Italy: The North-South Divide

In the days after Italy's right-of-center voters emerged victorious from the latest round of national voting it became clear that the next battle for control of Italy will not be between the country's left and right, but rather its north and south.

After a solid victory in Italy's 13-14 April elections, billionaire media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi is set to become Italy's prime minister for the fourth time. But Umberto Bossi, the controversial and iconoclastic founder of the Northern League, was the real electoral surprise.

Bossi founded the Northern League more than two decades ago, when it appeared that Italy might not qualify for the single European currency, a possibility he said was only due to the economic drag from Italy's poorer southern regions.

His solution? Split the country in two: The southern part would keep the name Italy, with the northern part becoming Padania. Padania would then re-apply to adopt the euro on its own.

Italy eventually - but barely - qualified to make the switch to the euro in the 1990s without splitting into separate countries, and the Northern League went into a long slide toward irrelevance.

But the Northern League stood tall in the latest election, doubling its share of the vote to nearly 9 percent of the total despite polling well only in the north, as many voters disillusioned with the center-left but wary of Berlusconi flocked to the party.

While the xenophobic organization has abandoned the belief that the country should be split, its stances still include an unlikely scheme to close Italy's frontiers to most immigrants and most foreign products. The party is now the third largest in Italy and the second-leading member of the government.

The Northern League seems eager to flex its newfound muscle. The new government has yet to officially take power, but Berlusconi already announced that his government would favor spending tax revenue where it was collected - a key issue for the Northern League, which believes too much northern tax money flows south to prop up the poorer economies.

A deal that would have seen control of beleaguered national airline Alitalia switch from the Italian government to Air France-KLM is in severe jeopardy in part because the buyers remain unconvinced that the Italian carrier's main hub should be in Milan, in the north, rather than in Rome, in the south.

Bossi also announced his desire to see one of the three national networks operated by state broadcaster RAI relocated to Milan from the nation's capital, and to build a giant film studio outside Milan in order to compete with Rome's storied Cinecitta studios.

On Monday, Bossi said that Berlusconi's yet-to-be-named cabinet would include Roberto Calderoli who has in the past outraged Muslims by wearing a tee-shirt stamped with controversial Danish cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammed and promoting a "pig day" protest in Milan last year in which he threatened to walk a pig over the ground where a new mosque was set to be built.

Roberto Maroni, whom Bossi said would become interior minister, champions the idea of creating vigilante citizens' groups to help protect against crime and to seek out illegal immigrants for deportation. The 66-year-old Bossi, who is in poor health, said he would assume control of the Reform Ministry, where he will look to set up a series of barriers to make it more difficult for foreign products to make it into Italy to compete against domestic products.

Other parts of the Northern League platform include using the military to control the country's borders, setting up tax barriers to foreign agriculture, instituting an outright ban on foods produced as the result of genetic engineering and moving government agencies from Rome to northern cities Milan and Turin.

"Reforms, security, the defense of agriculture, crime, high prices, these are among the reasons people voted for us," Bossi told reporters in a televised press conference after the election.

It remains to be seen how many of these and similar policies will become law. But it is clear that Berlusconi can scarcely afford to ignore the controversial Northern League.

He did so once before - in 1994, during his first government, when the Northern League was at its zenith - and Bossi and the party withdrew their support, forcing the Berlusconi-led government to abandon power after a tumultuous seven-month stint.

Now the Northern League is more powerful than it has been at any time since then. And Italy - weighed down by an economy that is among the slowest growing, most regulated and most heavily taxed in the European Union - will over the coming months decide whether the antidote to its woes exists somewhere within the country's long-standing north-south divide.