in Vairano, a nearby village, and that the two parted ways in Teano. A few days later, Garibaldi asked the king for plenary powers in the South for a year. The request was refused, and the red-shirted hero of Italy’s unification was later exiled to n island off Sardinia for “meddling” with state affairs.