Northern League steals another march

The opening of a new school at Adro, in Lombardy, a small town with a conservative Northern League council, shows just how effectively the main ally in the coalition led by Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi can promote its agenda at almost no cost. The League's green Sole delle Alpi (sun of the Alps) logo is plastered all over the school, on the doormat, on classroom desks and cupboards, even on the roof – 600 times in all. The school is named after the late Gianfranco Miglio, a political theorist and one of the first advocates of autonomy for northern Italy. Faced with a public outcry, council leader Oscar Lancini played dumb. In April, he attracted an enviable amount of media attention by stopping school meals for children whose parents failed to pay. The measure affected 80 pupils, mostly immigrants. In response to accusations of racism he said: "Those who don't pay don't eat." This time his approach was slightly more subtle. He agreed that the Sole delle Alpi did feature largely in the school's decor. "But it is an emblem of local identity. I can't help it if the League uses it as its logo," he said. "After all it's not a swastika." The education minister, Mariastella Gelmini, initially chose to ignore the furore, but on 18 September two weeks ago she finally realised that it had upset a great many Italians and demanded that the logo be removed from the school. In the meantime, the League had the publicity it wanted. Last December, the leader of the local council in Coccaglio, another small town in Lombardy, was just as ham-fisted in his attempts to defend Operation White Christmas, which had municipal police officers making house-to-house searches for illegal immigrants. "It is perhaps an unfortunate turn of phrase," the mayor said, "but the operation ends on Christmas Day and it is quite common for there to be snow at this time of year." In the end, the searches were stopped, much as many other similarly provocative Northern League schemes. This article originally appeared in Le Monde .