Italy's unity threatened by Bossi devolution victory

Italians were left wondering yesterday whether the end of their country as they knew it was nigh, after the Senate voted 151 to 89 in favour of a controversial devolution bill.

Opponents of the bill say it will force the north and south of the country further apart and aggravate the risk of national disintegration. Nicola Mancino, a centre-left Senator, said that the bill could cause "local selfishness, loss of national identity and a loss of the solidarity on which the welfare state was built".

The bill now goes ahead for a second vote in both chambers and if Silvio Berlusconi's House of Liberties coalition government succeeds in ramming it through, the secessionists of "Padania" will be toasting their first parliamentary triumph in the struggle to make the prosperous Lombardy region of northern Italy independent.

In 1994, the tub-thumping leader of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, pulled out of Mr Berlusconi's first administration when the Prime Minister refused to advance his federalist ambitions. The government subsequently collapsed.

This time Mr Berlusconi has been more careful. This week the figurehead President, Carlo Ciampi, and the leaders of the upper and lower houses of parliament, both loyal to the government, strongly voiced their hostility to the reforms. But Mr Berlusconi just shrugged off their criticisms, despite the fact that both house presidents are loyal to the government.

The devolution bill gives power over education, health and local policing to the regions. These are unlikely to be implemented straight away because of lack of money in the exchequer, but opponents of the measure say that is neither here nor there.

Mr Bossi, who came to prominence 10 years ago when Italy's established parties collapsed, has alternately favoured outright secession and federalism during his career. Yesterday he played down the constitutional implications. He said: "Regionalism is like a dog leashed on a short chain in the hand of the state. Devolution is like a dog in a spacious enclosure on a very long chain, and that enclosure is the state."

Employing the English word "devolution", Mr Bossi has said he favours the Scottish model. But in the Senate on Thursday, opposition members angrily denounced the move as "federalist hodgepodge", with one critic describing it as "the antechamber to national disintegration".

In the daily Il Manifesto, Claudio de Fiores voiced the most widely held of fears when he said the measure would "make rich regions ever richer and poor regions ever poorer".

The potential gravity of the implications of devolution, in a country polarised throughout its brief, 150-year history, between the rich north and the poor south, was further underlined when the unions at Fiat's car factories throughout Italy called workers out on strike yesterday after negotiations over the company's future collapsed.

The crisis was sparked by Fiat's decision to mothball its plant at Termini Imerese, in Sicily, with the loss of 8,100 jobs. The factory is the only large-scale industrial employer on the island. During recent talks the company agreed to put an extra €35m (£22m) into the plant. But if it were eventually to close, the impact on labour in Sicily – where unemployment is already close to 20 per cent – would be grim.

"In Sicily, Fiat is the only alternative to the Mafia," one commentator said.