businessmen and their employees, categories in which the Lega still enjoys relatively high support. But as the Lega Nord became a more recognised political force, its identitarian appeal became more transversal – and its demography more representative of the areas where it is rooted.16
Because its rise has broadly coincided with the decline of the old left – allowing it to win elections even in historic ‘red heartlands’ – the Lega Nord is often erroneously presented as a ‘welfare-chauvinist’ party, namely one which claims that reducing migrant numbers is necessary in order to protect and extend the welfare state. Yet, despite its attacks on spending on migrants, the Lega Nord was from the outset also dominated by anti-statism and the call for sharp tax cuts. At its founding congress in 1991, Bossi explicitly connected his regionalism to the simmering discontent against the First Republic and its so-called ‘elephantiasis’.The Lega’s ability to transcend a purely middle-class electorate owed not so much to the promise of welfare as to the fact that it presented corruption as a characteristically ‘southern’ problem from which northerners of all classes could be liberated. Bossi told his followers that it was no surprise that the voter revolt against the First Republic had arisen ‘in the areas of industrial civilisation, where citizens’ relation to institutions is more critical – though it will come in the South too’.17 Indeed, even before the Bribesville revelations, the Lega was advancing much of what soon became the common sense about Italy’s institutions and in particular the need to break the power of a high taxation, a corrupt state machine weighed down by patronage, and clientelism.
The end of the First Republic had raised the importance of ‘anti-corruption’ in a contradictory and limited way. Contra the Lega’s own presentation, both the case of the Milan PSI and Bossi’s own behaviour shed doubt on whether abuses could be pinpointed to the South specifically. Indeed, if the Lega Nord’s path to prominence was eased by the demise of the old parties, it immediately moved to claim the same privileges – and more illicit benefits – available to its predecessors. In March 1993 Bossi marched his supporters into a Milan courtroom to shake hands with prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro, congratulating him for his moves against the local post-Communist PDS. However, within just months Bossi was himself in the firing line, as a fresh set of hearings – the Enimont trial – exposed the bribes that chemicals giant Montedison had made to figures across the political spectrum: Bettino Craxi, local DC members, and also the Lega leader. Appearing in court at the turn of 1994, Bossi admitted he had illicitly received money from the firm but insisted that he had provided nothing in return.
That 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
