Cateno Roberto Salvatore De Luca (born 18 March 1972) is an Italian politician who served as the mayor of Messina from 2018 to 2022 and is the incumbent mayor of Taormina since 2023. He was also the mayor of Fiumedinisi, his hometown, from 2003 to 2011 and of Santa Teresa di Riva from 2012 to 2017.
De Luca began his career at the age of 18 in Christian Democracy (DC), the ruling party of post-war Italy. He often changed political parties, and switched between the DC's successors and other Christian-democratic parties, such as the Christian Democratic Centre (CCD) and the Union of the Centre (UdC), and regionalist ones, such as the Movement for Autonomy (MpA) and True Sicily (VS), which he founded as a split from the MpA in 2007. He also switched political alliances, at times allying with the centre-right coalition and at other times supporting the centre-left coalition or neither of the two largest blocs.
In 2022, De Luca founded his own national political party, South calls North (ScN), and was able to elect a deputy and senator to the Italian Parliament. He was a candidate for president of Sicily in 2012 and was the distant runner-up in 2022; that same year, he led ScN to become the largest party in Messina and the third-most voted party in Sicily. Due to his overbearing personality, De Luca is often nicknamed Scateno () by the national and local press.
Early life and education De Luca was born in Fiumedinisi, in the province of Messina, the third son of a peasant and mason family. As a teenager, De Luca raised rabbits and collected oregano, walnuts, and chestnuts and then sold them to the farmers of his hometown under the control of his mother. During the summer when in middle school, he worked as a bricklayer with his father. When in high school, De Luca worked in the bars of Fiumedinisi and in the winter attended a law firm in Messina that dealt with labour law and social security. He opened the first patronage office in Fiumedinisi at 18 and inaugurated the first office of the National Autonomous Federation of Small Entrepreneurs (FENAPI) in Messina at 22. De Luca said that he bought his first car, a 1200-injected Opel Corsa, from a car showroom in Messina with his own savings at the age of 18. He graduated in law at the University of Messina.
Political career Mayor of Fiumedinisi and Santa Teresa di Riva De Luca's interest in Italian politics came from an early age; when he was 14, De Luca joined the youth section of Christian Democracy (DC), the ruling party of the First Italian Republic, and shared manifestoes for the DC in his hometown. He began his official political career at the age of 18, when he was elected to the city council of his city, the youngest to do so. At the age of 22, he was appointed assessor to his own municipality. Within first the DC and then the Christian Democratic Centre (CCD) of Pier Ferdinando Casini, he was politically trained under the wing of Salvatore D'Alia, a leading exponent of the DC/CCD in Sicily.
After losing the 1998 Fiumedinisi municipal election, De Luca ran again for mayor in 2003, and this time he was successful. He was re-elected in 2008, and resigned as mayor of Fiumedinisi in 2011. In May 2012, De Luca ran for the office of mayor of Santa Teresa di Riva, winning in the first round with 51% of the votes; he resigned from the Sicilian Regional Assembly (ARS) in July 2012 in order to "start my revolution in Sicily", enjoying the support of FENAPI, and remained in office until June 2017. As he was not able to run for re-election in Fiumedinisi, De Luca supported two candidates, Alessandro Rasconà and Francesco Sentineri. Both candidates were supported by two electoral lists tied to De Luca, De Luca True Sicily and Fiumedinisi in the True Heart of Sicily, and Rasconà was elected with 63.42% of the votes. De Luca said: "True Sicily will present by the end of June the political and economic program based on clear autonomist and separatist choices."
Member of the Sicilian Regional Assembly At the 2006 Sicilian regional election, De Luca was elected deputy to the ARS with the Movement for the Autonomies (MpA) of Raffaele Lombardo, with whom he would later come to have conflictual relations; he was re-elected with the MpA at the 2008 Sicilian regional election. As part of a split from the MpA, of which he was the vice-secretary, De Luca founded True Sicily (VS), a political-cultural association that later became a regional political party, in March 2007. In February 2008, he returned to the MpA and sat among its members in the ARS until 2010, when he became the group leader in the ARS of Force of the South (FdS), which was founded by Gianfranco Miccichè. During his time at the ARS, De Luca stood out due to his lashes at the majority deputies, painting them with catchphrases and insults; he told Francesco Cascio of Forza Italia (FI) that he was "a baronet, a regime politician who squanders public money", called Salvino Caputo of The People of Freedom (PdL) "a street charlatan", and told to Micchichè, the then ARS president, that he had "legalized the absences of deputies" and to the then Sicily president Salvatore Cuffaro: "I have no respect for you." Among his slogans during his career at the ARS were "I Am a Free Hitter" and "Let's Demolish the Sicilian Region".
From 21 June 2011 to 19 July 2011, De Luca was suspended from the position of regional deputy because he was placed under house arrest. The prosecutor, who had asked for a sentence of five years, argued that, from 2004 to 2010, De Luca allegedly used public funds intended for the construction of containment works for a stream at risk of flooding to build a hotel in Fiumedinisi; meanwhile, De Luca and his lawyer, Carlo Taormina, had unsuccessfully argued for the trial venue to be moved from Messina to Reggio Calabria. In November 2017, De Luca was acquitted of the charges of abuse of office and forgery, while the attempted extortion was time-barred; he felt vindicated by the acquittal, especially because he had been placed in the list of not-presentable centre-right coalition candidates by the Antimafia Commission, including by the Five Star Movement (M5S) presidential candidate Giancarlo Cancellieri, after his arrest. In December 2018, De Luca was definitively convicted in the accounting justice system but acquitted in the penal system, after Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation rejected his appeal, as part of the inqury about the expenses of the ARS. In April 2017, he had already been sentenced by the Court of Counts to pay a fine of €13,000, which he did, expecting that his appeal to the Supreme Court of Cassation would be rejected.
In December 2011, when he returned to the ARS six months, De Luca attacked the prosecutor who investigated him and made complaints against the Messina prosecutor's office. At the 2012 Sicilian regional election, De Luca was a candidate for president of Sicily and was supported by the Sicilian Revolution list; as he garnered 1.23% of the votes, De Luca was not re-elected to the ARS due to the 5% election threshold, and was listed among the candidates that did not reach the threshold. He had called for the elimination of political discontent, the reduction of 50% of the costs of politics and bureaucracy, and the streamlining of the regional bureaucratic structure; despite his 2011 arrest, De Luca's 2012 electoral campaign had opened with a Silvio Berlusconi-style convention at the Politeama Theatre in Palermo, and the walls of Sicilian cities were plastered with his 3x6s electoral manifestoes with slogans referencing his Scateno nickname like "I Revolutionize Sicily. I Unleash De Luca". De Luca also criticized the ARS and comuni. He promised to "kick the ass of the idlers and professional sick people" of the Messina municipality. In support of the centre-right coalition candidate and eventual winner Nello Musumeci, De Luca's True Sicily made an agreement with the Union of the Centre (UdC) for the 2017 Sicilian regional election, in which he was re-elected as a member of the ARS among the ranks of the UdC after garnering 5,418 preferential votes; he left the UdC group and joined the Mixed Group in the ARS on 20 December 2017.
On 7 November 2017, De Luca apologized to his electors for not thanking them one by one, and wrote to his supporters: "They will acquit me in this too, I am a specialist in acquittals." He wrote on Facebook: "I will try to thank all of you one by one for the result we have achieved. For now I am not answering anyone either on the phone or by message because I am concentrated with my lawyers as on 9 November I have the last hearing of the last trial which concerns my judicial ordeal which has lasted since 27 June 2011 with 14 criminal proceedings already closed in my favour. I apologize." On 8 November 2017, after being acquitted from the 2011 charges, De Luca was charged for tax evasion (€1,750,000), and was again placed under house arrest; this was subsequently revoked and replaced by an interdictive measure of the prohibition to hold top positions in the bodies involved in the investigation. To his supporters, De Luca spoke of a conspiracy against him, stating: "They are afraid that I will become mayor of Messina, as I publicly announced I wanted to be last January , and so they found a way to stop me." In 2022, De Luca was acquitted of the tax evasion charge in both the first-instance trial and on appeal.
Mayor of Messina In April 2017, De Luca announced his candidacy for mayor of Messina, with the support of six centrist civic lists. In the 2018 Italian local elections, De Luca was elected mayor of Messina. In the first round, he came second with 19.81%. Although none of the lists that supported him received any seats, he won the election runoff on 24 June 2018 with 65.28% of the votes, beating the centre-right coalition candidate Dino Bramanti. He also automatically became mayor of the Metropolitan City of Messina, which was established after the introduction of the metropolitan cities of Italy by the Renzi government in 2015. In October 2018, De Luca resigned as regional deputy to maintain the position of mayor of Messina; it was the third time that he did not finish the regional legislature. His seat was assigned on the same day to Danilo Lo Giudice, mayor of Santa Teresa di Riva and second of those elected on the UdC list in the Messina constituency, who had joined the Mixed Group in the ARS and De Luca's True Sicily.
For the 2019 European Parliament election in Italy, De Luca made an agreement with Silvio Berlusconi and Gianfranco Miccichè, the regional coordinator of Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI) party in Sicily, to have Dafne Musolino as candidate for the European Parliament among the FI lists in the Italian Islands constituency. In addition to guaranteeing a candidate for De Luca's True Sicily, the pact was based on a shared program for the city of Messina to be brought to the European Parliament. With 47,187 preferences, Musolino was the second-most voted candidate not to be elected. De Luca remained the mayor of Messina until his resignation in 2022 to run for president of Sicily. In October 2021, on the occasion of the Sicilia Vera assembly, De Luca had announced that he would run for president of the Sicilian region, challenging the outgoing centre-right coalition president Nello Musumeci. On 25 January 2022, he resigned as mayor of Messina; his resignation became effective on 14 February 2022. He rejected Miccichè's proposal to be the centre-right coalition candidate to run autonomously. At the 2022 Italian local elections, he supported the True Sicily candidate Federico Basile, who was elected in the first round as mayor of Messina, and was elected municipal councilor. On 13 July 2022, he was elected president of Messina's municipal council with 23 votes out of 32.
Return to the Sicilian Regional Assembly and mayor of Taormina