Three times a minister during the governments of Silvio Berlusconi, former governor of the Lombardy region, former deputy prime minister, and successor to Umberto Bossi at the head of the Northern League, Roberto Maroni died yesterday at the age of 67 at his home in Lozza, in the province of Lombardy. of Varese, after a long illness. The Italian political world was in mourning yesterday as it remembered a highly relevant political figure for the last 20 years, who had helped Berlusconi as a key ally since his rise to power in the 1990s. A tough but not extremist leaguer, he defined yesterday the journalist Aldo Cazzullo in the Corrieredella Sera. Although he was not a great supporter of the secessionism of the so-called Padania, the mythical region that the Northern League claimed, he ended up being elected the prime minister of the Padan "provisional government", openly challenging Rome.
“Great secretary, super minister, excellent regional president, of the League always and forever. Good wind Roberto ”, wrote the current party secretary, his successor, Matteo Salvini, who took the reins in 2013 after Maroni had been in charge of the apparatus for only one year, from 2012 to 2013.
Born on March 15, 1955 in Varese, Maroni dedicated his entire life to politics, although he graduated in Law and practiced as a lawyer for several years. He was responsible for the legal office of the American multinational Avon Cosmetic. In 1979 he met the person who would be inseparable for many years, Umberto Bossi, who would be his right arm. "If he is the father of the League, I am the mother," he said.
Ten years later they founded the Northern League and in 1992 he entered the Italian Chamber of Deputies as president of the parliamentary group. Later, under Berlusconi, he became Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister in 1992, Minister of Labor in 2001 and Minister of the Interior again in 2008, until he ended his political career as president of the Lombardy region between 2013 and 2018. Then he promoted controversial regulations, such as a law dedicated to hindering as much as possible, to the point of making it practically impossible, the construction of new mosques in its territory, something that was blocked by the Italian Constitutional Court. Also, as Minister of the Interior, he declared a "state of emergency" to deal with the migratory flow and tried to register the gypsies by taking fingerprints of both adults and adolescents, in an idea that caused outrage as it was seen as an ethnic registry and which was never carried out.
Maroni rose as general secretary of the Northern League in 2012 after the internal crisis resulting from the Umberto Bossi corruption scandals, and organized the congress that elected the young Matteo Salvini as the new man who was to reinvent a made Northern League. ashes. Salvini picked up the inheritance but withdrew the secessionist charge to turn it into a party on a national scale. He did well until in these elections the pull of Giorgia Meloni stole votes even in his northern strongholds. And that is when Maroni, already very ill, intervened again to defend that the leadership of the League should pass to someone who would once again take care of northern Italy.
