Among the fake news that – as reported by Massimo Villone on manifest – are circulating on the subject of differentiated autonomy, a very deep-rooted one is that the position of Emilia-Romagna is qualitatively different from that of Veneto and Lombardy.
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Emilia Romagna has no alibi regarding the referendum
This is the thesis supported by the outgoing regional president, Stefano Bonaccini on multiple occasions, the latest of which in a recent interview with Repubblica, in which he formulates two arguments: that the Emilia-Romagna decision to join Veneto and Lombardy was «shared with all the social partners and without ever a vote against in the regional council” and that “the request from Emilia-Romagna concerned only some of the 23 potentially foreseen matters, especially limited and specific functions within these”.
THE FIRST ARGUMENT it is, technically, a call from (political) supporters: it aims to remind us that the associations, trade unions and all the political forces to the left and right of the Democratic Party (including the M5S, wherever you want to place it) supported the Emilia-Romagna decision to take the path of differentiated autonomy. In this, Bonaccini has his reasons: if it is true that the hyper-presidentialist form of regional government assigns a preponderant weight to the president, it is also true that none of those who worked around him – not even the former vice-president from 2020 of the region, Elly Schlein – tried to act as a counterweight. It is not true, however, that this unanimous alignment is a peculiarity of Emilia-Romagna, since, albeit in reverse order, exactly the same happened in the consultative referendums held in 2017 in Veneto and Lombardy (although, in the latter region, with some indecision on the part of the centre-left forces).
As for the second argument, it should be remembered that most of the requests from the three regions cover the same areas in an identical way: Veneto asks for all twenty-three abstractly eligible subjects, Lombardy asks for twenty and Emilia-Romagna sixteen. . Beyond the subjects, it is correct, as Bonaccini says, to look at the functions into which each individual subject is divided. Anyone who did so would, however, discover a different reality from the one sweetened by the new European parliamentarian. If a difference in approach characterizes the position of Emilia-Romagna, it is, in fact, the propensity to make requests that are perhaps less extensive, but in practice often even more incisive than those of the Northern League-led regions.
PARTICULARLY RELEVANT these are the cases of museums (which the region would like to see all, including state ones, acquired by its government), of the government of the transport system (which includes all road and railway networks), of the environment and of the territory (areas in which the regional requests aim at the power to act in derogation of state legislation in order to loosen the current protection constraints) and of local authorities (with respect to which Emilia-Romagna reveals a strong desire for regional centralism).
Perhaps the most striking case, however, is that of education, in which the PD-led region aims to create a regional school system parallel to the state one, to be placed in competition with the latter so that families choose whether to enroll students children to attend one or the other. It is worth remembering the words used in the draft state-region agreement leaked in May 2019, according to which the objective is «to guarantee the creation of a unitary and integrated system of second-cycle secondary education and vocational education and training in the regional context ( Iefp) which, while respecting scholastic autonomy, allows the development of young people’s skills in line with the employment opportunities of the area and with the professionalism required by companies, ensuring the effective right of young people to choose whether to fulfill their right and duty to education and training in the “education system”, of state competence or in the “professional education and training system” of regional competence”.
In this way, the most important tool for building the symbolic space of collective belonging, the school, would pass to regional control: it is difficult not to grasp the negative consequences that would derive from this for the maintenance of the feeling of national solidarity – political, economic and social – enshrined , as a mandatory duty, by Article 2 of the Constitution.
In short: if there is some (modest) quantitative difference between the differentiated regionalism of Veneto and Lombardy, on the one hand, and Emilia-Romagna, on the other, from a qualitative point of view it is difficult to grasp a truly significant gap.
