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. and remained in office until June 2017.
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, In February 2008, he returned to the MpA and sat among its members in the ARS until 2010, 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." 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. meanwhile, De Luca and his lawyer,
Carlo Taormina, had unsuccessfully argued for the trial venue to be moved from Messina to
Reggio Calabria. including by the
Five Star Movement (M5S) presidential candidate Giancarlo Cancellieri, 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. as he garnered 1.23% of the votes, 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". 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, 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." 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.
Mayor of Messina In April 2017, De Luca announced his candidacy for
mayor of Messina, 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. 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 On 27 June 2022, De Luca founded the
South calls North (ScN) to support his candidacy for the presidency of Sicily. In the subsequent consultations, he took the role of coordinator, while
Dino Giarrusso, a
member of the European Parliament (MEP) and former
Five Star Movement (M5S) who was working on a
Meridionalist political project, with whom he had developed an agreement a few days earlier but that ended in August 2022, became ScN's secretary. The former
Le Iene journalist Ismaele La Vardera also joined ScN in the role of federal president of the party and spokesperson in De Luca's electoral campaign for the
2022 Sicilian regional election, where De Luca came second, ScN, his newly founded political party, was the third-most voted party, just behind the M5S and ahead of the
Democratic Party (PD), and he was re-elected as a member of the ARS, He sat at the opposition. During the
2022 Italian general election, which was held on the same day, he unsuccessfully ran, as part of VS and ScN, for the
Senate of the Republic in the
single-member district of the Sicily 4 (
Catania) constituency; he said that his party would not be "the taxi to give the possibility of recycling and being the Pharisees of politics", and came third with 14.44% of the votes, while the centre-right coalition
Nello Musumeci was elected with 36.4% of the votes. Despite this, De Luca's party elected two members of the
Italian Parliament in the single-member districts (Francesco Gallo in the
Chamber of Deputies and Dafne Musolino in the Senate of the Republic. De Luca's party was the largest in Messina. In January 2023, De Luca announced his candidacy for mayor of
Taormina; he was supported by the former deputy Carmelo Lo Monte, who had joined ScN, and was elected mayor with 63.49% of the votes, defeating the outgoing mayor of the centre-left coalition Mario Bolognari, a member of the PD who was also supported by some from the centre-right coalition, such as FI and Lega. In August 2023, De Luca he announced his candidacy for the single-member constituency of Lombardy 6 (
Monza) for the Senate of the Republic in the by-elections following the
death of Silvio Berlusconi. He called himself more
leghista than
Umberto Bossi. Despite an optimistic prediction at the start of his campaign of a double digit result, De Luca garnered 2,313 preferences, which were equal to 1.76% of the votes, placing him third. In October 2023, De Luca's True Sicily party ceased to exist as a group in the ARS after Salvatore Geraci joined the
League (Lega) and all other formed members had joined De Luca's ScN group. In December 2023, De Luca said that he was working on the
campo largo, the journalistic definition for the opposition that had obtained a plurality of votes but was divided, with the PD and the M5S.
Clemente Mastella, and in December 2023 with
Carlo Calenda. When this failed, De Luca presented his own electoral list,
Freedom, and announced his candidacy to the European Parliament in all of Italy's constituencies. His
populist list attracted attention due to the record number of minor and heterogeneous parties (from
agrarianists and farmers to
environmentalists and supporters of
animal rights, from
pro-Europeanists to
Eurosceptics, from pro-vaccines to
vaccine sceptics, from supporters of greater autonomy for the
regions of Italy, particularly in the North, to opponents like De Luca himself), as well as members of
civic lists and former members of the M5S and Lega, which would be exempt from having to collect signatures at Italy's national elections if De Luca's list elects at least one MEP; De Luca described the collection of signatures for new parties as unjust and offered to help them. La Vardera, the ScN's group leader at the ARS, Sergio De Caprio, a former anti-Mafia
Carabiniere who arrested
Totò Riina and thus was subsequently forced to wear a mask, which he removed for the first time when he was announced as part of De Luca's list, and longstanding representatives of the
Northern League (LN) like Castelli were among the announced candidates and supporters of De Luca's electoral list; De Luca called his list a union "to defend the rights of the South and North against bureaucratic Europe". As of April 2024, among the many parties in De Luca's European Parliament list, which was first announced in March 2024 and became a subject of national attention due the number of its member parties and its logo, included De Luca's parties (South calls North and True Sicily),
anti-establishment forces (
Italexit's spliter party Movement for Italexit, Shared Horizons, Together Free, and
Vita), regionalist parties and movements of former representatives of Lega (
Great North, True North,
Valdostan Rally, and Venetian People), the M5S, and the Pensioners Party (Pensioners' Party + Health), as well as various mayors (Civics in Movement), symbols of anti-Mafia like De Caprio (Captain Last) and
Piera Aiello, and animal-rights activists (Rizzi), farmers and fishermen (Us Farmers & Fishers), street vendors (Us Free Vendors), environmentalists (
Green Front and Sustainable Progress), Europeanists and moderates (Moderate Party of Italy),
sovereignists (Sovereignty), are represented by the slogan "Less Europe, More Sovereignty, More Autonomy, More Italy". He compared his list to the
Expedition of the Thousand of
Giuseppe Garibaldi, and said that "we will become millions". De Luca further stated: "Each symbol is a star in the firmament of freedom. Each symbol represents a story and is the interpreter of a message and will have the possibility of bringing the demands of its territory and its history into the European Parliament. We have put together forces civic and political ones who want to give a push to this liberticidal Europe in a list not of purpose to overcome the barrier [of the electoral threshold], but with the common denominator [of] less Europe, more autonomy, more sovereignty, more equity." == Political views ==