ITALY: With the firebrand leader of Italy's junior coalition partner apparently in failing health, Paddy Agnew asks what future has the Northern League
At about 9.30 p.m. last Sunday evening, during a Northern League rally in the little Lombardy town of Alzano, near Bergamo, Institutional Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli broke off from a speech to announce a special address, via telephone, from his party leader, Euro MP Umberto Bossi.
Since suffering a serious heart attack last March that left him bedridden, with his physical movements and power of speech greatly reduced, 61-year-old Bossi has been a phantom figure in Italian politics. Too unwell to appear in public, he had spoken to the Northern League faithful just once before last Sunday night, namely on the party radio station, Radio Padania, on the eve of the European parliamentary elections in June (in which he won a seat from his hospital bed).
On both occasions, the Bossi voice was weak, hard to understand and far removed from the rough, raucous tones that have been his political trademark over the last 20 years.
The voice may have been weak, but the federalist message was strong as ever: "We will never renounce on federalism. I want to come back to find a free Padania", Bossi told supporters, in a reference to one of his most famous inventions, namely Padania, a mythical Northern League home territory that takes in much of Northern Italy, along the basin of the Po river from Piedmont across to the Adriatic.
The message was a throwback to Bossi's political origins, a reminder of the days when he seemed like an outsider, even a protest figure in the cosy, corrupt world of Italian politics. When his party emerged as a national force, winning 8.9 per cent of votes at the 1991 general election, Bossi and his fellow deputies marched on "Roma Ladrona" (Thieving Rome) with a menacing step. They were intent on cleaning up the mess created by a corrupt political system which overtaxed the industrious, hard-working north merely to subsidise the lazy, Mafia-ridden south. Or so went the populist protest gospel, according to Bossi.
Throughout the 1990s, his creative flair saw him invent one Northern League happening after another.
He came up with the green shirt and necktie for the party faithful; he took his followers on a march along the sacred Po; he organised a short-lived Padania parliament; he even held alternative Padania elections.
Most of all, he became a serious force in Italian politics, one who entered government as a coalition partner with Silvio Berlusconi in 1994 and who was then strong enough to pull the rug and bring down Mr Berlusconi after only seven months. In those days, by the way, he used to cheerfully refer to Mr Berlusconi as "the mafioso Berluskaiser".
Come the 1996 general election, the Northern League polled 3.77 million votes or 10.1 per cent.
That result may well have represented the high point in the rise and rise of the Northern League. Five years later at the 2001 general election, the League's vote had dropped to 3.9 per cent or 1.45 million voters.
Umberto Bossi's illness has come at a delicate moment for the "Lega". The uncertainty over the future leadership comes as the party has intensified its efforts to realise its long held federalist reforms. After three years in office alongside Mr Berlusconi, no such package of institutional reforms has been enacted.
Two of the senior coalition government partners, the ex-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale (AN) and the ex-Christian Democrat UDC are strongly opposed to federalist reforms that would undermine Italian unity. Tension between the squabbling partners saw AN force the resignation of Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti, a Northern League sympathiser, early last month.
Mr Bossi has distanced himself, for both political and personal health reasons, from the Berlusconi government, renouncing his role of Reforms Minister three weeks ago to take up his seat as Euro MP.
In the meantime, he ensured that the ministerial office was handed to party member Roberto Calderoli, the chief speaker at Sunday night's Alzano meeting.
The ill-disguised tensions within the centre-right governing coalition burst into the public eye in parliament last Saturday when, during the course of a debate over the approval of a €400 million loan to state carrier Alitalia, furious Northern League deputies went on a rampage, kicking, punching and shouting insults aimed at other members of the Berlusconi coalition.
Their anger had been ostensibly prompted by an accusation that the Northern League, in its involvement in Alitalia's affairs, had behaved in precisely the self-serving, clientelist and corrupt manner of the pre-1992 Christian Democrats or Socialists that they themselves had so vehemently denounced 10 years ago.
That accusation doubtless touched a raw nerve. Yet, in reality, it could be that the uncalled-for bout of parliamentary fisticuffs testifies to a growing sense of ontological insecurity in the Northern League.
With the king ailing, with federalist dreams unrealised, where does the League go now?
Will they implement their threat to walk out, for the second time, on a Berlusconi government, to speed up the path of federalist reform?
Even if they did, the parliamentary head counts indicate that the government could survive even without the League's 47 parliamentarians (30 in the Lower House, 17 in the Senate).
What then? This could be a long, cold autumn for the Northern League.