Italian populist politician Umberto Bossi, a firebrand who founded the anti-immigrant Northern League party and pushed for the wealthy north’s independence, died Thursday aged 84.

Tributes poured in from Italy’s right-wing bigwigs for senator Bossi, a friend of Silvio Berlusconi who managed to transform his small, regionalist party into an influential player in government, before running afoul of health woes and a corruption scandal.

Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that “Bossi, with his political passion, marked an important phase in Italian history and made a fundamental contribution” to the Italian centre-right.

He was “a passionate political leader and a sincere democrat”,  President Sergio Mattarella said in a statement.

Bossi died in Varese in northern Italy after being admitted briefly to intensive care, media reports said.

Known for his provocative rhetoric, Bossi founded the secessionist Northern League party in the late 1980s and spent much of his political career attacking the corrupt ways of “Roma Ladrona” (“Thieving Rome”).

He would go on to be one of the longest-serving members of parliament, spending nearly 30 years in one or the other of the two houses of parliament.

In its early days, Bossi’s Northern League called for Italy’s wealthy north — an area he dubbed the Republic of Padania — to break away from the poorer south.

He became a close ally of former Prime Minister Berlusconi and the party joined all three of his governments.

– Stroke, scandal –

Bossi helped propel Berlusconi to power, and although he brought down their first coalition government, the pair formed an alliance that went on to win twice.

Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, head of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, said Thursday that the whole party mourned Bossi, who had been a politician “of great intelligence” and “a key figure in bringing about change in Italy”.

In 2004, Bossi suffered a stroke which forced him to step back from politics for a period.

But despite his frailty and difficulty speaking, he went on to campaign for the party ahead of the 2008 general election, pledging to “take up arms” against “Roman scum”.

He also railed against immigrants, the Northern League’s long-standing target.

Bossi was forced to resign as leader of the party in 2012 after allegations of corruption and was convicted in 2017 to over two years for embezzlement.

The verdict was annulled two years later because Italy’s highest court ruled the statute of limitations had kicked in.

Matteo Salvini took over the party as leader in 2013 and changed its name, dropping the Northern and making it simply the League, in an effort to win votes from the south as well.

Salvini, deputy prime minister in Meloni’s right-wing coalition government, said on X the party would “continue to walk the path you have blazed: that of Freedom”.