An unusual march paraded on Friday in front of the Montecitorio palace, seat 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 in front of the police – to protest the reform approved by the Italian Government of Giorgia Meloni to implement a asymmetrical system of autonomy claimed for years by the wealthiest regions of the industrialized north of the country, but which, according to the opposition, will only serve to further widen the gap with the south of Italy. “All we have to do is drop the atomic bomb on us,” protested De Luca, an old-guard politician known for not having hair on his tongue.
“Instead of demonstrating, they should work”, answered Meloni to the protest. “Let her work, the torracollons”, answered De Luca, who this week even called her a “vegetarian”, among other disqualifications.
In an alley in the rione Sanità in Naples, De Luca’s crusade is beginning to subside. Between the battered 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 from the door of his house they prove him right. “Perhaps the insults are excessive, but it is true that the north has been stolen 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 secessionists. I have such a mania for him 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 chat companion. They live in one of the most central neighborhoods in Naples, but also one of those with the most worrying vulnerability rates. For example, in Naples, 22% of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 neither study nor work. In Sanità, where 32,000 people live in less than two square kilometers, this figure rises to 27%.
In Rome, the exchange between two of the three parties that make up the coalition led by Meloni was very clear. The League of Matteo Salvini supported the constitutional reform of Brothers of Italy for the direct election of the prime minister, Meloni’s most important bet of this legislature, in exchange for the mandate to yield to the so-called differentiated autonomy , one of the historic battles of the League. The problem is that the League barely has any supporters in the south of the country, where they believe Meloni has sold them to a minority party.
The bill, which has already received approval from the Senate and is awaiting a ruling from the Chamber of Deputies – where the right also has a majority – has been dubbed the “differentiated regional autonomy law”, but many in Italy they consider a system of federalism a la carte. 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 ports and airports civilians In other words, to manage these powers they will be able to use part of the taxes that until now were sent to Rome, opening the door to the reduction of the enormous fiscal deficit in the north of the country, a historic denunciation of regions such as Lombardy, which calculates that the difference between the services enjoyed by its residents and the taxes they pay is around 50,000 million euros. To prevent a citizen of a poorer region from having worse services than in other richer ones, the essential levels of provision (LEP, for its acronym in Italian) have been provided for, which the State must guarantee, but in southern Italy believe that it is impossible for them to leave under the same conditions.
“The LEPs are a fiction so that they apply what will de facto be a differentiated economy, because in practice the issue 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 is in a disadvantageous situation. Ideally, a person from Trentino could have the same healthcare 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 the Sanità neighborhood that, he says, is at risk.
The gap between northern and southern Italy 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 northern end and the southern end of the country. In 2019, for example, in the province of Milan, the GDP per capita was around 55,800 euros, data similar to those of Iceland, while in the province of Agrigento, in Sicily, it was barely they reached 15,700 euros, figures similar to those in Albania. For this reason, they believe that with autonomy what will happen in practice is that the State will have fewer resources to spend on the territories that need it most.
“They know perfectly well that we, in the south, are currently not able to manage certain competencies when there are already problems at present. Therefore, 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 in this we will not have equal conditions”, laments Angelo Forgione, a historian specializing 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 slow down his intentions. “Perhaps it is the first time that the entire south has come together for a political issue,” Forgione points out. In Naples, they are pessimistic. “Since the unification of Italy we have not counted at all. Nor will we count at all now”, laments Gennaro Rottello from Sanità.
