The founder of Italy’s pro-devolution, anti-immigrant Northern League expressed bitter disappointment at the result of the Scottish independence referendum and said voters had been intimidated by the media.
Umberto Bossi, who created the movement for autonomy for Italy’s rich northern regions in the 1980s and was a longstanding ally of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said he had followed the Scottish independence debate closely.
“We are not happy, we are sad,” he told Reuters after 55 per cent of voters in Scotland rejected the independence call.
“They succeeded in frightening people and unfortunately in a democracy, there’s the risk that whoever has the television stations and can control the newspapers, like the state, can manage to frighten people,” he said.
They succeeded in frightening the people
“They said to all the old people, your pension will be at risk or your job will be at risk. It was a targeted campaign,” he said.
Earlier, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi welcomed the result of the ballot and said Europe would benefit from a renewed commitment to joint action by Britain.
Following allegations of misappropriation of party funds, Bossi holds no executive position in the party he founded, but he retains the honorary title of federal president. He said the referendum showed a widespread fear by centralised states of insurgent independence movements from Catalonia to the Basque country in Spain, or Corsica in France, but added that there was also a deeper malaise across Europe.
“Europe is entering a crisis. The states of the last century, the centralised and semi-fascist states don’t have a great protector any more,” he said.
“We need to move and talk to all the independence movements and create a broad movement. Then we’ll see who is stronger and who is weaker,” he said.
The Northern League expanded rapidly during the 1990s after the breakdown of the old Italian party system, supporting four separate centre-right governments led by Berlusconi between 1994 and 2011, when its focus switched from outright independence to demands for more regional autonomy.
Now in Opposition, it has concentrated on calls for Italy to quit the euro and clamp down on immigration.