to mobilise its own base, a dress rehearsal designed to show that a Padanian state could, or even would, soon come into being.
In Government, against Rome
Yet Padanian secessionism brought major strategic problems, even in elections for regional councils – bodies with a wide array of powers over health care, education and transport, as well as an important platform for propaganda. And the Lega had no chance of securing absolute majorities in such councils without the aid of the wider, all-Italian centre-right parties. In the 1996 general election, the party had been isolated from both main political blocs, and the success of Romano Prodi’s centre-left government in bringing Italy into the euro in 1999 scotched even the notional possibility of Padania joining the single currency on its own. Bossi’s politics of slimming down the state and pushing privatisation were now the mainstream, but its pro-independence stance was minoritarian. It was thus caught between its ability to mobilise a radical minority, including in party activism, and its need to form broader alliances to win first-past-the-post contests. Hence, for all its rhetoric on the impossibility of reforming the Italian state, by the 1999 European elections the Lega Nord had turned back toward a pact with Forza Italia and the smaller right-wing parties. Just as the experience of 1994–96 had highlighted Berlusconi’s need to keep the Lega on the side, Bossi would, over the next two decades, repeatedly return to electoral pacts with his eternal brother enemy.
In the era bracketed by the war on terror and the financial crisis, the Lega Nord’s involvement in the Berlusconi governments of 2001–6 and 2008–11 would begin its conversion into a more conventionally hard-right force, indeed the tycoon’s strongest ally within the centre-right coalition. Even beyond the Bossi-Berlusconi connection, there were also specific areas of accord between the postfascists and the Lega. Having at least muted its commitment to destroy the Italian state, around the turn of the millennium, the northern chauvinist party increasingly took up the campaign against immigration. In 2001, Bossi buried the hatchet with AN’s Gianfranco Fini to co-author a bill that massively expanded the apparatus of migrant detention and expulsion. At the same time, in the bid to maintain an ersatz ‘outsiderishness’, Bossi increasingly resorted to shock communication tactics, for instance in his comments that the navy ought to fire on the boats of arriving refugees. This harsh identitarianism – expressed in the form of victimhood – was also put on display in election posters portraying a Native American with the tagline ‘They didn’t control immigration, now they live on reserves!’
The Lega Nord’s tonal divergence from the codes of republican institutions sat oddly with its actual presence in government. Clinging to their own territorial identity, Bossi’s activist base did not warm to Berlusconi or even to leghista officials serving in ‘the Rome government’ like interior minister Roberto Maroni. They could, at least, content themselves with the idea that the party represented a regionalist opposition within government ranks. This balancing of ‘Padanian’ and Italian commitments was most theatrically demonstrated by the Lega’s Luca Zaia, agriculture minister from 2008 to 2010, who led protests outside his own ministry in order to demand more funds for his home region. His insistence on more cash for wealthy Veneto would have made little sense for a genuinely national politician. Yet such bizarre antics also suited the leghista minister’s plans for what came next, serving as a kind of foreplay for his campaign to become president of this region. While the Lega Nord had no chance of securing regional government if it stood outside the centre-right alliance, the pact with Berlusconi allowed it to take Veneto for the first time in 2010, as well as the Piedmont region surrounding Turin.
Compared to the Forza Italia ministers chosen from among Berlusconi’s personal associates, Zaia and his colleagues were far more bound by the politics of their home regions as well as their accountability to party activists. This owed not only to the Lega’s regionalist identity but also the fact that its organisation was based on a mass of territorial branches. This accountability to local cadres – whose sources of funds and institutional weight also rose with breakthroughs in regional and mayoral elections – contrasted with the ‘light’ organisational form pioneered by Berlusconi, in which posts and influence remained under the tight control of the party’s owner-proprietor. Even amid the general volatility of the Second Republic, in which campaign vehicles like Forza Italia did away with ‘dense’ mass-party structures, Bossi’s Lega Nord was built on an organisational model more akin to its 1980s counterparts, sometimes even called a ‘Leninist’ model. Rallied in a force that had arisen in opposition to the First Republic, the leghisti nonetheless carried forth some of the assumptions of the previous era of political engagement. Indeed, already by the time of the 1996 general election the Lega Nord was the oldest party represented in the Italian Parliament.
If the 1990s saw widespread claims in the death of the mass-party form – exemplified by the wider collapse of the First Republic – the Lega Nord’s history instead highlights the merits of this more rooted model, allowing the party to endure even severe defeats. Its mass membership – hitting 112,000 by 1992 – was an impressive countertendency, especially considering that one could not simply sign up as a member of the Lega; rather, one had to earn membership through activism and attendance at meetings. This deep sense of ongoing party commitment, combined with the regionalist identity of which the Lega boasted under Bossi’s leadership, made it quite unlike the media machines with which it clashed each election time. As recent research on Lega membership structures has highlighted,24 its territorial roots are maintained not only through such practices as party gazebos (a way of maintaining direct contact with local populations) but also regular member meetings with elected officials as well as parallel and voluntary organisations representing such groups as women and youth.
As we shall see further on, today’s Lega is less rooted in local branches, or indeed ‘Padanian’ identity, than it was under Bossi’s leadership. From 2011, not long before Bossi was forced from office, to Salvini’s electoral breakthrough in 2018, the party’s number of territorial sections in fact fell by over two-thirds, from 1,451 to 437.25 Yet, through the volatile times of the Second Republic, these deeper structures had rendered the Lega Nord far hardier than its rivals, time and again proving able to renew itself notwithstanding the electoral setbacks that followed each spell in government. The party had not just ridden the ideological wave of ‘Bribesville’, with its revolt against the corrupt party system in Rome, but also, paradoxically, created a vehicle much more similar to the mass parties that Clean Hands had destroyed. This laid both the political and organisational bases for the Lega’s conquest of small towns across northern Italy, a bedrock that survived even Bossi’s own downfall.
The Revolution Eats Its Children
As we have seen, Bossi’s leadership of the Lega Nord was shaped by the tension between its regionalist and national ambitions. Throughout his period of control, and especially after the party’s first spell in national office in 1994, Bossi sought to present himself as a ‘guarantor’ figure, who would protect the interests of members against any corrupting effect that serving in the Rome government might have on ministers. The rise of a layer of leghista ministers, MPs, and European and regional/local representatives created what some activists derided as ‘the party of the blue cars’, supposedly focused on maintaining their own perks. From the very top of the organisational machine, Bossi could, in part at least, sidestep such an accusation. His only ministerial role in Berlusconi’s governments (‘Minister for Devolution’) was a purely propagandistic one, allowing him to keep one foot outside of the central Italian state and claim to represent the leghista base directly rather than the government as a whole. As his election posters put it: ‘further from Rome, closer to you’.
Whereas the Lega’s anti-corruption stance had soon brought Berlusconi’s first government to retreat and then collapse,26 the alliances of the 2000s were more governed by a tacit division of control. Here, Bossi’s party was allowed to lead the broader centre-right alliance in its heartlands in exchange for backing national-level legislation that shielded Berlusconi’s interests. Where, in 1994, the Lega had withdrawn its backing for the Biondi
