NORTHERN LEAGUE.

Lega Nord (Northern League) is a political movement and party founded in November 1989 by the charismatic Umberto Bossi (b. 1941) and the theoretician Gianfranco Miglio (1918–2001). The League, which has its own newspaper, the Padania, takes as its symbol Alberto da Giussano who led the cities of the Lombard League to victory over Frederick Barbarossa (1122–1190) in 1176. The Northern League united the many alliances that arose in Northern Italy (the Lombard League, the League of Venice, the Piedmontese Union, the Piedmont Autonomists, and movements in Friuli, Trentino, and Liguria) in opposition to the traditional Italian parties, particularly those in charge of the government. The phenomenon of the leagues developed in the wake of a tendency that appeared in the 1980s, when various local and regional groups emerged in the agricultural zones of the Veneto and in the valleys of the Bergamo and Varese provinces. Territorial patriotism was the primary factor binding the league activists, who were recruited from all social strata, although most of the early members were industrial and agricultural workers. At first the political parties of Italy underestimated the phenomenon, dismissing it as a manifestation of the wealthy Northern society's dissatisfaction with the national government; nor did they feel threatened by the new political issue of autonomy, expressed in the slogan coined by Bossi: "Lombardy for the Lombards." The league phenomenon was also characterized by rude and violent polemical attacks against Southerners, who were considered parasites of the North. When in the mid-1980s the influx of migrants into Italy began to swell, racist elements aimed at immigrants were added to the polemic.

From 1985 on, with the growing crisis in the parties, the protest against "thieving Rome" (another slogan of Bossi's) became ever stronger and the leagues spread into cities as well, recruiting initiates from the middle class, merchants, small entrepreneurs, privately employed persons, and white-collar workers; in brief, they drew from that vast pool of traditionally moderate citizens who in the past had aligned themselves with the ruling parties and in particular with the Christian Democrats.

The effectiveness of Bossi's federalist message and the separatist sentiments of the Northern countryside exerted a strong attraction and raised doubts about the nationalization of the Italian masses after less than 150 years of national unity. In the 1989 elections for the European Parliament, the striking success of the League could no longer be ignored: in Lombardy it became the fourth party with 8.1 percent of the votes. Bossi, who had already been elected to the Senate in 1987, received significant support in the 1990 regional elections: almost 1.2 million Lombards voted the party ticket of the carroccio, the League's symbol depicting a medieval ox-drawn war chariot. The League vote in Lombardy reached 18.9 percent, attaining 13 percent even in Milan where Bettino Craxi (1934–2000) had in vain taken it upon himself to defend personally the power of the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), which had been undermined by the League's battle with the Milanese City Council led by Paolo Pillitteri (b. 1940), Craxi's brother-in-law, who was later involved in the investigations for tangenti (bribe-taking).

In his protest against the centralized government, which he accused of penalizing the North in favor of other regions, Umberto Bossi waved the banner of a constitutional revision that would end the unitary experience and give rise to a federative government. The success achieved in Lombardy was repeated in the political elections of 5–6 April 1992, in which the League exceeded 8 percent of the votes at the national level and 20 percent in Lombardy, thus becoming an important political partner for any ally. In 1994 Bossi brought the League out of its isolation when he accepted the proposal of Silvio Berlusconi (b. 1936), who had just founded the Forza Italia party (FI), to enter into a joint electoral pact. Two alliances were thus formed, the "Freedom Pole" in the North (FI and Lega Nord) and the "Good Government Pole" in the South (FI and Gianfranco Fini's [b. 1952] Alleanza Nazionale). The two coalitions won the elections (27 March 1994) with the League attaining 8.4 percent of the votes. As soon as Bossi realized that he had allied himself with a leader, Berlusconi, whose media empire could swallow up the League votes, he attacked first Fini, whom he accused of backing southern statists, and then Berlusconi himself because of his old friendship with Craxi. The League then left the parliamentary majority, causing the collapse of the first Berlusconi government in December 1994. For the elections of 13 May 2001 the League once more allied itself with Berlusconi in the "Casa della Libertà" coalition (House of liberty), and as of early 2006 was still a ruling party in the government. A promise to institute federalism assured the loyalty of Bossi, who was appointed minister for Reforms and Devolution (the assignment to the regions of matters relating to health, education, and public security), a post that he resigned after he suffered a stroke in March 2004, at sixty-three years of age; he was replaced in July 2004 by Roberto Calderoli (b. 1956), who had until then been vice-president of the Senate.

See alsoBerlusconi, Silvio; Craxi, Bettino; Italy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cento Bull, Anna, and Mark Gilbert. The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics. Basingstoke, U.K., 2001.

Diamanti, Ilvo. La Lega: geografia, storia e sociologia diun soggetto politico. 2nd ed. Rome, 1995.

Miglio, Gianfranco. Io, Bossi e la Lega. Diario segreto dei miei quattro anni sul Carroccio. Milan, 1994.

Tambini, Damian. Nationalism in Italian Politics: The Stories of the Northern League, 1980–2000. London and New York, 2001.

Maria Teresa Giusti