An unusual march paraded last Friday in front of the Montecitorio palace, headquarters of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. There were 700 mayors from the south of the country, led by Vincenzo de Luca, governor of the Campania region, who paraded – with moments of tension before the police – to protest the reform approved by the Italian Government of Giorgia Meloni to implement a system of asymmetric autonomies demanded for years by the richest regions of the industrialized north of the country, but which, according to the opposition, will only serve to further widen the gap with southern Italy. “They just need to drop the atomic bomb on us,” protested De Luca, an old guard politician, known for not mincing words.
“Instead of demonstrating, they should work,” Meloni responded to the protest. “Let her go to work, the asshole,” replied De Luca, who this week even called her a “greengrocer,” among other loud disqualifications.
In an alley in the Rione Sanità of Naples, De Luca's crusade is beginning to take hold. Between the dilapidated portals and the altars dedicated to the local hero, Diego Armando Maradona, when the plastics placed to decorate the city after last year's historic scudetto have not yet rotted, three retirees sitting in front of the door of their houses give him the reason. “Perhaps the insults are unnecessary, but it is true that the north has been stealing from us for 500 years. It doesn't even surprise us anymore. Don't even talk to me about Meloni, he has knelt before the secessionist Leaguers. I'm so obsessed with it that I don't even buy melons anymore,” says Gennaro Rotello about the last battle of the governor of his region. “In the south they only want us to be a territory to exploit. “They want us all to emigrate to Milan,” adds Giovanni, his talk partner. They live in one of the most central neighborhoods of Naples, but also one of those with the most worrying vulnerability rates. For example, in Naples 22% of young people between 15 and 29 years old neither study nor work. In Sanità, where 32,000 people live in less than two square kilometers, this figure increases to 27%.
In Rome, the exchange between two of the three parties that make up the coalition led by Meloni was very clear. Matteo Salvini's League supported the constitutional reform of the Brothers of Italy for the direct election of the prime minister, Meloni's biggest bet of this legislature, in exchange for the president giving in to the so-called differentiated autonomy, one of the historical battles of the League. The problem is that the League barely has followers in the south of the country, where they believe that Meloni has sold them to a minority party.
The bill, which has already received the approval of the Senate while waiting for the Chamber of Deputies to rule – where the right also has a majority – has been baptized as a “regional law of differentiated autonomy”, but many in Italy They consider a system of à la carte federalism. In practice, it means the possibility for each region to ask the State for new powers within a package of 23 indicated subjects, such as education, health, the administration of cultural assets, foreign trade or civil ports and airports. That is to say, to manage these powers they will be able to resort to part of the fees that until now they sent to Rome, which opens the door to reducing the enormous fiscal deficit in the north of the country, a historical complaint from regions such as Lombardy that estimates that the difference between the services that its residents enjoy and the taxes they pay is around 50,000 million euros. To prevent a citizen from a poorer region from having worse services than in richer ones, the essential levels of provision (LEP, for its acronym in Italian) are planned, which the State must guarantee, but in southern Italy they believe that it is It is impossible for them to leave under the same conditions.
“The LEPs are a fiction to apply what de facto is going to be a differentiated economy, because in practice the question of differentiated autonomy is nothing more than a different distribution of money from one region to another, and there is a part of Italy that finds itself in a disadvantageous situation. The ideal would be that a person from Trentino can have the same health as me, who lives in Naples, but with less money. I don't know how they plan to do it,” says Maria Muscara, member of the Campania regional board, in front of a hospital in Sanità that she says is at risk.
The gap between the Italian north and south is historic. According to Eurostat, for example, in 2022, in three Italian regions in the south of the country, Calabria, Sicily and Campania, less than half of the active population had a job. In Sicily and Campania, more than 15% of young people have left school early. The difference is graphic if you compare the extreme north and the extreme south of the country. In 2019, for example, in the province of Milan, the GDP per capita was around 55,800 euros, data similar to that of Iceland, while in the province of Agrigento, in Sicily, it barely reached 15,700. , figures similar to those of Albania. For this reason, they believe that with autonomy what will happen in practice is that the State will have fewer resources to spend in the territories that need them most.
“They know perfectly well that we in the south are currently not capable of managing certain competencies when there are already problems today. So the result is only that the differences between the north and the south of the country will increase. In Campania, for example, we have fewer hospitals and worse structures, and even there we will not have equal conditions,” laments Angelo Forgione, a historian specialized in the defense of Italian southernism, while sipping a coffee in the central Piazza Cavour of the Campanian capital. .
The question now is whether the revolt started by De Luca will be able to convince Meloni to stop his intentions. “Perhaps it is the first time that the entire south has united over a political issue,” highlights Forgione. In Naples they are pessimistic. “From the unity of Italy we no longer count anything. We are not going to tell anything now either,” laments Gennaro Rottello from Sanità.
