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 allies. Yet in his bid to displace the tycoon’s administration, Bossi also operated a radical shift of his own – allying with figures equally opposed to his northern-autonomist agenda. His close collaborator here was PCI veteran Massimo d’Alema, a leading figure in the PDS, able to promise the centre-left’s votes for an alternative government. The two men’s meeting at Bossi’s little-used Rome address would rather bathetically be named the ‘pact of the sardines’ – an allusion to the sparse snacks that the Lega Nord leader was able to muster for his guests. It was nonetheless significant, as Bossi agreed to pull his party out of the Pole of Freedoms and join the PDS in backing an alternative administration led by former Bank of Italy director-general Lamberto Dini. This ‘technical’ government was appointed by president Eugenio Oscar Luigi Scalfaro in the name of piloting Italy toward a fresh general election, but it also had the task of ‘cleaning up the public finances’ – above all through a reform to cut the state’s pension bill.
Supporters of this deal to back Dini characterised it as a break in ‘political government’, instead inaugurating an administration which could impose reforms that stood above ordinary party divides. Such an arrangement had been premiered in April 1993, in the final months of the First Republic, when former Bank of Italy governor Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was appointed head of a majority-DC cabinet, in the first republican administration to be led by an unelected figure. In the Italian political system, no prime minister is directly elected, and indeed it was only through the rise of Berlusconi (and later Renzi) that this office assumed such a strong electoral-media role, more akin to a presidential system. But what was new in the technical cabinets headed by first Ciampi then Dini was that they each relied on personnel drawn from outside the electoral arena, lifted to office in the name of correcting the inefficiencies of democratic politics. Every minister in Dini’s cabinet was an unelected technocrat, and its base in parliament bore no reference to the coalitions that had stood in the 1994 general election.
The Dini government was also notable for enshrining a characteristic trait of the Second Republic, itself driven by Italy’s changed international position. This cabinet of technocrats was built on the consensus that decisions were needed to adapt the Italian public finances to the conditions of the European Economic and Monetary Union, even if no democratically elected party wanted to take direct responsibility for implementing them. For the hard-right Lega as for the ex-Communist PDS, the pursuit of certain policies – and in particular the need for so-called ‘balanced budgets’, with rock-bottom levels of public borrowing – now stood above normal democratic competition. Even Forza Italia abstained on confidence votes during the Dini administration, rather than try to block its work. In the period of the post-2008 economic crisis, these principles would again assert themselves in the technocratic cabinet led by former Goldman Sachs advisor Mario Monti from 2011 to 2013, as well as by the grand coalition that immediately followed it.
There was nothing incompatible between this logic and the Lega’s identitarian radicalism, which in fact hardened in the period of its break with Berlusconi. Within just years of its founding, the Lega Nord had become a key force in a national government, throwing its weight behind a tycoon and then a former central banker in order to further its aim of trimming the Italian state. But the parliamentary pact with the PDS had not amounted to a wholesale dissolution of left-right divides. When the early general election came in April 1996 the Lega Nord found itself standing outside of both the main electoral blocs – and the results were paradoxical. While the Lega’s overall vote share rose two points – to over 10 per cent of the national electorate – it was squeezed by the same first-past-the-post system that had powered its initial rise. Already in January 1995, Bossi’s ‘pact of the sardines’ had seen his party lose 40 of its 118 MPs, who remained loyal to Berlusconi’s Pole of Freedoms. With the 1996 general election, the Lega was reduced to just 59 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The Lega’s attempt to deal with these setbacks was defined less by a move to the right as by the sharper stance it now adopted against the central Italian state. Having repudiated the centre-right alliance and Berlusconi, Bossi pushed for a change in the party’s image, adopting an openly secessionist agenda. As the promise of reforming the Italian state waned, in 1997 Bossi renamed the party the ‘Lega Nord for the Independence of Padania’, insisting that this ‘country’ straddling the Po Valley from the Alps to the Adriatic should cast off the South altogether. Yet, if this secessionism marked a sharp break from the typical codes of republican politics, there were also elements of continuity with the agenda the Lega Nord had followed in backing Dini. With Italy widely expected to fail to meet the convergence criteria to join the euro upon its launch in 1999, Bossi insisted that the wealth-ier northern regions should not allow the South to drag them down: a new and independent Padania would, instead, be able to take its place in the concert of European nations.
There were certain tensions between the Lega Nord’s pro-business agenda and its folk nationalism – the radical-right party’s secessionism represented a clear destabilising force in Italian politics. Yet Bossi also sought to diversify the party’s image and make it more like the ‘nation’ it sought to rally. This was the impetus behind the unofficial Padanian Parliament it created in 1997, which would supposedly serve as the launchpad for a new state. In this cause, a series of Potemkin parties were organised, from the Padanian Communists (whose candidates included one M. Salvini), to a list aligned to Bonino’s Radicals, or the top-placed lists, respectively named European Democrats – Padanian Labour and Liberal Democrats. The Lega claimed that around six million people had participated in this vote – far beyond its own four million tally in the 1996 general election.
