The Northern Question: An Investigation into a Taboo

Gianfranco Miglio said that the North was an economic giant but a political dwarf. Only by uniting could the northern regions have sufficient negotiating clout to obtain from the central government the tools to address, and resolve, their problems. In a document published in 1992 by the Agnelli Foundation and titled "Padania, an Italian Region in Europe," Alberto Bramanti and Lanfranco Senn wrote that "the level of development achieved by the Po Valley regions places them at the top of the [European] rankings ... GDP per capita (calculated at purchasing power parity) is also well above the European average; in particular, Lombardy's is surpassed only by three other European regions: Hamburg, Ile-de-France, and Brussels." Nonetheless, the widespread belief was that the balance of power in Rome was unbalanced. It was as if, within the country, a process of productive specialization had been set in motion: in the North, the creation of wealth, in the South, the management of public institutions . This tacit compromise could not and did not hold. But what led to its breakdown?

The economic strength of the North remains a fact today: Lombardy, in particular, with a per capita GDP of €51,000 in 2023, is among the twenty richest regions in the European Union, which has since expanded to include twenty-seven member states . The rest of the North follows closely behind (with a few exceptions). Unlike in the past, during the Second Republic the North also had greater political clout, measured both in terms of its "occupation of power" and its ability to dictate the agenda. As Pagella Politica notes in an article on the origins of ministers throughout the history of the Republic, since its inception in 2001, the Ministry of Economy and Finance has never had a single Southerner: seven came from the North (Tremonti, Siniscalco, Padoa Schioppa, Monti, Grilli, Franco, and Giorgetti) and four from Rome or other cities in Lazio (Saccomanni, Padoan, Tria, and Gualtieri). Today, in one of the governments least sensitive to the Northern question, Giancarlo Giorgetti sits on Via XX Settembre, who is not only Northern by birth but also by – if one may say so – ideology.

Can the Northern Question , which revolutionized Italian politics in the 1990s by imposing slogans (the fight against taxation), institutional reforms (federalism), and new faces, be considered resolved? Probably not; but it has certainly become muted. The Northern mobilization has produced effects but not results. In the current political phase, there seems to be no room for the Northern Question: Rome has regained a centrality it hadn't had for years. As Claudio Cerasa wrote in Il Foglio on August 1st, Romanness is Giorgia Meloni's ace in the hole, and it's no coincidence that—after the slow decline of autonomy—she has successfully initiated the bipartisan constitutional reform to grant special powers to the capital . To understand what is happening, we must first reconstruct what happened.

The first to use the term Padania with a political connotation was Guido Fanti, a staunch communist and the first president of the newly formed Emilia-Romagna Region. In 1975, he proposed establishing a permanent coordination body between Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna (which he called the "Lega del Po"). "The regions," he explained to La Stampa on November 6, 1975, "refusing to withdraw into themselves, are called upon to play the leading role in national politics, and the consolidation of permanent relations in the Po Valley represents a decisive contribution." The proposal had no practical consequences. But it captured a point that would remain true in the years to come: among the northern regions, despite their economic, social, and cultural differences, there were common traits that required systematic forms of collaboration.

All this, however, remained submerged for a long time, losing all political pretensions and at most gaining a few academic reflections (including Miglio's seminal ones on federalism and macroregions). Several explanations, not mutually exclusive, can be hazarded. One is that, in the 1980s, Bettino Craxi's political leadership imposed certain themes dear to the North, and particularly to its industrial sector: consider the modernizing push that came with the abolition of the scala mobile (escalator). All this was combined with irresponsible spending policies, which attempted to combine the protection of corporate competitiveness (including through constant competitive devaluations, despite the "divorce" between the Treasury and the Bank of Italy initiated by another Northerner, Beniamino Andreatta) with social support for Southern Italy. The Southern Question, for its part, remained at the center of the national agenda, itself the product and victim of the contradictions between a welfare policy that failed to produce lasting results, the burden of organized crime and the mafia's influence on the economy of many areas of Southern Italy, and the use of public employment as a safety valve.

All this created a precarious balance: the North was granted a weak currency, while in the South inflationary pressures were offset by public employment protections. The southernization of public administration, of course, is an ancient and complex phenomenon: "The share of southern-born bureaucrats at the highest levels," wrote Sabino Cassese in a survey published by Svimez in 1977, "increased from 23 percent to 56 percent until 1954 and continued to rise thereafter, reaching 62-65 percent." Even at the lowest levels of the administration, Cassese estimated that the share of officials of southern origin exceeded 60 percent. More recently, he noted that "Southerners have reached nearly 70-80 percent of managerial positions," partly due to the state's growth and the resulting attraction function played by Rome, resulting in a "loss of 'representativeness' of the bureaucracy, in the sense that it no longer comes in a balanced manner from various parts of the country." This has not been without consequences for the South itself: higher real wages in the public sector and greater stability of contracts have drained skills from the private sector, compromising the region's development potential and exacerbating the vicious cycle of redistribution (see the pioneering work of Alberto Alesina and others and the more recent work of Marta Auricchio, Emanuele Ciani, Alberto Dalmazzo, and Guido de Blasio).

Furthermore, in the 1980s, Italy was a country with a bulimic tax and regulatory system tempered by widespread tolerance of illegality and irregularity, both in tax relations and in the enforcement of regulations (especially labor regulations). Italy's decline is rooted, in many respects, in that compromise, which helped create an implicit disincentive to business growth—one of the most important factors explaining the long-term stagnation of productivity. Completing the cycle were a highly politicized credit system and the pervasive presence of the state in all public services, whose extra costs ultimately flowed to the state budget, contributing to the enormous growth of debt. In short, the agreement that held the country together rested on fragile foundations that, in hindsight, hindered the development of Southern Italy and the competitiveness of a significant portion of Northern businesses.

The balance was disrupted in the early 1990s, aided by the acceleration of European unification. EU membership promised great benefits but required several changes. Three above all others: the progressive transfer of monetary policy controls from Rome to Frankfurt; the consolidation of public finances and debt reduction, with the resulting commitment to privatize state-owned companies and end their use as a source of hiring and handouts; the obligation to adopt and implement European regulations, with the result that the letter of the law and its implementation in the real world could no longer remain two parallel lines. Thus, almost simultaneously, competitive devaluations disappeared, the possibilities for gaining consensus and social peace through public spending diminished, and fiscal and regulatory pressure began to bite . According to an analysis by Tommaso Di Nardo on behalf of the National Council of Chartered Accountants and the National Foundation of Accountants, the tax burden (which, together with social security contributions, makes up the overall tax burden) increased by eleven percentage points between 1980 and 2019, with the bulk of the increase occurring in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. These phenomena, combined with the broader changes that ushered in a new political cycle not only in our country, undermined the clearinghouse that had held North and South together, without other opposing changes—above all, the considerable successes in the fight against the Mafia after the massacres—sufficient to counterbalance them. Thus, the North emerged as a political entity. It's incomprehensible why the Northern Leagues first emerged, and then the Northern League, emerged without taking these facts into account; nor is it possible to understand the success of Forza Italia, nor why, within the Democratic Party (and before it, the Democrats of the Left), reformist currents are traditionally led by representatives of the North.

This strong convergence of interests also grafted a cultural construction, aimed at rediscovering the common roots of the Po Valley regions: the protagonist was Gilberto Oneto, who passed away exactly ten years ago in 2015, who was able to inject identity hay into the predominantly economic demands of the North . Through his cultural enterprises – the most important of which was “La Libera Compagnia Padana”, which for two decades represented the most organised and well-equipped initiative of the Northern League area – Oneto managed to spark a debate not only on whether, but also on how and why the North should march under a single flag. For a period, this was a powerful glue in the Northern uprising and truly allowed a proper identity to germinate. Testimony to this today are the signs of many Northern municipalities, which display a name in the local language alongside the official name, and the increasingly faded graffiti of the Sole delle Alpi on walls and overpasses (“walls are the books of the people”, Umberto Bossi repeated). This rediscovery, however, due to the way it was exploited by the League, also ended up becoming a limitation: the reduction of such an impressive work to a folkloristic phenomenon (the ceremony of the ampoule with water from the Po) ended up pushing a very serious issue to the edge of farce (or even beyond).

After all, everyone knew that the unity of the North wasn't born from some remote founding episode, but from the continuity of its economic and social fabric. The periodical edited by Oneto, Quaderni Padani, concluded with a "Silent Column" that showed, from time to time, the regional distribution of various economic and social indicators: per capita income, the propensity to tax evasion, the number of faithful attending Mass, and so on. Each graph revealed a clear dividing line between the North and the South. Today, an echo of this can be found in one of the figures posted on X (formerly Twitter) by the amusing account "Terrible Maps," which occasionally reposts the one on "Literally all statistics about Italy."

In the years preceding full membership in the European Union, when it seemed Italy might be left out, former Budget Minister Giancarlo Pagliarini insisted on a two-speed entry: the North immediately, the others as soon as possible. The point is not the realism of the proposal, but rather what it betrayed: the idea that the northern regions constituted a compact bloc that could no longer, or would not, sacrifice their interests to the memory of the Risorgimento. In this way, the North became hegemonic in Italian politics for a certain period: it was the North that dictated the agenda, it was the North that imposed the ruling class, it was the North that influenced attempts to update and revise the Constitution. This happened in 2001, with the reform of Title V drafted by the center-left, and again in 2006, with the Northern League-led devolution proposal, later rejected in the confirmatory referendum, and finally with the launch of the process of differentiated autonomy, to which we will return shortly.

At the heart of this political shift was the perception, by the North, and especially its most productive classes, of being squeezed in a vise: on the one hand, participation in the European Union and the opening of international trade made competition more ruthless; on the other, the need to finance an oversized state apparatus with taxes (rather than debt and inflation) acted as a competitive burden. One measure of this gap is the fiscal residue, that is, the difference between the taxes paid by the population residing in a given region and the portion of those taxes returned to the region in the form of services: according to the Bank of Italy, in 2019 (the latest year for which data is available), the regions of central and northern Italy had a negative fiscal residue of €95.9 billion (6.9 percent of regional GDP), while the South and islands had a surplus of €64.2 billion (16.2 percent of GDP).

The numbers show that, if the goal was to reduce the fiscal residue, the mission was not completed. The instruments adopted—regionalism, devolution, autonomy—were inadequate because they did not address the tax sphere and, therefore, the core of the internal transfer system.

An analysis conducted by Rossana Arcano, Alessio Capacci, and Giampaolo Galli for the Public Accounts Observatory of the Catholic University shows that "transfers from North to South are not due to excessive spending in the South, but to the fact that the incomes of Southern residents are lower and therefore the taxes and contributions paid by Southern residents are lower." Indeed, based on 2021 data, Itinerari Previdenziali estimates that on average, a Northern resident pays €6,098 in personal income tax, compared to €5,932 in the Center and €4,313 in the South. Therefore, Northern citizens are right to feel like they are systematically losing out on taxes; but they are wrong to think that, to mitigate this effect, it is sufficient to cut a few active items in the state budget. For the same reason, the gap cannot be filled through mere administrative decentralization measures, such as those currently possible under the current Constitution (or implemented, in the case of healthcare). Without questioning the fiscal balance—and therefore the power to govern taxes—the mechanism of internal transfers remains untouchable. And in this respect, Marco Leonardi and Leonzio Rizzo are absolutely right in stating that the contrast between financial transfers from the center and the sharing of national tax revenues, which has sparked enormous controversy in the context of differentiated autonomy, is purely nominalistic, as in both cases the levers of taxation remain firmly in Rome (Il Foglio, August 1).

This is why the forms of decentralization experimented with thus far have in no way mitigated the fiscal imbalance; and this is why differentiated autonomy could not, despite the rhetoric about the "secession of the rich." Indeed, this latest rhetorical gimmick has offered unexpected relief to that part of the League still trying—in the North—to reconnect with its roots, fueling the perception that the battles of the past are still ongoing. This is no longer true: not so much because of the League's fault, but because the North no longer appears to express a unified and coherent political proposition.

One wonders, then, whether what we are witnessing is simply the end of an era: efforts to strengthen autonomy have failed simply because they responded to a poorly posed demand. Moreover, the questioning of the myth of national unity has paradoxically led to two opposing, mutually reinforcing consequences. The first was the reactive rediscovery of the symbols of the Nation (with a capital letter), starting with the flag and the anthem, which have also recently been glorified with constitutional dignity. The other has been a flourishing literature critical of the very essence of Italian national identity, which continues today, as Fabrizio Rondolino's excellent book "L'Italia non esiste" demonstrates. Except that these works end up achieving more than they intended: by bombarding Italian identity, they devastate any identity. If Italy doesn't exist, then subsets of Italians don't exist either. Therefore, a fortiori, the North doesn't exist either.

There is also evidence to the contrary. The first, of course, comes from the autonomy referendums held in Veneto and Lombardy on October 22, 2017, with overwhelming yes votes and turnout of 57.2 percent and 38.2 percent, respectively. Even after years, this turnout suggests that the issue is deeply felt, and that autonomy represents (or has represented in recent times) a powerful force capable of generating popular mobilization. The result is all the more significant considering that the party theoretically leading this battle, the League, has experienced internal division on the issue. On the one hand, it has expressed strong local support, evidenced by figures such as Attilio Fontana, Luca Zaia, and the late Roberto Maroni; on the other hand, the coldness of the national (once one would have said: federal) leaders was and is tangible, all projected into the attempt to shift the geographical roots of the party from the northern regions to the whole country, and its political axis from the North to the right.

A second factor arises from the unity with which the Northern regions, albeit in different ways and forms, supported the request for autonomy: born in Veneto and Lombardy, it was quickly embraced by Emilia Romagna (which only recently, and for political reasons, abandoned the process), Piedmont, and Liguria. It is secondary, in this respect, whether and to what extent the autonomy actually implemented could have changed the balance of power under discussion: what is significant, however, is that it quickly became a horizontal element between the regions and, even more importantly, a vertical element of rupture between the North (and the local representatives of the political forces) and the national parties. In this sense, Andrea Giovanardi and Dario Stevanato wrote in their 2020 book "Autonomy, Differentiation, Responsibility," "it is precisely the diversity found among the various regional territories that make up the Italian nation that justifies and makes plausible a differentiation of competences and scope for autonomy. Some territories and regions... aspire to greater autonomy, to the acquisition of greater competences and functions, and have demonstrated in many fields and on many occasions that they are capable of organizing and delivering public services with a sufficient degree of effectiveness and efficiency, in many cases superior to that of the central government."

A third factor comes from current events: in the throes of the North's demands, the largest and most dynamic city in the North—Milan—has sought an individual way out. The process of change that has marked the Lombardy capital has ultimately created a disconnect with the rest of the North . Its growth has been exclusive rather than inclusive, as both Alberto Mingardi (Il Foglio, July 23) and Giorgio Gori (Il Foglio, August 4) have noted, from different perspectives. Thus, the debate on the North has become a debate on Milan, and the peculiarities of an entire area have been supplanted by those of a specific city—producing a fracture in its very connection with the territory. By focusing on Milan's singularity, the broader issue has been lost, even though it is still karstly resurfacing: what is, for example, the Italian reaction to the Green Deal if not the rejection (perhaps with purely reactive and partly rearguard traits) of a regulatory framework perceived as penalizing the entire industrial system of the North? Once again, the crucial point is not the accuracy of perceptions, much less the proposed solutions, but the evident unity of the demands. The underlying coherence of the Northern Italian interests stems from its industrial manufacturing backbone and the resulting social composition—a characteristic that even Confindustria (the Italian industrial federation) no longer seems to grasp , as Dario Di Vico noted in Il Foglio on August 6. Both are crushed between Italy's fiscal burden and the exponential growth of European regulations: the constant resurgence of the reasons for the crisis in economic and political exchange that shattered at the end of the First Republic.

This brings us to a crucial question: why, if the North continues to have common interests distinct from the rest of the country, is it no longer the object of any political attention? Part of the answer lies in an analysis by Gianni Fava, the candidate defeated by Salvini at the last League congress in 2017: Fava noted the contrast between the slogans of the past ("further from Rome, closer to Europe") and those of the present ("more Italy, less Europe"). This metamorphosis reveals not only the involution of a party but, in part, of a region, or at least of its ruling class. And if it's true that the North owes its unity to economic and industrial unity, then its crisis is first and foremost a manifestation of the decline of the Northern bourgeoisie. Once demanding "liberal federalism," today it often finds itself begging for centralist protection . Rather than being unanimous and cohesive, the demands of the North (and especially of Northern industry) are increasingly less about being freed from constraints and restrictions, and more about seeking public protection and support. The paradox is that, while the North is diluting its identity, the South seems to be rediscovering it in a unique way, far removed from the cohesion policies that have failed over the past thirty years . Consider the reasoning behind the single Special Economic Zone (SEZ), as well as the battle Sardinia is waging over the concept of insularity. As Nicola Rossi has written, "the genuinely supra-regional nature of Southern Italy's problems" is emerging, and with it a new approach based on expanding opportunities, not on welfare and transfers.

In 1997, Miglio published a book with the future president of the Constitutional Court, Augusto Barbera, entitled "Federalism and Secession. A Dialogue." Today, this would be unthinkable: because of the format, a calm discussion between two intellectuals culturally distant but united by mutual respect; because of the subject matter, which would be considered thorny and unapproachable; but above all, because of the lack of an audience interested in the topic and willing to listen to the other's arguments and, possibly, change their minds (or form their own). Perhaps the North lacks a voice; or perhaps, even if it does have one, it has nothing to say and therefore doesn't use it. Certainly, without this silence, it would have been difficult for Rome to overtake it on the right, on the road to autonomy.

More on these topics: