VENICE, Italy — Luca Zaia, a towering force in northern Italian politics, is plotting his next move and that’s turning into a headache for his party, the far-right League, led by firebrand Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini.

As regional president of Veneto, the wealthy region of 5 million people around Venice, Zaia is one of the League’s superstars, but his mandate comes to an end after an election this weekend. That is sparking intense speculation about his ambitions — not least because his political vision is so different from Salvini’s.

While Salvini is steering the League away from its separatist roots — no longer seeking to rip the rich industrialized north away from poorer southern Italy — Zaia remains a vocal advocate for northern autonomy from Rome. He is also more moderate on immigration, climate and LGBTQ+ rights than his right-wing populist party chief.

One of the big questions looming over Italian politics is whether these two rival visions can survive within the League, a party at the heart of Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government. Zaia himself suggests the League could split into two allied factions along the lines of the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union on Germany’s center right.  

Meet the doge

Nicknamed the “Doge of Venice,” Zaia, a former Italian agriculture minister, has spent 15 of his 57 years running Veneto from an office lined with emerald silk in a 16th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal.

He won eight out of 10 votes cast in 2020, the highest approval rating of any regional chief, but is barred from running again because of a two-term limit.

In an interview with POLITICO, he joked about the whirl of theories about his next steps. “I am in the running for everything: [energy giant] ENI, Venice, parliament, minister.”

But when pressed on what he will do, he gave nothing away, only that his focus is squarely on the north. “I gave up a safe seat in Brussels a year ago to stay here,” he said, only adding he would work until the last day of his mandate. “Then I’ll see.”

Amid internal power struggles in the League, Zaia is increasingly seen as an alternative leadership figure by those unhappy with its trajectory.  Zaia has clashed with Salvini’s deputy leader Gen. Roberto Vannacci over his revisionist views of the fascist era under Benito Mussolini, but has held back from criticizing Salvini openly.

When asked whether Salvini made strategic mistakes as party leader, he stayed cryptically diplomatic. “We all make mistakes,” he replied.

A changing League

When Zaia joined what was then the Northern League in the 1990s it was a separatist movement, opposed to tax redistribution from the wealthy north to the south, perceived as corrupt and inefficient. But under Salvini’s leadership, the rebranded League became a nationwide party, with a strand increasingly courting the extreme right.

This approach has alienated both mainstream voters, and more moderate and north-focused activists, for whom Zaia is a political lodestar. One major bugbear is Salvini’s drive to build a €14 billion bridge between Calabria and Sicily, seen by separatists as a wasteful southern project sucking in northern tax revenue.

In a sign of the shifting tectonic plates, one faction, supported by the Northern League’s founder Umberto Bossi, and that has in recent years unsuccessfully tried to oust Salvini, last week launched a new party, the Pact for the North.

Its leader, former MP Paolo Grimoldi, expelled from the League after 34 years, told POLITICO his group would welcome Zaia “with open arms.” 

Zaia and other northern governors “just have to find the courage to say publicly what they have been saying privately for some time, that Salvini has completely betrayed the battles of the League.”

Zaia himself is recommending a new-look League modeled on the German CDU-CSU, with sister League parties catering to Italy’s north and south. He aired the idea in a new book by journalist Bruno Vespa, pointing out the CSU had a separate Bavarian identity within the German Christian Democrat family. “We could do the same here,” he said.

Most political insiders and observers think it unlikely that Zaia would seek a national leadership role — being too associated with Veneto — but he would be an obvious choice to lead the northern wing of a divided party.

For Salvini, this internal schism is an obvious challenge. He has said he’s intrigued by the CDU-CSU idea, but few believe him. He needs to find something to prevent Zaia from turning into a nuisance, and has proposed him for a vacant parliamentary seat in Rome and as mayor of Venice.

“It’s up to him to decide if he stays in Veneto or brings Veneto to Rome,” Salvini said at an event in Padua last weekend.

Mayor of Venice?

Which way will Zaia jump?

A return to Rome seems unappetizing. “When he was minister, he didn’t like Rome”, said a political colleague. “Rome’s values are not the values of Veneto.  In Veneto, we value meritocracy, work, effort, seriousness in politics. In Rome it’s all compromise.”

Which makes Venice the more likely option, if he does decide to avoid a head-on clash with Salvini.

Zaia would be very well set to run for mayor of Venice next May, according to the MP and two friends of Zaia’s from Veneto. He has a manifesto ready: Autonomy for Venice. Venice should become a city-state with special powers to address its unique problems of depopulation, overtourism and climate change, he said in the interview.

Zaia’s popularity in Veneto, according to the locals, derives from his down-to-earth persona. He’s better known for speaking in regional dialect and attending traditional events, rather than being snapped at glamorous galas or on the fleet of speedboats at his disposal, rocking gently at his Grand Canal doorstep.  

He was also lauded for his handling of the Covid pandemic, readying Veneto for the Winter Olympics next year and even helping boost exports of Prosecco sparkling wine.

Local lore holds that half of Veneto’s 5 million residents have his phone number. “Maybe even more,” he quipped. “I have never changed my number, people know they can call me if they have a serious problem.”

Disco doge

Raised in a small village near Treviso, just 30 kilometers from Venice, he was an unusually independent and motivated teenager, passionate about horses and teaching himself Latin on Sundays, according to one classmate.

At university, where he graduated in animal husbandry, he supported himself by running club nights in local discos. It was a useful training for politics, Zaia said. “Clubs are a great school of life. You meet humanity in all its forms: rich, poor, good, bad, violent, peaceful.”

Indeed, it seems he took the role ultraseriously. “I never saw Luca dance. For him it was work,” said the same former classmate.

He entered politics in the aftermath of the 1990s Clean Hands scandal, a nationwide corruption investigation, which took down a generation of politicians, and became a rising star in the region. As well as being the youngest provincial president in Italy, adorning Treviso with numerous surprisingly popular roundabouts, he was minister of agriculture in Silvio Berlusconi’s government.

He is sufficiently self-assured to diverge from central League dogma when he sees fit. He tried to bring in a law this year to regulate doctor-assisted suicide in contrast to national League policy. He also supports sex education in schools, something the League opposes. “When it’s an ethical matter … I  have my own ideas, regardless of what the party says,” he said.

But he is clearly smarting about the party’s deal with Meloni to keep the Zaia brand out of the campaign for this weekend’s Veneto election. The original plan, which would have given him significant ongoing influence in the region, was for him to choose a list of regional councilors to go on the ballot and for the League logo to feature his name, he told journalists on the sidelines of a Venice Commission event in October. “If they see me as a problem, I’ll become a real problem,” he threatened. (He will still appear on the ballot as a candidate for regional councilor, giving him yet another option — stay on to assist his successor.)

If he does decide to chart his own political path as mayor of Venice next year, at least he won’t have far to go.

The doge needs only to step into one of his speedboats to whizz off to the mayor’s equally opulent palazzo along the Grand Canal.