Long-serving Italian politician Roberto Maroni dies at 67

Leaders of Italy's League party say one of the movement's longtime leaders and a three-time Cabinet minister, Roberto Maroni, has died

Roberto Maroni, a longtime leader of the right-wing Northern League party and a cabinet minister in ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s three governments, has died at age 67, League leaders said Tuesday.

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 discriminatory against 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 1994-1995 government, labor minister in his second government in 2001 and interior minister again in his third and final government in 2008-2011. Highly visible with his trademark red-rimmed glasses, he was an accomplished pianist and played in a band in his hometown, Varese.

Salvini praised Maroni as a “great secretary, super minister, great governor and League member forever."

“He is someone who gave so much to the country, to Italy, to the League, to his community,” Salvini told RTL radio.