The following is part of an email exchange between Chirol and a very close Italian friend. This friend worked at the polls in the recent referendum and had this additional information to add since microstates and devolution have been all the rage recently. The title of the post is a rather humorous comment from him on what would happen if the North became autonomous.

The referendum asked to change half of the constitution, of course it was too much at once. For example they wanted to lower the number of senators, which is good, but also wanted to take some power from the supreme constitutional court and give them to the prime minister, which is very bad because it means the government can make a law which is not constitutional.

However, the most important point was federalism: they wanted to give every region his own autonomy, for example in matters like health-system, security and schools. This means of course that the northern regions, which are richer and more efficient (southern Italy is a money-grave), will have higher standards.

Now what happened is that they posed these questions all together, because Berlusconi wanted to hit his biggest enemies (the judges) without too much noise, therefore he tried to switch the attention on federalism. Moreover , this was the main political target of Bossi and Lega nord, one on his biggest allies. At the end only Veneto and Lombardia (two of the richest region) voted yes and this was rather a surprise, since I expected the whole north to vote yes. In fact it’s clear that we’ve always had two different Italies, which have different speed. It’s however different from Catalonia, since there they really feel they live in a different state. This is not the case for Italy:

Bossi, at the beginning of his career, tried to talk about a norther state and about a “celtic race”, but now most of the northern people don’t feel this appeal anymore. Even when Bossi, before the referendum, asked for a “non-democratic alternative” in case the “no” would win, nobody was really scared. The people here just want to spend the taxes here and not send them to southern italy (which is also not completely true, since here the tax-evasion is much higher than southern italy, expecially the companies here pay much less taxes then they should).

Anyway, yes, there was a time when many people here dreamed of an independent state and they offended the Italian flag in public, now is a different story i guess.

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