ITALY : Who’s the Bossi? He’s Crude, but Fed-Up Voters Love Him

Sen. Umberto Bossi is little-loved in Parliament and has no shortage of enemies who revile him as a loud-mouthed blusterer. But he has touched a nerve among voters in a country fed up with political party corruption and sapping Roman bureaucracy.

Bossi, 52, often crude and always opinionated, is forcing the pace of overdue political change by threatening to unravel Italy. He demands national elections under new rules--the sooner the better.

Failing that, Bossi, populist leader of the rapidly growing Northern League, brandishes the specter of an imminent tax revolt, his party’s resignation from Parliament and a referendum aimed at detaching the rich north from the rest of Italy.

Bossi’s young protest movement has 80 seats in Parliament and has already won control of a number of northern cities, including juggernaut Milan. League recruits share Bossi’s distaste for Establishment parties and their 50-year vise-grip on power; for immigrants, foreign and domestic, and for the laggard and corrupt Italian south, which they see as a voracious sinkhole for northern taxes.

The Northern League (Lega Nord in Italian) calls for transforming Italy into a federal republic. Each region would fund and administer its own affairs, leaving to the central government such overreaching concerns as monetary policy, foreign affairs, police, defense and, probably, the makeup of the national soccer team.

“The road to federalism cannot be a process of slow transformation. We give you until April. Then a gigantic fist will be raised,” Bossi challenged political opponents last weekend.

Since then, the breakaway threat has drawn concentrated fire.

“The country is indivisible,” Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi snapped. President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro and political leaders across the spectrum have scolded Bossi. “We must remain a united country,” said Giorgio Napolitano, a senior leader of the former Communist Party.

Bossi may not have the cure for what ails Italy, but he certainly is representative of the fever. “Bossi didn’t create the crisis; the crisis created Bossi,” said centrist Mario Segni, architect of a referendum last spring in which 82% of voters demanded a new way of electing their Parliament.

The referendum and subsequent legislation scrapped a proportional representation system in which voters chose lists of candidates assembled and manipulated by political parties.

A quarter of the seats in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies will continue to be distributed proportionately to assure survival of minor parties, at least in the Chamber.

For three-quarters of the legislature, though, it will be winner-take-all for the first time in the history of the Italian republic. That will probably mean an end to dominance by the old Christian Democrats and their Socialist allies for the first time since World War II.

Both parties, like all other major political movements, have been publicly dishonored by a gigantic corruption scandal that is deep into its second year and going strong. About one-third of the members of the current Parliament are targets of corruption investigations in which hundreds of millions of dollars went into party treasuries--and private pockets--as payoffs for public contracts.

At the time of the referendum, it seemed that public outrage would force elections this fall. But Italy is Italy. Rome and other major cities will have their first direct mayoral elections in November, but the first parliamentary vote under the new rules will likely not come before spring.

Bossi is the hungriest for quick elections because he has the most to gain: The new Northern League is untouched by scandal.

Tens of thousands of workers marched through Old Rome last week, and a torrent of strikes are about to break out against the government: transport workers, doctors, factory managers and factory workers all have walkouts planned. That doesn’t mean Italy will burn. But the ambitious Bossi certainly will fiddle.