Stellantis Corporation, which owns the Italian brand Alfa Romeo, decided to urgently rename the subcompact crossover Alfa Romeo Milano presented last week to Alfa Romeo Junior due to the outbreak of a political scandal: the Italian government believes that a car produced outside this country cannot bear an Italian name.
In 2003, the Italian authorities, led by then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, passed a law requiring that products bearing Italian names be produced in Italy. This law was adopted mainly to protect the Italian food industry (cheeses, sausages, wines, pasta, etc.) from spreading across Europe and beyond, but this is the first time it has been applied to a car. The Alfa Romeo Milano crossover will be produced at the Stellantis plant in the Polish city of Tychy, so Italian Industry Minister Adolfo Urso, after the premiere of this model last week, said that the Stellantis corporation was breaking the law and demanded that it abandon the Milano name in connection with the Polish-assembled crossover.
This conflict has a purely political background: Stellantis is in confrontation with the current nationalist government of Italy, which has been headed by Giorgio Meloni since 2022. The government wants Italian cars to be produced in Italy, and Stellantis, based on its business interests, is looking for the most favorable conditions for production, so it is launching some new models of Italian brands in Poland and Serbia, where labor is cheaper. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares, quoted by Automotive News Europe, said that the Alfa Romeo Milano would cost 10,000 euros more if it were produced in Italy rather than Poland. Milano (now Junior) should become the most popular model in the recent history of Alfa Romeo, so an affordable price for it is a critical parameter, so the choice in favor of the Polish site is quite justified.
At the same time, the Italian government, represented by Adolfo Urso, acted, to put it mildly, insidiously. The name Milano for the junior Alfa Romeo crossover was officially announced on December 13 last year, but Mr. Urso decided to wait until the premiere of the model on April 10 to express his dissatisfaction with the law-breaking naming and thus cause maximum reputational damage to the Alfa Romeo brand.
The head of Alfa Romeo, Jean-Philippe Imparato, is confident that in court the Italian brand, founded in 1910 in Milan, would have proven its right to use the name of its hometown for any of its models, but the trial could have lasted for many months and would have turned into an even bigger nightmare for Alfa Romeo in terms of negative PR, so Stellantis management decided to quickly rename the Alfa Romeo Milano to Alfa Romeo Junior, so as not to leave room for further speculation and not to escalate already tense relations with the Italian authorities.
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The name Junior is also taken from the Alfa Romeo archive: in the 1960s, this was the name of the junior version of the Giulia Sprint GT coupe with a 1290 cc engine . The name Junior took second place in the name selection stage for Alfa Romeo's junior crossover, and now that the first name has dropped out for political reasons, Junior has come out on top. Let us remind you that prices for the junior Alfa Romeo crossover start from 29,900 euros, orders are already being accepted, the first Junior production units assembled in Poland will be shipped to European customers in September.
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