Liga Veneta was conceived by Franco Rocchetta and others in the late 1970s. During its first official meeting in Recoaro on 9 December 1979, Achille Tramarin, who was then elected secretary of the new party, gave a speech titled "Venetian Autonomy and Europe": "Today for Venetians the moment has come, after 113 years of Italian unitary colonisation, to take their natural and human resources back, to fight against the wild exploitation that brought poverty, emigration, pollution and uprooting from their culture". European integration was seen as an opportunity to give Veneto its autonomy back.