Long-serving Italian politician Roberto Maroni has died
ROME (AP) — Roberto Maroni, a longtime leader of the right-wing Northern League party and a cabinet minister in ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s three governments, died, last Tuesday, at age 67, League leaders and the premier said.
State-run RAI television cited a family statement saying Maroni died at 4 a.m., after a long illness.
Maroni was a longtime associate of Northern League founder Umberto Bossi and was secretary of the party as it grew from a northern secessionist movement into a key ally in successive conservative governments, dating from Berlusconi’s rise in politics in the 1990s.
The party under current leader Matteo Salvini dropped “Northern” from the name in a bid to expand its geographic appeal and downplay a past that many saw as alienating Italy’s poorer south, and is now a coalition partner in Premier Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government.
A lawyer, Maroni served as interior minister in Berlusconi’s first 1994-1995 government, labor minister in his second government, in 2001, and interior minister again in his third and final government, in 20082011. Highly visible with his trademark red-rimmed glasses, he was an accomplished pianist and played in a band in his hometown, Varese.
In a statement, last Tuesday, and later at a government press conference, Meloni praised Maroni as a friend who had served the country with “good sense and concreteness.”
Accolades also poured in from across the political spectrum, with former center-left Premier Paolo Gentiloni, now European economy commissioner, praising Maroni’s passion, competence and loyalty. “A loyal, kind and committed man,” he tweeted.