I can’t believe this news arrived here so much distorted that it has nothing more in common with the original story. It is a proof, although not a welcomed one, of how strong is the anti-government campaign that most of the Italian medias are leading against the center-right coalition.
I’m a longtime reader of LGF, and, as you might have guess, I am from Italy.

Salvini, a local candidate of the Northern League, told to a crowd at a political electoral rally in Milan that, if the current laxist policy against illegal immigrations where to be continued, they would need “seating places reserved to the citizens of Milan, like those for the war veterans”. (from Italian: “Se si va avanti di questo passo ci troveremo coi posti riservati ai milanesi come con gli invalidi di guerra”).
Please note that the word milanes is in current Italian language referring to the “citizens of Milan”, and not to a non-existent Milanese ethnic group. His naive joke-proposal was much like the “residents only” reserved parking slots and mass transit facilitations that are already existent in almost every big city of Italy.

I would also like to remind to all overseas reader (well, overseas from an EU point of view :D) that in Italy, whenever an election date is near (Eu Parliament Elections in June), there’s usually a very heated political battle aimed at the image of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, with four of the most sold newspapers (Repubblica and La Stampa, mostly) strongly opposing him and his party, and Berlusconi’s televisions subtly praising the government.
A political strategy widely used by the left-wing parties here in Italy has always been to attack and to smear the public figure of Premier Berlusconi, either for his gaffes or for his “association” with the Northern League, which is seen as a bunch of “fearful rednecks” by the liberals. Truth to be told, Northern League is a federalist party which has positions that are somewhat more liberal than the most of the GOP :)