Italy’s former Interior Minister and co-founder of the far-right Northern League party, Roberto Maroni, died Tuesday at the age of 67 after an illness he had been carrying since 2021 and which forced him to leave the front line of Italian politics.
«Great secretary, superminister, excellent governor, always and forever a Northern League sympathizer. Good wind, Roberto,» the now party leader, also former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, has thus reminded him.
The Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also had words of remembrance, who, visibly moved, described him at a press conference as «one of the most talented people» she had ever met in her life.
Already on Twitter, Meloni shared a photograph of both of them and expressed her «deep» sorrow for the death of «a friend, an intelligent politician capable of serving the institutions with common sense and concreteness».
Maroni, one of the most influential politicians in Italy in recent decades, founded together with Umberto Bossi in 1991 the far-right party that was initially known as Northern League, renamed in 2020 as simply League.
He reached Italy’s Parliament in 1992 and did not leave it until 2013. Under the government of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi he was twice Minister of the Interior (in 1994-1995 and 2008-2011) and once responsible for the Labor portfolio (2001-2006).
