First They Took Rome. David Broder
Bossi survived this setback provided an early indication that the ‘anti-corruption’ on which the Lega Nord thrived wasn’t just about the kind of wrongdoing that could be tested in court. His party instead used this term as a more nebulous – and conventionally right-wing – attack on unearned reward and state profligacy, as exemplified by the invocation of poor southern regions leeching off the productive North. In this sense, the assault on corruption also adopted a curiously racialised dimension. At the Lega’s founding congress in 1991, Bossi explicitly described the party as ‘ethno-nationalist’ and labelled southerners – pejoratively termed terroni – as feckless layabouts to be identified with Arabs or Albanians rather than white Europeans.18 This cult of the industrious North was also married to a kind of folk nationalism, albeit one limited to certain regions. This party of industrial modernity adopted as its logo the sword-wielding figure of Alberto da Giussano, a mythical warrior who supposedly defended the Carroccio (a four-wheeled war altar) against Frederick Barbarossa in the Battle of Legnano in 1176.
The foundational clash with the First Republic (and indeed the PSI) assumed a lasting place in Lega folklore – as would the party’s nickname, the Carroccio. The Lega’s sense of territorial rootedness is especially bound to Pontida, a town of 3,000 people near Bergamo, in its Lombardian heartlands, where it made one of its earliest local election successes, during the final years of the First Republic. Responding to the Lega Nord’s breakthrough, PSI leader Bettino Craxi paid a visit to the town on 3 March 1990 in which he tried to pander to leghista themes, acknowledging the popular demand for a more federal Italy. Unimpressed, local Lega Nord activists jeered the former premier, and three weeks later Bossi and his comrades held their own opposing summit in Pontida. After their massive gains in the 1992 general election, the Lega faithful again met there for a three-day celebration. This set the precedent for a summer festival that continues to this day at which crowds of mostly white-haired Lega activists convene to consume rather grim quantities of meat and beer.
The ritualised return to Pontida typified the party’s roots in provincial northern Italy. Contrary to the general tendency of political forces in Italy and beyond, over the 1990s and 2000s, to replace territorial branches with media campaign vehicles, the Lega Nord built its initial rise on cadre structures rather reminiscent of the old mass parties. These were particularly important in ensuring its visible organisation presence even in small communities. Indeed, though the party was from the outset a recipient of funds from the great industrial groups of the North, the Lega Nord’s electoral rise was driven not by wealthy urban populations – as heralded by some former Marxists who hailed the liberation of ‘dynamic’ northern Italy from the ‘backward’ South – but, rather, by the small towns and hinterlands surrounding these same cities. While it would capture the largest regional governments in northern Italy in 2010, the Lega has in fact never occupied the mayor’s office in such major urban centres as Turin, Genoa, Venice, Trieste, Bologna, or Brescia. If, amidst the collapse of the First Republic, it managed, in 1993, to capture the largest of all northern cities, Milan, it has never since won elections there, its largest conquests instead coming in mid-ranking cities like Verona and Padua.
In Lega members’ own accounts of why they joined the party, there is a strong promotion of both identity – the system of values that build a community – as well as the notion of being in contact with the population, where other parties have become more focused on media campaigns. In a Lega-sympathetic collection of testimony by Andrea Pannocchia and Susanna Ceccardi, one youth activist explains, ‘The others look at us astonished because they don’t have activism like this, by people active on the ground, holding gazebos, doing sit-ins, holding demonstrations and organising events’;19 or, as one activist put it, a ‘school of life’ running through activism.20 A lawyer in Varese running a Lega-attached cultural association explains, ‘It is a world of young people, professionals, entrepreneurs who perhaps don’t want to dedicate themselves directly to politics but are interested in defending our territories’ culture and environment’.21 This is, indeed, a ‘sense of community … not only as an administrative entity but something also spiritual, a territory where the human person rediscovers his own natural dimension and returns to relations based on affect rather than interest’.22 Padanian identity, Islamophobia and a sense of being a victimised minority strongly colour the militants’ own sense of togetherness – the left is often held to be both absent from communities, yet also culturally dominant.
Beyond this self-mythology, the Lega Nord’s activist base – rooted among small businessmen and independent professionals outside the biggest cities – certainly does have material interests.23 This is expressed both in a call for low taxes and the retreat of the central state, and the demand for its own heartland regions to keep more of their own tax revenues. In this sense, the Lega Nord put a special northern spin on the broader privatising and tax-cutting agenda advanced by the Pole of Freedoms coalition in the 1994 general election. This campaign, mounted together with Silvio Berlusconi, combined a classic neoliberal mix of the call to slim down what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu labelled the ‘left hand’ of the state – welfare, investment, public services – while also reinforcing its ‘right hand’, from law and order to subsidies for certain protected categories of business. This Pole of Freedoms alliance, standing in northern regions, stood separately from the so-called Pole of Good Government which Berlusconi sealed with the postfascist AN. Yet there were deep similarities, too: in each case an identitarian anti-communism was combined with a general offensive against partitocrazia and a confected ‘outsiderishness’.
The ability of this outwardly populist and anti-political agenda to extend beyond parochial identitarianism was most strikingly illustrated by the alliances the Lega built. This was first notable in the curious trajectory of Emma Bonino, in 1994 a supporter of the Pole of Freedoms. A well-known liberal, she in fact spent most of her political career in the secularist Partito Radicale, fighting for such causes as abortion and divorce rights and the legalisation of cannabis. Such were her centrist credentials that in 2006–8 she became foreign minister in an administration led by the Democratic Party, and in 2018 leader of the small European-federalist party +Europa. Yet back in 1994 Bonino instead stood as an independent on a Lega Nord list, as part of the broader right-wing alliance. This was something of an eccentric choice but also had a clear logic, explained by Bonino in an interview with Il Messaggero in the run-up to the election. She emphasised that, while she had strong differences of political identity with the hard-right party, her liberal, free-market politics shared much in common with the Lega Nord’s own call for a slimming of the Italian state:
Many things divide us from the Lega, but it’s also true that other things unite us, starting with [support for the] first-past-the-post electoral system. It’s no accident that [she and fellow Radicals] successfully promoted, together with the Lega, the campaign for thirteen anti-statist and anti-corporatist referendums … the vast majority of those who define themselves as progressives in reality embody a force for the conservation of the partitocrazia … [We and the Lega are united] by the common battle against the partitocrazia and the wasting of public funds.
In the generally volatile situation of the early 1990s, liberals and leghisti united in the name of a Thatcherite revolution in Italy. As Bonino mentioned, this included a series of referendums cosponsored by the Lega Nord and her own Radicali, from privatising public broadcaster RAI to banning trade unions from directly collecting dues from workers’ wages. Yet, if the campaign to finish off the First Republic was driven by actors spanning left–right divides, the alliances that emerged in 1994 were also liable to sudden and radical shifts. While upon its election Berlusconi’s coalition enjoyed a large majority in the Chamber of Deputies, it would not even last one year in government. Relations were soon strained by revelations of the tycoon’s collusion with the Sicilian Mafia and Calabrian ’Ndranghetà. Indeed, when news emerged that the media magnate faced fresh police investigations over his tax affairs, Bossi moved to split the coalition. But there was also a more strictly political reason behind the split: Berlusconi’s public repudiation of the Lega Nord’s plan to give the regions greater autonomy.
Bossi claimed that, in blocking this federalisation policy, concretised by the Lega Nord congress in November 1994, Berlusconi had reneged on his pre-election commitments to his