Italy's Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni hired illegal Romanians. Some years ago, Maroni allegedly called Romania's Embassy to extend working permits for three illegal Romanian immigrants. However, he is among those Italian politicians to take a stand against Romanian immigrants.
Romania's General Consult to Turin, Mrs. Iulia Buje stated for the newspaper that Italy discovered that Romanians are felons only in 2007, because before that, many employers wanted illegal Romanian immigrant workforce, since Italians refused to work in certain sectors.
Mrs. Buje declared that Maroni called a couple of times at the Romanian consulate to help his three Romanian workers to get a working permit. She added that there were a lot of Italians who would rather hire Romanians illegally to avoid paying taxes.
Maroni, Italy's Ministry of Interior and a prominent 'Northern League' politician, is lately supporting an anti-immigration bill.
The 'League', however, is now the oldest political party in Italy, indeed the only one that can look back on 30 years of activity. This is not an accident produced by the random workings of the break to the Second Republic. It reflects the second peculiarity of the League, its dynamism as a mass organisation, possessing cadres and militants that make it, in the words of Roberto Maroni, perhaps Bossi’s closest colleague, ‘the last Leninist party in Italy’. Over much of the North, it now functions somewhat as the PCI once did, as rueful Communist veterans often observe, with big gains in one formerly ‘red’ industrial stronghold after another: the Fiat works in Mirafiori, the big petrochemical plants in Porto Marghera, the famous proletarian suburb of Sesto San Giovanni outside Milan, setting in the 1950s of Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. This is not to say that it has become a party based on labour. While it has captured much of the working-class vote across the North, the League’s core strength lies, as it has always done, among the small manufacturers, shopkeepers and self-employed in what were once fortresses of the DC: the Catholic provinces of the North-East, now increasingly secularised, where hatred of taxes and of interference by the central state runs especially strong. Here resentment of fiscal transfers to the South, perceived as a swamp of parasitic ne’er-do-wells, powered the League’s take-off in the late 1980s. Immigration from the Balkans, Africa and Asia, which has quadrupled over the last decade, is now the more acute phobia, laced with racism and prejudice against Islam. The shift of emphasis has, as might be expected, been a contributory factor in the spread of the League’s influence into the Northern working class, more exposed to competition in the labour market than to sales taxes.
The truculence of the League’s style has been perhaps an even more important source of its popular success. Defiance of the sickly euphuism of conventional political discourse, as cultivated in Rome, confirms the League’s identity as an outsider to the system, close to the blunt language of ordinary people. The party’s leaders relish breaking taboos, in every direction. Its political incorrectness is not confined to xenophobia. In matters of foreign policy, it has repeatedly flouted the official consensus, opposing the Gulf War, the Balkan War and the Lisbon Treaty, and advocating tariffs to block cheap imports from China, without inhibition. Breaking verbal crockery, however, is one thing; effecting policy another. Since its period in the desert between 1996 and 2001, the League has never rebelled against the orthodox decisions of the centre-right governments to which it has belonged, its rhetorical provocations typically operating as symbolic compensation for practical accommodation. But it is not a dependency of Berlusconi. The boot is rather on the other foot: without the League, Berlusconi could never have won the elections in which he has prevailed, least of all in 2008.
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