The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics

The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics Anna Cento Bull and Mark Gilbert bull/gilbert/96936/crc 1...

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The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics Anna Cento Bull and Mark Gilbert

bull/gilbert/96936/crc

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The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics


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Also by Anna Cento Bull SOCIAL IDENTITIES AND POLITICAL CULTURES IN ITALY FROM PEASANT TO ENTREPRENEUR: The Survival of the Family Economy in Italy (with P. Corner) ENTREPRENEURIAL TEXTILE COMMUNITIES: A Comparative Study of Small Textile and Clothing Firms (with M. Pitt and J. Szarka)

Also by Mark Gilbert POLITICA IN ITALIA, 2000/ITALIAN POLITICS: The Faltering Transition (editor with G. Pasquino) THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION: The End of Politics, Italian Style


18/7/01

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The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics Anna Cento Bull Professor of Italian Studies University of Bath

and

Mark Gilbert Lecturer in Italian Politics University of Bath


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© Anna Cento Bull and Mark Gilbert 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–75068–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cento Bull, Anna, 1951– The Lega nord and the northern question in Italian politics / Anna Cento Bull and Mark Gilbert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–75068–3 1. Lega nord—History. 2. Italy, Northern—Politics and government. 3. Italy, Northern—Politics and government– –1996– 4. Italy—Politics and government—1976–1994. 5. Italy—Politics and government—1994– I. Gilbert, Mark, 1961– II. Title. JN5657.L45 C46 2001 324.245’084—dc21 2001032125 10 10

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Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents List of Tables

vii

Preface

viii

Introduction

1

1 The Lega Nord and the Crisis of the Italian State Introduction Il Senatúr Roma ladrona (‘Thieving Rome’) The Republic of the North The Italian revolution Party of government Conclusions

9 9 11 13 22 26 31 38

2 Interpretations of the Lega Nord Introduction A protest against Rome? The Lega as a populist party The Lega as a subcultural party The Lega as an ethno-regionalist party The Lega as a political entrepreneur Conclusions

42 42 43 45 51 56 59 63

3 The Electorate of the Lega Nord: a Socio-economic and Territorial Constituency Introduction The electorate of the Lega Nord Small-scale industrialization and the rise of the Lega Nord in the manufacturing areas of Lombardy Small-scale industralization and territorially-based political subcultures Facing new challenges: Italy’s industrial districts and political institutions in the 1980s and 1990s The Lega Nord, small business and regionalism The Lega Nord as a political subculture Recent developments Conclusions v

67 67 69 73 79 82 90 93 98 102

vi

Contents

4 Padania and After Introduction The making of Padania The theory and practice of Pandanian nationalism The sectarianism of the Lega A far-right party Conclusions 5 Globalization, Italian Politics and the ‘Northern Question’ Introduction The process of economic globalization and its effects on politics The politics of secession as a response to globalization Competing responses to globalization: state and markets Old and innovative solutions to new challenges Competing responses to globalization: state and regions The Northern Question and the growing territorial gap in Italian politics Conclusions

105 105 106 112 121 124 135 139 139 140 143 148 152 160 165 169

Conclusions

173

Postscript on the 2001 General Elections The Lega’s Caporetto?

184 184

References

188

Index

199

List of Tables 1.1 The 1992 General Elections in Italy: Chamber of Deputies

28

1.2 The General Elections of 1994: Chamber of Deputies

34

3.1 Variations of the Votes for the Lega and the Christian Democrats in Lombardy’s Industrial Districts compared to the Provincial Averages and Classification of the Lega (Chamber of Deputies, 5 April 1992)

77

4.1 The General Elections of 1996: Chamber of Deputies

109

P1 The Italian General Elections of 2001

185

vii

Preface

This book originated in conversations between colleagues who had each worked on the Lega Nord in the past and had adopted different perspectives. Talking the subject over, however, we discovered that our understanding of the Lega phenomenon was essentially complementary, in so far as it enabled us to cover its political, economic and social dimensions. We were determined from the outset to study the Lega as a political force which emerged in a specific socio-economic context and at a particular time in the evolution of Italian politics. By working together we could aspire to do this with a thoroughness that neither of us would have achieved without the other. The book develops themes on which the authors have in some cases previously worked and published. Some sections of Chapter 3 previously appeared in an article by Anna Bull entitled ‘The Politics of Industrial Districts in Lombardy: Replacing Christian Democracy with the Northern League’, The Italianist, 3, 1993. The bibliography contains all our relevant publications on the Northern Question and Italian politics. We have had the benefit of much insightful criticism from colleagues and friends in both Britain and Italy and wish especially to thank Gino Bedani, Roger Eatwell, Sergio Fabbrini, Salvatore Vassallo and Dwayne Woods. Palgrave’s external reader made a number of constructive and pertinent criticisms to our original manuscript that had the effect of causing us to rewrite many things and to rethink our position even when we disagreed with his/her comments. The book is unquestionably better because of this. The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation provided us with funds to carry out interviews with business and political leaders in northern Italy in June–October 2000. We wish to thank all the people we interviewed and others who made such interviews possible. In particular, we are very grateful to Maurizio Amenduni, Angelo Bendotti, Giuseppe Benigni, Franco Benincasa, Oliviero Bergamini, Giuliana Bertacchi, Massimo Bianconi, Emilia Borghi, Ermenegildo Borghi, Massimo Cacciari, Maurizio Fistarol, Marco Formentini, Eugenio Lapenna, Mario Moretti Polegato, Elio Mosele, Barbara Pezzini, Alberto Sciumè, Carlo Veronesi and Gianni Zonin. Anna Bull also wishes to thank the British Academy for an earlier research grant which enabled her to carry out a series of interviews with viii

Preface ix

Lombard small-businesspeople and Lega activists and representatives in Lombardy. Finally, we would both like to thank Jill O’Brien and Chris Williams in the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages for their practical support. Our efforts were also greatly helped by the understanding of our respective spouses, David Bull and Luciana Gottardi. The arrival of Mark Gilbert’s son, Francisco, came in 1999, in the middle of our project. He is an Italian and European citizen – but will never be a citizen of Padania. ANNA BULL MARK G ILBERT Bath

Introduction

The Lega Nord has been one of the most colourful and controversial actors to appear on the European stage in recent years. It played an undeniably important role in bringing down the Italian First Republic in the early 1990s and has managed to affirm itself as a permanent political force within the tangled Italian party system. Even today, when its electoral fortunes appear to be in decline, it retains a hardcore electorate of approximately 1.5 million people. The Lega has excited a good deal of attention from scholars. Not since the heyday of Enrico Berlinguer’s experiment with ‘Eurocommunism’ has an Italian political party aroused so much interest outside Italy, and within the country there has been a vast volume of scholarship explaining every aspect of the Lega’s rise, membership, social composition, geographical strongholds and political propaganda. There has also been a wealth of studies that attempts to locate or classify the Lega in terms of the categories evolved by political scientists. The Lega Nord has been variously defined as a ‘protest party’, ‘populist’, ‘ethno-nationalist’, ‘a subculture’ and a ‘political entrepreneur’. Our approach, while it has immensely benefited both from empirical work on the Lega and from the insights of those who have approached the movement more abstractly, falls into neither category. What we have tried to do in this book is study the Lega as a phenomenon that arose in a particular political-economic environment (northern Italy in the 1980s and 1990s) and which has, in its turn, profoundly influenced that environment – and the wider Italian political system – in measurable and important ways. We are, in short, not trying to prove that the Lega corresponds to one ideal type of political movement rather than another, but are engaged in the perhaps more prosaic activity of assessing why the Lega emerged in the first place, what its impact on the political 1

2

The Lega Nord and the Northern Question

system was, why at given moments it made certain policy choices rather than others, and so on. Our book is no more (but no less) than a focused study of the development within a specific national context of a particular subject over time. We hope that it will prove useful to those who do seek to generalize about new political movements in Europe – not least by demonstrating how difficult generalizations can be. We have, we think, provided quite convincing answers to a series of specific questions about the Lega’s development, but the Lega has said and done certain things that we cannot fully explain and it is perhaps as well to acknowledge that here. In the light of these remarks, it might be useful to sketch a broad picture of what we understand the political-economic context of 1980s and 1990s Italy to be. Our starting point is an undeniable fact about the economic development of post-war Italy. The country used to be divided into a poor South, a more prosperous but still largely agricultural Centre and North-East, and a triangle of intense industrialization in the NorthWest based upon three major cities: Genoa, Milan and Turin. Italy’s relatively small number of industrial giants – the Fiat car company being, of course, the most famous – are based in the North-West to this day. Yet, since the 1960s, this picture has been changing. The North-East of the country in particular has enjoyed a prolonged boom in production and investment that has given birth to tens of thousands of highly specialized, often family-owned firms whose productive ingenuity is second-to-none. Entire towns have dedicated themselves to the production of a single range of goods: shoes, spectacle frames, leisure wear, ceramics, processed foods, firearms, agricultural equipment, underwear, furniture, all continue to be ‘made in Italy’ with a skill and competitiveness that has by-passed the moribund British manufacturing economy. In the last twenty years, moreover, the phenomenon has spread: ‘industrial districts’ can now be found all the way down Italy’s east coast. Even the South, which has traditionally relied upon agriculture and the nationalized industries for employment, can now boast thriving clusters of manufacturing firms in Apulia, Molise, the Abruzzo and Basilicata. At the end of the 1980s, the flexible new economy represented by the small-firm model of development required a state that was as flexible as they were (Bassetti, 1996). However, the state that developed in Italy during the First Republic was born overweight after the fall of Fascism, and then steadily put on rolls of fat for the next thirty years. The peculiar nature of Italian electoral competition, with the largest Communist party (PCI) in the Western world offering a plausible electoral alternative to

Introduction

3

the governing Democrazia cristiana (Christian Democracy: DC), meant that Italy was obliged to adopt a consensual democratic system rather than the competitive system of ‘winners and losers’ in force in Britain, for example. Italy did not have the option of allowing the DC and the PCI to alternate in power because that might have risked social and political breakdown. Instead, Italy’s constitutional power was centralized in the parliament and parliament itself was in the hands, thanks to an elaborate system of proportional representation, of a fragmented and litigious array of political parties of which the DC and the PCI were by far the largest. The highly representative character of the political system, however, was at the expense of its ability to take clear decisions that hurt influential sections of public opinion. Parliamentary processes offered immense possibilities for legislative ambushes and no majority was ever strong or stable for long enough to force through unpopular reforms. In such conditions, the only issues upon which generalized cross-party accord could be reached were ones that were generous with public money, or which conferred privileges on broad sectors of the electorate. Between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, Italian governments legislated for one of the most restrictive and expensive labour markets in the world. Sacking workers was rendered almost impossible; employer contributions to workers’ pensions schemes were raised to near-Scandinavian levels; part-time working was all but outlawed; the opportunity to close down loss-making factories was made impossibly expensive by the so-called cassa integrazione system, which required firms to carry on paying the salaries of laid-off workers for several years after closure; salary equality was imposed upon the whole country via national pay bargaining agreements, despite the substantial variations in the cost of living between North and South; firms wanting to hire new workers had to go through state-run job agencies that assigned workers to firms according to the number of points they had accumulated by various bureaucratic criteria, rather than fitness to do the job (Ferrera and Gualmini, 1999). In addition, the banking system was largely nationalized and swiftly became inefficient and expensive for firms wanting to borrow money; expenditure on infrastructure was wasted or badly directed; and corruption placed a heavy informal ‘tax’ on the productive economy. Up to the 1980s, the new Italian economy nevertheless acquiesced in the dominant political system. In their respective strongholds, the north-eastern regions and the central ones, Christian Democracy and the Communist Party encouraged small business development or, at the

4


very least, ‘let it be’. That politics was largely conducted in Rome did not seem to matter, provided it did not interfere with the road to prosperity. In the 1980s, however, it became increasingly obvious that this state of affairs could not continue. Increased competition in Europe as a result of the creation of the single market, much greater competition from the Far East, hidden ‘off-budget’ costs such as bribes to ever more avid politicians, all made political and economic reforms an objective necessity. But the natural party of small business, the DC, had long since ceased to listen to the small entrepreneurs. The DC, certainly by the early 1980s, had degenerated into a kind of political brokerage house, which managed and shared out public funds, absorbed a conspicuous part of the public wealth through corruption, and preferred to acquire votes by clientelism rather than standing up for aggregated interests. Probably the DC’s leaders assumed that conservative smallbusinesspeople in the North would always vote for them. But in so doing they underestimated the extent to which the pressure had grown within the system. The Lega provided an outlet for this pressure. Perhaps more importantly, the Lega was articulating a pro-business programme that directly echoed the complaints and preferred solutions of the region’s producers. It argued for tax cuts, deregulation, an end to corruption and futile subsidies to the South. It did so moreover in clear, earthy language that sharply contrasted with the obscure and ambiguous language used by all other politicians. Having said this, it is important to underline that we do not subscribe to a narrow socio-economic explanation of the Lega’s political rise. The party was also able to recreate a collective identity out of the localistic and even parochial values of small-scale capitalism. It captured the mixture of nostalgia for a rural and idealized past and fear for what the future might bring that characterized the mood of many areas of smallscale production after a period of intense – and often bewildering – economic expansion. At a time when Italy moved from being a country of emigrants to one chosen as their destination by foreign immigrants, fears and anxieties that a model of development which rested on kinship and social networks, as well as personalized trust, was at serious risk grew immoderately. Out of these values the Lega constructed a regional collective identity which gave it a cohesion and potential for action totally lacking in the narrow municipal identities characteristic of much of Italy, including the North. Starting from a peripheral perspective, the Lega looked outwards. In particular, it placed an idea that had deep historical roots but was nevertheless revolutionary at the heart of its programme: the notion of

Introduction

5

territorial autonomy from central government. It identified ‘Rome’ and the misgovernment of the political parties as the root of the Italian malaise and, following on from this premise, claimed that a wideranging federalist reform of Italy’s Constitution was a sine qua non for the broader economic and social reforms that its constituency was demanding. The folkloristic aspects of the Lega’s political style (flags, mass rallies, the use of regional dialects), therefore, went hand in hand with a set of programmes precisely tailored to the specific needs of a substantial part of the northern electorate. Conversely, localism (in the new shape of regionalism) went hand in hand with a federal project of restructuring of the Italian state. The political centre (which in economic terms was a periphery) was being attacked by the political periphery (which in economic terms had become the new centre). If one tries to put oneself in the shoes of the mythical Signor Brambilla, a small producer from the Brianza industrial district near Milan much eulogized in Lega propaganda, one can understand why this genuinely hard-pressed, overworked and over-taxed figure decided to vote for the Lega Nord. It was the only party speaking directly to his concerns, upholding his moral and cultural values, and offering a defence of these same values coupled with practical and pragmatic remedies. Plus, of course, the Lega was saying in forthright tones that the northern Italian way of life was being threatened by illegal immigration. In short, Signor Brambilla’s socially conservative but economically productivist views found their ‘natural’ political home in the Lega. Our assumption is that voters’ actions can depend on their beliefs, not just their class affiliation or immediate pecuniary interests. In 1992– 94, the Lega’s standpoint coincided with the world-view of a large section of the northern electorate. But from 1994 onwards, the Lega faced increasing competition for its heartland’s votes. Forza Italia, the political movement formed by the media entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi in 1994, stole the Lega’s liberalizing clothes. The centre-left coalition elected in April 1996 adopted decentralization of government functions, a federal reorganization of the state and a war on red tape as one of its core policy goals. The Lega responded by jettisoning federalism and adopting outright secessionism. Between September 1996 and the autumn of 1998, the Lega promoted the formation of a new state called ‘Padania’. Instead, in other words, of promoting a Catalan or Scottishstyle solution to the dilemma posed by northern demands for greater autonomy from the central Italian state, the Lega had opted for the Czechoslovakian solution.

6


But was the North of Italy a ‘nation’ deserving statehood? Did the Lega believe it was? Or was the invention of Padania merely a tactical device to distinguish the Lega from its immediate electoral competition? Advocating secession at least had the merit of being a policy nobody would steal. We think there was an element of calculation. During our research, we were convinced by Marco Formentini, the former Mayor of Milan and until 1998 a figure of some weight within the movement, that the Lega had believed that the Italian government elected in April 1996 would not manage to meet the Maastricht criteria by the spring of 1998. After such a failure, the Lega expected the northern business community, whose lifeblood is European Union trade, to turn strongly against the central Italian state. Padania, by this line of argument, was at least in part an attempt to position the Lega to take advantage of a (further) collapse in the popularity of the Italian state. Was the decision to launch Padania mere calculation? The Lega’s intellectuals – they do exist – strongly made the case in 1997–98 for Padanian nationhood. They argued that racially, linguistically, culturally and geographically northern Italy constituted a natural political unit. Were they being sincere? Or were they writing to order? The latter suggestion seems implausible. The tone of their writings is strongly indicative of sincerity (and, to illustrate this, in Chapter 4 we allow the Lega considerable space to speak for itself). It is important to underline, however, that in three very important ways the Lega’s nationalist turn has proved to be misguided. First, it led the movement to waste two years playing fantasy politics instead of concentrating its political action on the specific concerns of its constituents; secondly, it was an approach that antagonized the regional and local loyalties of many Lega members and northern voters; thirdly, it caused the party to turn inwards and to replace the idea of a functional reform of the central state with that of national fundamentalism. Since 1998, the Lega has lost much of its electoral support and has somewhat erratically veered towards the shoals of right-wing extremism. How far the failure of the Padania project caused or contributed to this adoption of extremist policies and rhetoric is problematic, but we record the shift in some detail at the end of Chapter 4. One consequence of our methodological preference for studying the Lega as a phenomenon that emerged in a specific economic and political context is that the picture we present of the Lega is arguably more nuanced than many studies of the movement. We are neither of us supporters of the Lega Nord (or of any movement remotely similar to it) but after immersing ourselves in the economic and political reality from

Introduction

7

which the Lega sprang, we have found that it is possible to understand why so many people found it a plausible alternative to the traditional parties in the early 1990s. It is very important to acknowledge – and is not a sign of political sympathy – that the Lega Nord was asking broadly the right economic and institutional questions in its diagnosis of the challenge facing Italy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is not a coincidence that almost all the key planks of its 1992 election platform – above all federalism and privatization – have since been transformed into law by its political rivals. The presence of the Lega has been a goad jabbing Italy’s political class into remembering that the North – Italy’s productive heartland – has become alarmed and angry about the inadequacy of the Italian state. For the first time in modern Italian history, the ‘Northern Question’ is at least as important as the more familiar ‘Southern Question’ in the political debate. This is the reason for the title of this volume. The Lega Nord exists because there is a Northern Question. It has itself contributed to creating such a question and it has notably failed to provide a solution to it, but this does not mean that the Northern Question is not real or has now gone away. Whatever happens to the Lega Nord in the future the needs and demands of the manufacturing North will condition Italian politics in the coming decade. Just as the need to enter European Monetary Union was a vincolo esterno (external constraint) compelling budgetary austerity on successive Italian governments throughout the 1990s, so pressure from the industrial North has been a vincolo interno compelling Italy’s political class to recognize the necessity of federal reforms to Italy’s institutions. Since 1996, the centre-left government has taken a series of legislative steps to free the labour market, simplify bureaucracy and devolve power from Rome to the regional capitals (Ferrera and Gualmini, 1999; Baldi, 2000; Gilbert, 2000). A 1999 constitutional reform granted greater statutory power to regional presidents and ‘fiscal federalism’ has been introduced to make the regions less dependent upon Rome for their finances. But these measures have been introduced on a somewhat ad hoc basis and do not seem, as yet, to have had their desired effect. The preceding paragraphs illustrate what our book is about and what our approach to our subject has been. It remains to outline how the book is structured. Chapter 1 is a straightforward portrayal of the birth of the Lega in the early 1980s, its spectacular electoral growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s and its prominent role in the fall of the Italian First Republic in 1992–94. It argues that the Lega’s emergence was a crucial factor in hastening the collapse of an admittedly anachronistic system of government. Chapter 2 is a broad survey of scholars’ attempts

8


to categorize the Lega. We try to illustrate how each and every theory has captured some part of the Lega phenomenon, but also attempt to show how the Lega cannot easily be squeezed into a single definitional framework. Chapter 3 is a sociological analysis of the milieu from which the Lega originated and whose interests and values it represented in the early days. It illustrates the disproportionate extent to which the Lega substituted the DC as the main party of reference for the industrial districts of the North in the early 1990s. Chapter 4 discusses the most widely known aspect of the Lega’s political career: the invention of Padania in 1996 and examines the Lega’s subsequent degeneration into an extremist party of far-right views. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the ‘Northern Question’, which it sees as an outcome of the challenge globalization represents for the Italian state and economy. The chapter takes a critical look at the economic policy changes and political responses that this challenge has compelled. Chapters 2, 3 and 5 are necessarily more analytical; Chapters 1 and 4, although they each make specific arguments, also have a narrative function and hence are more descriptive. It would not have been possible to make the main points contained in Chapters 3 and 5 in the absence of the context provided by Chapters 1, 4 and the Postscript. The authors take joint responsibility for all of the chapters, but think it right to note here that Chapters 1 and 4 were written by Mark Gilbert, Chapters 3 and 5 by Anna Bull, although Mark Gilbert contributed the latter chapter’s analysis of the centre-left government’s institutional reforms since 1996. Chapter 2 was jointly researched and debated by both of us at some length, but was almost entirely written by Anna Bull. Finally, a note on terminology. We have not translated Lega Nord into English and have also left Forza Italia in Italian, since the name of Berlusconi’s movement is both well-known in English-speaking countries, and hard to render in English. All other political parties have been rendered thus: Democrazia cristiana (Christian Democracy: DC) upon first usage and then have been referred to either in English or by acronym on all subsequent occasions.

1 The Lega Nord and the Crisis of the Italian State

Introduction In the spring of 1985, an obscure party known as the Lega Autonoma Lombarda (a name shortened to Lega Lombarda the following year) took 13,000 votes in local elections in the wealthy Alpine province of Varese: 2.5 per cent of the votes cast. The Lega took a seat in the provincial assembly and gained further seats on Varese city council and in the neighbouring town of Gallarate. Apart from a handful of activists, nobody really knew what the new party stood for. Its electoral symbol was a stylish image of a medieval warrior with a drawn sword superimposed over an outline map of Lombardy. When told that the warrior was one Alberto da Giussano, a twelfth-century knight who in 1167 had led an army drawn from the city-states of northern Italy against the invading forces of Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, most people just sniggered. They laughed even louder – or walked out in disgust – when the Lega’s newly elected representative to the provincial assembly eschewed all formality and gave his first speech in the guttural local dialect. Certainly nobody then imagined that within a decade the Lega, by then renamed the Lega Nord, would have contributed half a dozen cabinet ministers to a national government, won a mayoral election in Milan and several other major cities with record pluralities, and have become the largest political party in Italy’s rich industrial North. In the early 1980s, the Lega Lombarda was just one of several movements striving to represent localist sentiment in northern Italy, and was by no means the most electorally successful. Northern Italians are intensely proud of their traditions, dialects and local cultures and almost every region has given birth in the post-war period to political 9

10


parties aiming to mobilize and represent local opinion. The doyen of these parties is the Südtiroler Volkspartei (South Tyrolian Peoples’ Party: SVP), a Christian Democratic movement that represents the substantial German-speaking population in the province of Bolzano and has consistently dominated politics in Italy’s northernmost region, TrentinoAlto Adige. Other parties representing linguistic or cultural minorities in what Italians call the ‘Alpine arc’ are the Union Valdôtaine, which represented French-speakers in the Val D’Aosta, and the Partito autonomista Trentino Tirolese (Trentino-Tyrol Autonomy Party: PATT), an intensely conservative movement popular in the valleys (but not the urban centres) of the Trentino. The Lega Lombarda was overshadowed in the early 1980s both by these parties and also by the success of the Liga Veneta, a movement founded in 1979 which, on a shoestring campaign budget, obtained 125,000 votes (4 per cent) in the Veneto in the 1983 parliamentary elections. It was, in fact, the startling immediate success of the Liga Veneta that illustrated the level of submerged voter discontent in northern Italy and it is possible that, with more coherent leadership, the Liga Veneta would have emerged as a major political force. As it was, the Liga was riven by factional infighting between its ‘historic leader’, Franco Rocchetta, and its sole parliamentary deputy, Achille Tramarin, and the Liga was forced, reluctantly, to watch as the Lega Lombarda stole its thunder. All these parties (the SVP being a partial exception) at the beginning of the 1980s stood for policies that might be summarized, briefly, as local chauvinism – even cultural xenophobia. The Lega’s first manifesto called, among other things, for public examinations to be held on an ‘ethno-regional’ basis, for public housing to be reserved for Lombards, for Lombards to be given preference in private-sector jobs, and for the defence of the ‘cultural and linguistic patrimony’ of Lombardy in the schools (Vimercati, 1990, p. 151). Its so-called ‘definitive programme’, published the following year, called for the ‘reaffirmation’ of Lombard culture, history and language, and of the territory’s ‘values and morals’. The appeal for preferences in healthcare, housing, education and jobs was made even more explicit, and the movement demanded that Lombardy be given the same kind of special constitutional status reserved for regions with a substantial non-Italian minority such as TrentinoAlto Adige, the Val D’Aosta and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The movement declared itself to be against ‘any assault on Lombard national identity’ and declared that the Lombard national flag (a red cross on a white background, like the flag of Saint George) should fly alongside the Italian tricolour on all public buildings (Vimercati, 1990, p. 153). Lombardy, in

The Lega Nord and the Crisis of the Italian State

11

other words, should be allowed to declare itself a self-governing state, free to discriminate in favour of ‘pure’ Lombards born on its soil and against outsiders from southern Italy or other countries. The feature that distinguished the Lega Lombarda at its birth from the PATT and the Liga Veneta, and half a dozen even smaller regionalist grouplets, and enabled it to project itself as a national political force, was the skilful leadership of its founder, Umberto Bossi. Political scientists and sociologists can (and we do in this book) expound knowingly upon the social and economic roots of the electoral success of the Lega in the late 1980s and 1990s, and, ex post facto, they can illustrate that the Lega’s extraordinary ascent to political prominence was largely determined by such socio-economic factors. But unless one takes into account Bossi’s boundless commitment, occasional ruthlessness, flair as an orator and indisputable political nous, the Lega’s ability to galvanize voters and to present itself as an alternative to the traditional party system becomes inexplicable. As Bossi himself put it in characteristically vivid language: ‘had there been some wimp of a professor in my place, the Lega would not now exist’ (Bossi, 1992, p. 47).

Il Senatúr Bossi must be one of the least likely leaders of a major political party to emerge in recent decades. Born into a family of agricultural workers from Varese in 1943, Bossi was not, as Italians say, ‘born with his shirt on’. He spent a decade living hand-to-mouth, working as a factory hand and as a guitarist in a dance band before he decided to apply himself to his studies. Well into his twenties, he began studying medicine at university in Milan, maintaining himself by giving private lessons and by working as a laboratory technician, and had successfully completed almost all his exams before he was drawn into politics by a chance meeting in February 1979 with Bruno Salvadori, the ideologue and leader of the Union Valdôtaine. In one of the autobiographical chapters of his first book, Vento dal Nord, Bossi dedicates almost an entire chapter to this encounter with a man whom he describes as ‘a limpid individual, one of the few politicians who were working for an ideal rather than for personal gain’ (Bossi, 1992, p. 31). The Lega Nord’s own official chronological account of its origins and development begins with this meeting, which is depicted as a fateful event for the cause of regional autonomy and the federal reorganization of the Italian state (Fassini, 1998, p. 29). In fact, Bossi, by his own account, only reluctantly became involved in the Union Valdôtaine’s activities and might never have begun a political

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career had it not been for Salvadori’s persistence (Bossi, 1992, p. 33). Bossi eventually was given the task of building up the Union Valdôtaine’s support in Varese and he did so at some personal expense. Bossi made himself responsible for some of the movement’s debts and, following Salvadori’s death in a car crash, was obliged to spend several years repaying quite considerable loans. The strain induced by this financial burden caused his first marriage to collapse. Bossi was undaunted by these setbacks in his personal and political life. He threw himself into building up the movement that became the Lega Lombarda holding endless meetings and writing tirelessly in Lombardia Autonomista, the news sheet he founded in 1982 (Bossi, 1992, p. 45). Bossi always found time for meetings and money for the newspaper. Unlike the parties represented in parliament, who (in the 1980s) could count upon a steady stream of legal and illegal financing from private and public enterprises to publicize themselves, the Lega’s only means of acquiring support was to go out into the bars, clubs and halls of northern Lombardy’s prosperous towns and villages and spread the word to the people face to face. This old-fashioned technique was to prove surprisingly effective, not least because the leghisti were themselves ordinary people who very often had had no previous political experience and were worlds apart from even the local functionaries of the major political parties. Bossi also had an obsession about organization. In Vento dal Nord, he recounts how even at a time when the entire active membership of the movement could have comfortably met in his new partner’s onebedroom flat, he would work for hours drawing up organizational flowcharts of the movement’s structure and planning the future (rigidly hierarchical) form that the movement would take (Bossi, 1992, p. 44). This meticulous attention to questions of organization was not just inspired by delusions of grandeur. The split in the Liga Veneta impressed upon Bossi that ‘organization must precede votes’ or else the movement might disintegrate into competing internal factions once electoral success occurred (Bossi, 1992, p. 44). He was also suspicious that attempts would be made to infiltrate the movement and subvert it from within and was determined to build an institutional framework that would protect it from this threat. Particularly after the electoral success in the general elections of 1987, when fears of infiltration were at their height, central control over the by now rapidly growing movement was steadfastly maintained. In 1987, Bossi introduced a net distinction between so-called sostenitori (supporters) and soci ordinari (ordinary members). The former group, containing the new members,


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had no voting rights and had to prove their worth to the movement before earning promotion to the ranks of the long-term activists in the other category. The 1987 general elections were the consecration of the movement’s hard work, organization and word-of-mouth propaganda. To the astonishment and bemusement of Italy’s political class, the Lega obtained 186,000 votes in the elections to the Chamber of Deputies, and nearly 140,000 in elections to the Senate. Three per cent of the Lombard electorate overall (approximately 0.5 per cent of the national total) had voted for the Lega. Thanks to Italy’s hyper-proportional electoral system, these results were enough to send Giuseppe Leoni, one of Bossi’s oldest friends, to the Chamber of Deputies, and to send Bossi himself to the Senate. He has ever since been referred to ironically by the Italian press as Il Senatúr, the dialect rendition of the Italian word senatore.

Roma ladrona (‘Thieving Rome’) Bossi and Leoni took their seats on the benches of the Italian parliament at a moment when the political system that had governed Italy since the immediate post-war years was beginning to crumble. For many irate burghers in northern Italy Bossi became the most visible and colourful critic of the waste, corruption and futile politicking endemic in Italian politics. The Lega’s attitude to the political establishment had been made clear from the first. In an early article Bossi had stated that: Lombardy is not an idiot who will pay other people’s debts. Lombardy is not going to follow Rome passively into bankruptcy because it has no intention of sacrificing the rights of its citizens, the sweat of its sons, the diligence and the personality of its people on the altar of Roman misgovernment. (Fassini, 1998, p. 34) The articulate opposition of the Lega to the excesses of the Italian party system cannot be overestimated as a factor in its ability to establish itself as a major political force. Had the Lega merely been the voice of Lombard chauvinism, it would rapidly have become a laughing stock. The great advantage Bossi possessed as an agitator and propagandist in the late 1980s was that he was voicing (albeit in extremely unpleasant tones) a critique of the nature of the Italian state that was often

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substantially accurate and which was popular even when it was wrong. The Lega concentrated upon four themes:

• •

•

•

The misgovernment of the political parties was in danger of throttling the small businesses and manufacturing industry in northern Italy that provided much of the nation’s prosperity. The South of Italy, which had been allowed to stagnate by decades of state handouts, was living off the charity of the North instead of paying its own way. The North’s taxes were being directed into the pockets of the Mafia and other criminal gangs who provided the parties of government with political support in many parts of the South. The Italian political élite were themselves little better than gangsters. All the parties were involved in corrupt practices. Italian politics needed a profound break with the past; a tabula rasa that would sweep away the existing political class. Italy was being transformed into a multicultural society against the will of its citizens by mass immigration from the Maghreb countries and (after 1989) Albania.

These themes were publicized by striking posters and leaflets that aroused much controversy but also great interest. The Lega’s most famous poster ‘Così No!’ (‘Not Like This’) showed a pained-looking Lombard hen laying golden eggs into a basket held by a distastefully caricatured Roman matron. The poster’s subtitle was: ‘Southern hegemony means the power to loot the North’. The campaign against immigration was publicized by a poster which stated with sublime hypocrisy: ‘Bringing Blacks here is slavery’. Another poster on the same theme stated: ‘Immigration from the Third World dissolves society and brings Fascism’. Crude though the Lega’s style was, Bossi’s jabbing finger was pointing at crucial issues for Italian democracy. The mismanagement by the political class of the economy and public finances was threatening Italy’s national solvency by the end of the 1980s. In the 1980s, Italy was governed by an uneasy coalition based upon the traditional party of government, Christian Democracy, and the Partito socialista italiano (Socialist Party: PSI), which from 1976 had been led by Bettino Craxi, an opportunistic Milanese politician with big ambitions to transform the PSI, at the expense of the Partito comunista italiano (Communist Party: PCI), into the DC’s main rival. The government, which was also supported by two venal minor parties, the Partito liberale (Liberal party:


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PLI) and the Partito socialista democratico (Social Democrats: PSDI), and an altogether more moralistic party, the Partito repubblicano (Republican Party: PRI), was thus internally incoherent. The DC had had to govern with Craxi, because the option of co-operating with the PCI had been tried and failed during the 1970s, but at the same time they had to prevent Craxi from exploiting his party’s pivotal role to gain popularity. Craxi was prime minister between 1983 and 1987 of an administration whose chief enemy was the leadership of the largest party nominally supporting it (Balboni, 1988). When, after the PSI’s successful showing in the 1987 elections, the DC pulled the rug from beneath Craxi and replaced him with their own nominees, the PSI returned the DC’s obstruction with interest. The governments of Giovanni Goria (July 1987–March 1988) and Ciriaco De Mita (April 1988–May 1989) were little more than a prolonged government crisis in which politics was characterized by parliamentary guerilla warfare (Gilbert, 1995, pp. 15–17). In this climate of political chaos, the only things the main political parties could agree on was spending public money. Italy’s public finances worsened dramatically from the early 1980s onwards as spending ran out of control, interest rates on government bonds spiralled upwards to reflect the greater risk being incurred by investors in Italian debt, and the state abdicated from its duty to pursue near-ubiquitous tax evasion. The figures tell their own story. The national debt, 61 per cent of GDP in 1981, had reached 101 per cent of GDP in 1990 (and was to peak at 124 per cent in 1995). Public borrowing exceeded incoming revenues by from 10 to 14 per cent of GDP every year for most of the 1980s, and, by 1989, the state was spending 54 per cent of the wealth produced annually: a figure that rivalled Scandinavia (Einaudi, 1991). Italy, of course, as Lega spokesmen dryly pointed out, does not enjoy Swedish or Danish levels of social services. Quite the opposite. As Giulio Savelli, a journalist and political activist, asserted in a book that was prefaced by a warm essay by Bossi, Italy had inferior levels of provision, by European standards, in healthcare, education, rubbish collection, water supply and sewerage, public transport, the courts, telecommunications, the roads, banking, social insurance, defence and public order (Savelli, 1992, p. 22). The economic effects of the profligacy of the Italian state were worsened by taxation policy. Annual taxation rose in the 1980s from about 30 per cent of GDP (well below European averages) to nearly 41 per cent (just above the average). This might have been acceptable had tax increases been levied equally. However, they were not. Taxes were raised

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sharply on wage earners, consumer goods such as petrol, property (in a country where 70 per cent of the population own their own homes), and businesses (which, by 1990, in some cases had to pay 54 lire in obligatory social contributions for every 100 paid out in wages to their employees). Other categories, notably the self-employed, escaped almost scot-free and were able to invest the money they evaded in taxes in government bonds paying 15 per cent interest rates. The productive economy, in short, was being transformed into a rentier economy that was bound, in the long run, to be less innovative and prosperous. From the late 1980s onwards, the Lega set out to become the party of Italy’s producers, especially the small businesses of Lombardy and the Veneto. The ethnonationalism of its early years, while retaining a substantial appeal for the movement’s most militant members, was given less prominence in the Lega’s programme and a militantly laissez-faire agenda of privatization, cost-cutting and tax cuts was fore-grounded (Lega Nord, 1992). In Vento dal Nord, Bossi bluntly described the Lega’s position: The Lega represents the North that has been squeezed beyond endurance for decades and is fed up – more than fed up (arcistufo) – with this state of affairs. For this we are saying loud and clear: this State, and this method of managing public money is no longer acceptable to us. We want a change of direction and we want it now. We will no longer tolerate our hard work being wasted in this way. There are two alternatives. Either the political parties change the way they do things and take their claws off the public money that the North is transferring to the South . . . or the North will get up and go. Thirty million citizens have had enough of being made mugs of, of paying for everybody and everything. (Bossi, 1992, p. 136) The appeal of this language for the hard-pressed producers of northern Italy is obvious. The message was spoiled, however, by unpleasant propaganda insinuating that the biggest savings in the state sector could be made by drastically reducing economic assistance to southern Italy, which Lega spokesmen, playing on a centuries-old prejudice in northern Italy, disparaged as being a drag on the economic progress of Lombard business and the beneficiary of huge handouts from central government. Bossi justified himself subsequently by stating that the Lega had used anti-southern smears as ‘a Trojan horse to get the newspapers to write about us’ (Bossi, 1992, p. 174). Lega activists, given such a lead, were naturally more forthright: in the wake of the movement’s


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first electoral successes, the North was besmirched by wall graffiti urging southerners to go home, equating southerners with the Mafia, and inciting Mount Etna to swamp Sicily in lava. As early as 1989, soccer teams from southern Italy were greeted by prolonged chanting of ‘Lega, Lega’ from the ‘ultras’ (hard core supporters) of teams from northern towns. The idea that the North alone produced wealth and the South alone spent it was a distortion of the truth. The Alpine provinces of Trento and Bolzano are big beneficiaries of government largesse, with the Val D’Aosta not far behind. State investment in public works and on welfare was higher per inhabitant in the South than the North, and the percentage of people employed, often unproductively, by the state bureaucracies was significantly higher, but the disparities were not enough to justify the Lega’s sweeping judgment that southerners as a whole were living off an ‘assisted economy’ that preferred to sponge rather than produce. Where the Lega was on much firmer ground was in pointing out that many of the resources redirected to the South were being wasted on pork barrel projects and on the client networks of southern politicians. This was true of the North too – politicians such as Giovanni Prandini, a Christian Democrat ‘boss’ in the Lombard city of Brescia, were notoriously skilled at using their political leverage to bring home the bacon – but in the South, clientelism had reached parody levels in the 1980s. Tens of thousands of people were unjustifiably drawing state invalidity pensions procured through the intervention of national and local politicians re-seeking election, and government agencies such as the post office and the local health authorities were stuffed with people who did no work and who owed their positions to a ‘push’ from a friendly politician. The Calabrian forestry service employed nearly 30,000 people in 1982, despite Calabria being one of Italy’s most barren regions (Walston, 1988, p. 125). The point was that the political class throughout the country, but in southern Italy in particular, had abandoned any pretext of using politics to pursue competing visions of the country’s future. They were middlemen, pure and simple, who mediated between central government and their electoral fiefs, disbursing public money in exchange for votes (and taking a rake-off from the deal). The academic jury is still out on how these cancerous political practices had developed. Some scholars prefer cultural explanations for the exceptional levels of clientelism apparent within the Italian political system; others blame Italy’s long-standing institutional paralysis and electoral system (Pasquino, 1991). The fact, however, of ubiquitous clientelism is not disputed by anybody. And in

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the late 1980s, the Lega, more than any other political force, made itself the scourge of the degenerative practices of the political élite. The political class’s wrongdoing, however, went beyond fixing jobs and pensions for constituents. It became absolutely clear in the late 1980s that leading politicians were willing to treat organized crime syndicates as clients like any other. In 1987, the general election results in Campania (the region containing Naples) were falsified by massive ballot fraud on behalf of DC and PSI candidates. The Chamber of Deputies voted to take no action on a select committee report which advocated holding the elections again despite voluminous evidence to suggest that the fraud had mostly been carried out by the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. In the same area, the Irpinia earthquake of 1982 provided an illustrative example of the abuses that the political class was prepared to condone. The Italian state spent at least $30 billion in the 1980s (the figure is given in dollars because in lire it would be so large as to be meaningless) on infrastructure projects, re-housing and schemes of industrial regeneration in the area hit by the earthquake (which was gradually enlarged to encompass provinces hardly damaged at all). Had this money been spent wisely, it might have re-launched the economy of one of the poorest regions of Italy. Instead, by the end of the decade tens of thousands of people were still living in tents and other temporary structures and many of the state-financed projects had been abandoned. Almost the only people to have benefited from the state’s largesse were the local political hierarchies, a handful of (often northern) industrialists, who took the state’s money and ran, and local mafias of every description. Irpinia was an example of rampant clientelism that particularly smarted with the Lega’s leaders – and northern voters. In Vento dal Nord, Bossi pointedly commented that the political parties had not managed to find the much smaller sum of 2500 milliards of lire (at the time about $1.5 billion) to rebuild the Valtellina valley in Lombardy, which had been the victim of devastating floods in 1988 (Bossi, 1992, p. 157). In the wake of Irpinia and subsequent shocking episodes of collusion between the political class and the Mafia (Tranfaglia, 1994), quite a number of leading journalists, most notably Giorgio Bocca of the liberal daily La Repubblica, were inclined to give Bossi a hearing when he thundered that it was necessary to eject the political class in its entirety from power. The desire for a period of epuration, a cleansing of public life, was growing apace in Italian society in the late 1980s, and the Lega was increasingly widely seen as the most efficacious solvent for the stains of Italy’s democracy. Bocca’s La Disunità d’Italia, a pungent critique of the


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degeneration of Italian democracy published in 1990, was widely regarded as a pro-Lega tract. This was inaccurate, but it was significant that even liberal opinion-makers were compelled to accept that Bossi was something more than a populist demagogue: he was also somebody telling unpleasant home truths. The liberal press, however, never made a common cause with Bossi against the misgovernment of the parties. The reason for this, almost certainly, was their disquiet at the Lega’s position on immigration. Foreign migration to Italy soared in the 1980s as, following on from earlier relatively uncontroversial migrations of women, many of whom found employment as domestic workers, large numbers of unemployed youths from the Maghreb countries of North Africa and West Africans also began to enter the Italian labour market. After the collapse of communism in 1989–90, Albanians, Yugoslavs and Poles, began to head for the EU in search of work. Italy, with its long unprotected coastline, and traditionally large informal economy, was a natural point of arrival in Europe for these clandestine visitors. In all, there were some 700,000 non-EU immigrants with authorized documents by 1991 and the total number of immigrants was estimated as approximately 900,000: about 2 per cent of the population (Campani, 1993). The high percentage of legal migrants was a consequence of the somewhat ad hoc policy followed by the Italian government in the 1980s. The Italian government failed to undertake a systematic approach to managing the demand created by the Italian economy for migrant labour, and certainly did little to assist the insertion of immigrants into Italian society. At the same time, a series of amnesties did legalize the entry of tens of thousands of migrants between 1987 and 1989 and in 1990 the passage of law 39/1990, the so-called ‘Martelli Law’, allowed 225,000 immigrants who had migrated to Italy before 31 December 1989, and had since found work, to regularize their position. After 1990, faced with the collapse of the Albanian economy and the prospect of hundreds of thousands of new migrants, Italy essentially closed the door on new migration. This was not least because of the success of the Lega in mobilizing opposition to what were widely perceived as liberal immigration policies. The Lega protested that the immigrants were undercutting shopkeepers by hawking trinkets, leather goods and toys in the streets; were spreading drug use and disease; were the cause (rather than the victims) of the increase in street prostitution. In parliament, Bossi presented over 100 amendments to the text of the ‘Martelli Law’ and Lega spokesmen, while never plumbing the rhetorical depths of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s

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Front National in France, undoubtedly did much to create the ‘climate of hostility and xenophobia’ rightly identified by one scholar of immigration in Italy as the predominating response of the Italian general public to mass immigration from the rest of the Mediterranean (Campani, 1993, p. 511). The Lega’s defence was two-pronged. First, they flatly denied that the multicultural society was either possible or desirable; secondly, they argued that those immigrants who did enter the workforce had to earn their place in Italian society and not expect handouts and easy access to the social services. As Bossi bluntly put it in Vento dal Nord: ‘the Lega retains that we should show solidarity first to our own people: to people like us’ (Bossi, 1992, p. 144). Such language went down well with ordinary people. An early sociological study of the Lega and its sympathizers quoted respondents to a questionnaire saying: ‘When Bossi speaks, it is as if I were speaking myself’; ‘The Lega’s speeches say the same thing that we say in the bars, on the commuter trains, in the workplace’; ‘Bossi tells the politicians to their face what we say between ourselves’ (Biorcio, 1991, p. 70). This was perhaps especially true of the Lega’s views on non-white immigration from ‘alien’ countries and cultures. The Lega succeeded in making itself the political voice of the ultraconservative frequenters of the bars, sporting clubs and small factories of the Milanese hinterland. As the elections to the European Assembly in June 1989 and, even more dramatically, the local elections in Lombardy in May 1990 proved, there were rather a lot of people who liked what the Lega was saying. In the European elections, the movement, campaigning together with the Liga Veneta, Piemont Autonomista, L’Union Ligure, La Lega Emilia-Romagnola and Alleanza Toscana under the banner of the ‘Northern Alliance’, obtained nearly 637,000 votes, 1.8 per cent of the national total, and elected two deputies, Francesco Enrico Speroni and Luigi Moretti, to the European Parliament: 471,000 of these votes came in Lombardy, where the Lega secured over 8 per cent of the electorate. In some Alpine villages, the movement became the largest party, overtaking even the DC. Votes of 50,000 or more came from Piedmont and the Veneto; incredibly, several thousand people voted for northern autonomy even in the South. One of the leading figures in the Lega at this time, Marco Formentini, has told the authors that the Lega seriously expected the demand for federalist reforms to grow in the South in the early 1990s (Formentini, 2000). Bossi’s reaction to this electoral victory was to push for greater co-ordination of the autonomist movements of the North. In December 1989, at the ‘Congress Nassjonal’ of the Lega Lombarda, its annual


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conference, the parties that had successfully fought the European elections formed a new confederal alliance called the Lega Nord. The event passed unnoticed outside Italy, and even within Italy was regarded as small beer by comparison with the struggle of the PCI to come to terms with a post-communist future in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But, in fact, the international upheaval provoked by the end of communism was to prove decisive for the continuing growth of the Lega. As the movement’s astonishing success in the local elections of May 1990 illustrated, many middle-class Italian voters who had voted for the DC out of antipathy for the PCI now began to feel that they were safe to experiment with their vote. To a certain extent, some such shift away from the DC and towards the Lega was anticipated. But as Daniele Vimercati, the movement’s first (sympathetic) chronicler, commented: ‘a shock was expected, but what arrived was an earthquake’ (Vimercati, 1990, p. 126). Italy, a country where hitherto even minor oscillations of 1 or 2 per cent in individual parties’ votes had been the subject of excruciating debates between political scientists, suddenly woke up to discover that it had in its midst a political movement that had nearly tripled its previous best electoral performance. In elections to the Lombardy regional government, the Lega received 1.2 million votes, nearly 19 per cent of the electorate. Only the DC received more votes; the PCI and PSI were beaten humiliatingly into third and fourth place. For the first time, the Lega burst out of its heartland and began to score well in the big urban centres. In Milan, the Lega received 14 per cent, in Brescia, 25 per cent: these figures almost matched the movement’s results in the Alpine provinces of Varese, Como, Sondrio and Bergamo. The Lega Lombarda was the driving force of the northern autonomy movement in May 1990. None of the other regional leagues came close to equalling Bossi’s extraordinary achievement. Nevertheless, they scored well. Overall, the different leagues took 4.4 per cent of the national vote: more than such traditional parties as the neo-fascist Movimento sociale italiano (Italian Social Movement: MSI), the PRI, the PSDI, the PLI and the Radicals. Flushed with victory, the Lega organized a mass rally of its members and its hundreds of newly-elected representatives at all levels of local government at Pontida, a small town where the original Lega Lombarda had sworn an oath of fidelity to the struggle against the Holy Roman Empire. The oath is a fascinating one. It illustrates the almost millenarian understanding of the cause demanded by Bossi, but it illustrates too that the leadership of the Lega was worried that the movement had been almost too successful. Bossi, as the Lega’s official chronicle openly states, was anxious to bind the

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massed ranks of regional, communal and provincial councillors to his own leadership: Today at Pontida, the years of our commitment to the liberty of our peoples are joined to the sacrifices of our forefathers who chose this place to declare their faith to the cause of liberty. I who have wished to put myself forward as a candidate in the lists of the Lega LombardaLega Nord in order to become a standard-bearer in the struggle for the autonomy of the people of Lombardy, the Veneto, Piedmont, Liguria, Emilia, Romagna and Tuscany, do unite my oath to that of my forefathers and do swear fidelity to the cause of the autonomy and the liberty of our peoples who today, as for the last 1000 years, are incarnated in the Lega Lombarda and in its democratically elected organs of leadership (emphasis added). (Fassini, 1998, p. 48)

The Republic of the North The language of the oath was also interesting because it blurred an important question. Were northern Italians one people or an assemblage of peoples? This was not an arcane matter of interest only to the dialect poets and local historians in the Lega’s ranks. It went to the heart of the Lega’s future political strategy. Should the Lega Nord remain a loose confederation, reflecting the widely held belief among its membership that the Piedmontese, Venetians, Ligurians, Lombards, Trentini and Emiliani should regard themselves as being separate national and cultural identities, or should it become a federal movement, with strong central leadership, as a reflection of the broad cultural similarity of the different northern regions and the inability of any single region to stand on its own as an independent nation? Bossi strongly preferred the second alternative, others, notably Franco Rocchetta of the Liga Veneta, preferred the former option. Bossi’s reason for emphasizing the similarity of the ‘peoples’ of northern Italy was his ambitious plans for the movement. In September 1990, he had unleashed a storm of polemic when he announced that the Lega’s long-term strategy for the Italian state was its division into three ‘macroregions’ for the North, Centre and South. The ‘Republic of the North’, composed of Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and the Veneto (but not the autonomous regions of Friuli, Val D’Aosta and Trentino-Alto Adige), would have been independent in all but name, with the central state merely continuing to control foreign


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and defence policy and a handful of other key powers. Such a drastic reordering of the nature of the Italian state could not be achieved, Bossi argued, by regionalist movements struggling independently to obtain concessions from the central state for their own objectives. It would only be achieved by a strong political party capable of exercising a ‘hegemonic project’ in Italy (Bossi, 1992, p. 73). For this reason, Bossi rode roughshod over the other regional leagues and at the inaugural conference of the Lega Nord, held in the outskirts of Milan in February 1991, demanded that he be allowed simultaneously to hold the leadership of the Lega Nord and of the Lega Lombarda, instead of having to choose, as a significant opposition group within the leadership of the movement preferred, one job or the other. Bossi was preoccupied that if he chose the leadership of the Lega Nord, which at that stage was little more than a title without substantive powers, he would be undermined within the Lega Lombarda by more cautious individuals who did not share his plans to make the Lega the principal force of opposition to the political system. Bossi was forced to assert his authority on the last day of the congress by threatening that, if necessary, the Lega Lombarda would go it alone – the implication being that it would then invade the Veneto and the rest of northern Italy and offer electoral competition to its by now hopelessly junior partners (Bossi, 1992, pp. 76–7). The conference backed Bossi but the clash left scars. Relations between Bossi and Rocchetta, who was made president of the new movement, were never good thereafter, and some months later Bossi’s chief rival within Lombardy, one Franco Castellazzi, left the movement and publicly lamented its lack of democracy. It is worth underlining at this point just how ambitious Bossi’s objective was. First, a close reading of Bossi’s own writings in the early 1990s reveals that he correctly guessed that the long-standing party system was about to collapse, although even he did not foresee that the DC would be swept away too. In Vento dal Nord he prophesized that ‘before long there will be just two forces of representation, the DC and the Lega. The party of conservative stagnation and the party of radical change’ (Bossi, 1992, p. 120). His objective, in other words, was to realign the dominating cleavage in Italian politics from the ideological divide between communism and Catholicism to the territorial divide between North and South. The Lega would by 1994 become the first political force in the North and would be able to use its position as the fulcrum of the political system to compel substantive constitutional changes in the structure of the Italian state (Bossi, 1992, pp. 120–1).

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Bossi’s strategy, as many astute commentators in Italy pointed out at the time, was akin to that of Bettino Craxi, the leader of the PSI, who was also trying to subvert the long-established duopoly of the PCI and the DC. But it is important to underline that Bossi’s strategy was altogether more visionary than Craxi’s. The leader of the PSI had briefly articulated the view at the end of the 1970s that Italy required a ‘great reform’ of its institutions: in the 1980s it became clear that this reform amounted to a new presidentialist constitution tailor-made to suit Craxi’s particular brand of personality-driven politics. At no point did Craxi seem inclined to attack the DC’s clientelistic and corrupt form of government: the PSI, indeed, became notoriously the most corrupt of Italy’s political parties – no small achievement. Moreover, after the spring of 1989, when the ruling élite inside the DC deposed Craxi’s bête noire, Ciriaco De Mita, from the office of prime minister and proposed a power-sharing agreement with the PSI, Craxi became wholly identified with the traditional system he had been allegedly striving to reform (Gilbert, 1995, p. 17). Bossi, by contrast, was a political outsider and possessed of a vision for the reform of the country’s institutions that was startling in its audacity but well-grounded in Italian history. The idea that Italy should be divided in three self-governing republics was not ridiculous. Throughout modern Italian history, voices arguing that Italy was a natural candidate for a federal form of organization have been a constant feature of the national debate. Nineteenth-century writers such as the radical democrat Carlo Cattaneo, whom the Lega immediately hailed as a forerunner, had been adamant that North and South were not a natural union (Vimercati, 1991). In the Lega’s eyes, the Italian state was born by accident (thanks to the opportunism of Garibaldi and Cavour in 1860) and has ever since been struggling to hold together fundamentally different social, cultural and economic realities. As Bossi ironically commented in Vento dal Nord, ‘apart from the national football team, almost nothing unites the Trentino and Lombardy with Calabria and Campania’ (Bossi, 1992, p. 161). But Bossi went further and made a case against the nation state in general. He argued that the future of governmental institutions in Europe, not just Italy, lay with sub-national tiers of administration and with the cancellation of national borders altogether. The future of Europe lay with ‘the little big peoples’ he was to eulogize subsequently in his single most interesting essay, not with ‘the myth of the great nations’ (Bossi, 1993, p. 127). These ambitious ideas were not, however, Bossi’s own. They reflected the views of a mercurial Italian intellectual, Gianfranco Miglio, a professor


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in political philosophy, and former rector of the prestigious Catholic University of Milan. Miglio has been called by the conservative scholar Alessandro Campi ‘one of Europe’s leading political scientists’ and, along with the French thinker Julius Freund, ‘the main European exponent of that school which, through Carl Schmitt, can be traced back to Max Weber and the tradition of German historicism’ (Campi, 1994, p. 104). Schmitt himself, according to Campi, regarded Miglio as ‘one of the most cultured men in Europe’ (Campi, 1994, p. 105). His work, however, has not received wide publicity abroad and even in Italy has been limited mostly to lectures and short essays (which were collected in a volume called La Regolarità della politica in 1988). In the 1980s, Miglio began to take an active political role. He was the founder and animator of the so-called ‘Milan group’ of constitutionalists, which, like many independent intellectuals of the left in the same years, argued strongly that Italy’s political malaise could only be combated by radical institutional reforms to strengthen the executive branch of the state (Miglio, 1990). The new Italian state, however, he argued, should also be federalist – or, more accurately, neo-federalist. Traditional federalism, in Miglio’s eyes, sought to compress diversity into unity (as in the motto of the United States, e pluribus unum). Neo-federalism, by contrast, sought to prize plurality over unity (e uno plures). Instead of trying to burden the greatly different territorial and cultural realities present in almost all European countries with permanent centralized (and centralizing) institutions, it was necessary to regard the future nation state as being merely a temporary association instituted contractually between independent territorial subjects for mutual co-operation in well-defined areas of policy (Miglio, 1991). Miglio’s visions of a ‘federal Italy’, which informed the Lega’s policies in the early 1990s, was grounded upon an understanding of the historical processes at work in the post-1989 world. For him, the end of the ideological conflict, globalization of commerce, and the attainment of high standards of living were, in the West at least, rendering the nation state superfluous to requirements, or, more accurately, were exposing its artificiality. The object of citizens’ loyalties was becoming increasingly local – to a city, a land, a region, or, at most, an agglomeration of regions. Europe in future would have to evolve new forms of political co-operation between these territorial entities (the European Union, being an attempt to squeeze European cultural plurality into a federal state, is eminently anachronistic in Miglio’s view) in order to facilitate economic exchanges and continued prosperity. Italy, specifically, was at the forefront of this disintegration of the nation state because her

26


central institutions and representative organs were, by most European standards, extremely corrupt and inefficient. Quite aside from whether Miglio’s ideas are convincing or not, the rarefied tone of his theoretical work (though not the professor’s populist attempts at being a politician, where he was often cruder and more threatening than Bossi himself) undeniably gave an added dimension to the Lega’s appeal. The Lega, for all its defects, had always addressed the main issues facing Italian society. It could now boast a thinker who could make a plausible case for saying that its chosen solution to Italy’s problems – the disaggregation of the national Italian state – was in keeping with the evolution of the modern state. Miglio rapidly became second only to Bossi in the movement’s hierarchy (Canteri and Ottaviani, 1992, p. 124), although his relationship with the movement, as his brief memoir Io, Bossi e la Lega shows, was somewhat turbulent (Miglio, 1994). At Pontida on 16 May 1991, Bossi, who had been publicly warned by the premier, Giulio Andreotti, that he would be arrested if he mentioned the word ‘secession’, made a carefully worded speech in front of 25,000 flag-waving activists announcing the symbolic formation of the ‘Republic of the North’. It was no more than a gesture. But for those activists, Bossi’s speech marked the psychological end of Italy as a unified nation and the start of a political struggle to end the institutional inheritance of the Italian Risorgimento.

The Italian revolution Between May 1991 and May 1993, Italy underwent the most profound political crisis of any European democracy since the Fourth Republic in France in 1958. The Christian Democrat-Socialist government was defeated by the polls in the general elections of April 1992 and then devastated by investigations into political wrongdoing, carried out by teams of prosecutors in Milan and elsewhere. By the spring of 1993, hundreds of national and local politicians had been indicted for extortion, illegally financing political activity, corruption or, worst of all, collusion with organized crime. The political figures who had dominated the political stage in the 1980s had become figures of fun or loathing: certainly all their legitimacy was gone. Bettino Craxi had been alerted that he was under investigation in dozens of individual cases of corruption and extortion; seven-times prime minister Giulio Andreotti had been warned that he would shortly be indicted upon mafia and murder charges; a former Minister of the Interior, Antonio Gava (DC), was accused of being the godfather of the Neapolitan Camorra. In


27

April–May 1993, the president of Italy, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, was forced to step in and ask the governor of the Bank of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, to become prime minister after the last DC-PSI administration, battered by public disgust and the indictment of many of its chief ministers, finally threw in the towel. There were, literally, no reputable party politicians left for Scalfaro to appoint (Gilbert, 1995; McCarthy, 1995). The onset of this crisis began in June 1991, when a national referendum on the reduction of the number of preferences voters could cast for candidates on the PR lists in national elections from four to one – a distinctly arcane subject – passed by a 95 per cent majority. Foolishly, the political parties, particularly Craxi’s PSI, had opposed this reform, and any other reform to the electoral system, with all the power at their command. Two other referendums that would have introduced a degree of British-style first-past-the-post voting into Senate elections and the direct election of mayors in large towns had already been blocked by the Constitutional Court after extensive behind-the-scenes arm-twisting by the political parties (Gilbert, 1995, p. 100). This obtuse policy of resistance to electoral reform had the predictable effect of turning the referendum on electoral preferences from a technical judgement over electoral law into a humiliating vote of confidence in the political class. Bossi’s political antenna, incidentally, for once let him down. The Lega officially encouraged abstention during the referendum campaign, believing, apparently, that the referendum was a trivial side show to its own challenge to the party system. The referendum was, by contrast, a triumph for the newly formed Partito democratico della sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left: PDS), which was the party that had emerged, 18 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the old PCI. The leader of the PDS, Achille Occhetto, had seized upon the referendum as an opportunity to affirm the new party’s identity as a campaigning movement for greater democracy in Italy. The DC and the PSI, however, were determined to tar the PDS with the communist brush and to prevent the new party from escaping from its lengthy relationship with the Soviet regime. During the general election campaign in February–April 1992, the media conducted a politically orchestrated campaign against the murkier moments in the PCI’s history and also unblushingly boosted the PSI and the personality of Bettino Craxi. The Lega came in for some tangential abuse, but was not central to the electoral campaign, and it was not thought possible that it would get enough votes to establish itself as a national political force. Quite clearly, the leaders of the PSI believed that the PDS might

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disintegrate under this propaganda barrage and that an influx of former communist votes might enable the PSI to establish itself as the second party in the system, still in alliance with the DC, but on conditions of near-parity. What none of the traditional leaders appear to have realized was that the dominant post-war cleavage between communists and non-communists had now been superseded by a broader split in Italian society between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (Fabbrini, 1997). The two ruling parties could still count upon a large client base, and upon the votes of the many people who had benefited from the lax tax regime and open-handed spending of the 1980s, but these ‘insiders’ were now outnumbered by the ‘outsiders’ for whom the political system imposed only economic or moral costs. The scare-mongering propaganda of the major parties did not address the concerns of such people. In particular in the North, where the damage of government profligacy was most evident, voters were less worried by the PCI’s alleged Stalinism than by the dysfunctional economic climate created by the DC-PSI ‘regime’ (Pansa, 1991). The Lega, consequently, did better at the polls than any pundit had dared to imagine. In the North, the Lega became second party overall, just 5 per cent behind the DC. The Lega Nord scored 17.3 per cent of the northern vote and beat the DC and the PSI to become the largest party in the Milan–Pavia electoral district: an area where, relatively speaking, the Lega had been slow to take off. In all, nearly 1.5 million people voted for the Lega in Lombardy, a significant improvement on the already exceptional results obtained in May 1990. But it was in the

Table 1.1

The 1992 General Elections in Italy: Chamber of Deputies

Political Party

Votes (000)

Percentage

No. Seats

DC PDS PSI Lega Nord R. Comunista MSI PRI PLI PSDI Others Spoiled votes

11 638 6 318 5 344 3 395 2 201 2 107 1 724 1 122 1 067 4 328 3 072

29.7 16.1 13.6 8.7 5.5 5.4 4.1 2.8 2.7 10.2 6.8

206 107 92 55 35 34 27 17 16 41 –

Source:

Italian Ministry of the Interior


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rest of the North that the biggest gains came. In the Veneto, the Lega Nord took almost 600,000 votes; in Piedmont, over half a million; in Liguria, 175,000; in Emilia-Romagna, almost 300,000. The Lega also did well in elections to the Senate (which are restricted by law to voters over 25 years of age). Twenty-five Lega senators were elected and the movement took 8.2 per cent of the national vote. The poll was a personal triumph for Bossi, who received a record 240,000 personal preference votes. Despite the fact that the DC and the PSI, together with the PSDI and the PLI, were – remarkably, when one considers the extent of the misrule over the previous five years – able to mobilize sufficient support in the South and Centre to win a narrow majority (331/630) in the Chamber of Deputies, the majority of commentators recognized that the elections had been a ‘landmark’ in Italian electoral history (Pasquino and McCarthy, 1993). The best metaphor, perhaps, is a break in the dam. With such a narrow majority in the Chamber of Deputies, the DC and PSI were unable to find a candidate for the office of president of the republic, from which President Francesco Cossiga resigned shortly after the elections, who was acceptable to all their warring factions. Cossiga was eventually replaced by Scalfaro, a distinguished Piedmontese of impeccable reputation, who became the choice of all the traditional parties after the brutal killing at the end of May 1992 of Italy’s leading crime fighter, prosecuting attorney Giovanni Falcone. Public opinion, already mobilized by spreading corruption investigations in Milan, was no longer willing, after Falcone’s murder, to tolerate the misrule of the parties. Scalfaro chose a new premier – Giuliano Amato (PSI) – who was more of a technocrat than a party boss, and the small clique of DC and PSI politicians who had run Italy’s affairs throughout the 1980s found themselves sidelined. The prosecutors, finally unchained, moved in for the kill. By the end of 1992, they had decapitated Italy’s political élite. Had the Lega Nord been defeated in the 1992 elections, and had Bossi been joined by a much smaller parliamentary contingent, it is at least questionable whether the prosecutors would have felt as free to challenge political power. The Lega was the big immediate winner of the political disruption caused by the judicial inquiry. Hitherto disdainful academic opinion even wondered whether the Lega might not evolve into ‘a national, centrist, catch-all party’ capable of substituting the DC as the core of a new, modernized party system (Leonardi and Kovacs, 1993, pp. 50–66). For a brief moment in the spring and summer of 1993, Bossi’s strategy of building the Lega into a hegemonic force able to impose a new

30


constitutional settlement upon the Italian state looked anything but a fantasy. Local elections in June 1993 were fought in an atmosphere of panic as the Carroccio (chariot), as the Lega is nicknamed, gained relentlessly in the opinion polls. A series of terrorist bomb blasts only added to the electric mood of public opinion: Bossi openly stated that the bombs were part of a ‘strategy of tension’ by occult forces to subvert democratic change. Unwisely, he warned that the North would take up ‘kalashnikovs’ and liberate itself if the Lega was robbed of victory. Fortunately for Bossi, his deputy, Marco Formentini, was the Lega’s candidate in the key race for the mayorality of Milan (an electoral law in March 1993 had instituted directly elected mayors). A former Eurocrat who looks like a suburban bank manager, Formentini was the ideal choice for prosperous Milanese who were anxious to get rid of the DC and the PSI but who did not want to be governed either by the radical left (the chief alternative) or by a movement of wildmen. The Milan poll became a personal victory for Formentini who took 39 per cent of the vote in the race for the mayoralty, while the Lega Nord took 41 per cent – an all-time record for any party – in the election for the city council. Formentini easily won the run-off against the second candidate, a well-known writer and broadcaster called Nando dalla Chiesa, while the DC, which came a humiliating third, was thwarted in its stated goal of turning Milan into the ‘Lega’s Stalingrad’ (Gilbert, 1995, pp. 156–9). The Lega swept the main provincial capitals of the North, with only Piedmontese cities such as Turin and Novara holding out. By the time the elections were over, it had become clear that the Lega, the PDS and the DC were more or less equal in electoral strength, with the Lega dominating the North, the PDS the Centre, and with the DC continuing to cling on in the South. A second round of local elections in November–December 1993 confirmed this tripartite division, although the PDS, which was skilfully building coalitions with left parties such as Rifondazione comunista (Communist Refoundation: PRC) and La Rete (The Network), emerged as first among equals: with the PDS as a nucleus, the left proved able to win mayoralities in both the South (Naples) and the North (Genoa). The Lega’s electoral progress was also checked by its never fully explained involvement in tangentopoli (bribesville), as the corruption scandals are known in Italian. On 29 November 1993, a former company executive, Claudio Sama, who was one of the chief witnesses in the trial of Sergio Cusani, a Milanese businessman who was subsequently convicted of paying huge bribes on behalf of the Ferruzzi chemicals group to all the principal political parties during the 1992 election campaign,


31

declared that Cusani had given him 200 million lire to give to the Lega for its electoral expenses. The Lega’s treasurer was arrested on 7 December and Bossi was subsequently compelled to become one of the string of party leaders (including Craxi) who were subjected to ruthless televised questioning during Cusani’s trial by the prosecutor-hero of the bribery investigations, Antonio Di Pietro. The message that clearly came across to the watching nation was that the Lega were no different from any of the other parties (Pamparana, 1994). The Lega itself is convinced that this was the purpose of Sama’s allegations. In its version of events, an emissary of Sama’s had given its treasurer the money as an unsolicited gift in March 1992 and before they could denounce the money to the appropriate parliamentary authorities it was stolen during a break-in at the Lega’s headquarters in Milan. The treasurer, Alessandro Patelli, chose to stay silent about the stolen cash, fearing that the pro-government press would turn the story into a scandal at a crucial moment a few days before the vote. However, this meant that when Sama came forward with his story in November, the Lega undeniably had received illegal funds, although, as Di Pietro himself subsequently conceded, there was never any evidence to suggest that the Lega had been a party to Ferruzzi’s systematic bribery of the political élite. Bossi’s own judgement on an episode that unquestionably robbed the Lega of momentum at a critical historical moment is that he and the movement were subjected to ‘a political trial’ (Bossi, 1996b, p. 5). The Lega’s own story is strikingly implausible, but there is some justice in Bossi’s complaints about the Sama affair. The Lega was treated by the prosecutors, particularly Di Pietro, as if they were on a par with political parties that had spent the previous decades ransacking the state. The most likely explanation of the Sama affair is that the Lega, like the equally under-funded PRI, which was also humiliated in the Cusani trial, simply saw Sama’s money as manna from heaven during a desperate campaign against the unscrupulous and free-spending government parties.

Party of government In January 1994, the political situation was transformed by the decision of a prominent Milanese entrepreneur, Silvio Berlusconi, to enter political life at the head of a newly invented political formation called Forza Italia. Even more than the Sama affair, or the tenacity of the PDS in assembling anti-Lega coalitions, the rise of Berlusconi was the single, most important development that prevented Bossi’s ‘hegemonic project’ from becoming reality. Had the political balance of power remained

32


similar to the one existing after the local elections in June 1993, Bossi would have gone into the general elections called by President Scalfaro for March 1994 in the complete certainty that he would have been in a position after the elections to demand a federalist reorganization of the state as the price for the Lega’s co-operation in parliament. Berlusconi, with his three national television channels, his overblown but potent reputation as a self-made businessman, his ownership of the AC Milan football team (which, via the supporters’ clubs, gave him a ready-made activists’ network), and his media and publishing empire, was a formidable force who was likely to exert a considerable appeal to many Lega voters, particularly city-dwellers. Since Berlusconi had always been closely identified with the by now disgraced Bettino Craxi, the bulk of the Lega’s membership was against coming to any electoral accord with Forza Italia. But some sort of accord, Bossi reasoned, was necessary. In August 1993, turning its back on nearly five decades of proportional representation, the Italian parliament had passed a semi-majoritarian electoral law. Seventy-five per cent of seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate would be assigned in British-style single member constituencies, 25 per cent through a very complex system of PR. Bossi foresaw that Forza Italia, which had immediately revived the old DC’s anti-communist and pro-business message in new, muchimproved packaging, would split the vote of the centre-right in Lombardy and the rest of the North and would end the Lega’s chance of becoming the dominant parliamentary force north of the Po. Bossi himself, perhaps exaggerating the scale of the Lega’s inevitable defeat, has written that the Lega ‘would have been wiped out’ (Bossi, 1996a, p. 6) had it attempted to go head-to-head with Berlusconi’s new party. More probably, it would have retreated to its heartland, winning seats in the Alpine arc, but ceding control over Milan and the cities of the Paduan plain to Forza Italia and even the PDS, which might have been able to profit from the division among the rightist parties. The Lega, accordingly, in January 1994 agreed to make an electoral pact with Berlusconi in northern Italy. The Polo della Libertà (Liberty Pole), as the pact was called, assigned a majority of the candidates in northern Italy to the Lega, and the Lega, in return, committed its huge network of activists – by 1994, Italy’s best-organized party machine – to Berlusconi’s cause and accepted the Milanese entrepreneur’s position as coalition leader. This was despite the fact that Berlusconi arrived at a similar agreement – the Polo del Buongoverno (Good Government Pole) – with the neo-fascist MSI in southern and central Italy. The MSI, with its blackshirt past, is hated by many Lega activists for being


33

a largely ‘southern’ party; wartime memories, moreover, mean that the legacy of fascism is a bitterly contested one anywhere in northern Italy. A split-off from the DC, the Centro cristiano democratico (Christian Democrat Centre: CCD), the Radicals (called the ‘Pannella list’ after their egocentric leader, Marco Pannella) and the Unione del centro (Union of the Centre: UC) made up the numbers in both ‘poles’. This fundamentally incoherent coalition was to spend the next eleven months engaged in what Bossi later described as ‘a ruthless and immoral game of chess’ (Bossi, 1995, p. 3). The three principal parties involved – the Lega, Forza Italia and the MSI (which fought the elections under a new name, the Alleanza nazionale (National Alliance: AN) – were all out to establish themselves as permanent points of reference in the new political landscape and, in the case of Forza Italia, one of its primary goals was to eliminate the Lega as a rival in northern Italy. The decision to make a pact of convenience with Forza Italia, moreover, was never accepted by the most active members of the movement, who were unwilling to campaign on behalf of Forza Italia candidates ‘whose links with the old system could be smelled a mile off’ (Bossi, 1995, p. 45). Increasingly, as 1994 wore on, a strong current within the movement began to advocate the Lega’s pressing for a policy of ending all electoral pacts and alliances, and for a strategy of ‘independence’ from Rome. The alliance with Forza Italia began successfully enough, however. Berlusconi’s media-friendly campaigning style, the free-market rhetoric of the Liberty Pole’s election manifesto, the failure of the opposing ‘Progressive’ coalition (based on the PDS, La Rete and the PRC) to dispel middle-class fears of their communist identity, the weakness of the former Christian Democrats whose ‘Pact for Italy’ list proved unappealing to voters, all combined to give the right a smashing victory in elections to the Chamber of Deputies. As can be seen from Table 1.2, the Lega’s support, measured by the number of votes it obtained in the ballot for the seats distributed by proportional representation, declined slightly from the figure obtained in 1992. The Lega had dropped back to being only the fifth-largest political force in the country and had been eclipsed by the strong performance of both Forza Italia, which took one-fifth of the vote just three months after its foundation, and the impressive performance of the MSI-AN, which broke out of the electoral ghetto to which its neofascist rhetoric had always condemned it. In southern Italy, the MSI-AN scored sensationally well, reaching almost 30 per cent in some regions, as a conservative electorate rejected the DC-Partito Popolare and swung

34


Table 1.2

The General Elections of 1994: Chamber of Deputies

Party/Coalition

FPTP Seats

Polo della Libertà Polo Buongoverno Progressisti Patto per l’Italia Others

164 137 164 4 5

Forza Italia PDS MSI-AN PPI Lega Nord PRC Segni Pact Lista Pannella Verdi PSI La Rete Others

– – – – – – – – – – – –

PR Votes (%)

PR Seats

– – – – – 8 136 7 882 5 214 4 287 3 235 2 344 1 812 1 359 1 047 849 720 1 819

– – – – – (21.0) (20.3) (13.5) (11.1) (8.4) (6.0) (4.7) (3.5) (2.7) (2.2) (1.9) (4.7)

30 38 23 29 11 11 13 0 0 0 0 0

All votes expressed in thousands and rounded to nearest thousand. FPTP Seats: candidates elected in Single Member Constituencies. Parties obtaining less than 4 per cent of vote excluded from PR distribution of seats. PPI (Partito popolare) new name of the DC.

behind their candidates. In the North, both Forza Italia and the PDS easily overtook the Lega. Despite the election’s disappointing results, the Lega emerged as a major parliamentary force. Bossi’s pact with Berlusconi, agreed when the Milanese businessman could not have known how strong Forza Italia’s showing would prove to be, meant that dozens of card-carrying Lega supporters had been elected in the single-member constituencies of the North. When the new parliament assembled, Bossi theoretically could count upon 150 senators and deputies, which made the Lega the parliamentary equal of Forza Italia, and placed it second only to the PDS. In fact, the situation was not as rosy as it seemed. Many, perhaps most, of these people had been elected on Berlusconi’s coat-tails, a fact which presented Bossi with a new challenge. Long-used to running the Lega as a personal fief, he now had to face the task of holding together a movement whose leadership élite no longer needed to look to him alone for advancement. He could no longer lay down the law within the movement without risking the defection of large numbers of senior figures to Forza Italia. A ‘ministerialist’ party swiftly formed within the


35

Lega, contrasting the ‘independentists’, and Bossi was forced to balance on both of these horses together. In retrospect, it is something of a miracle, and a testimony to his political astuteness, that he did not fall off with a bump. Bossi did his best to protract the negotiations for the formation of the new government, calling the MSI-AN the ‘hangman right’ and saying that the Lega would not stoop to be part of a government that included them. Similar, albeit less colourful, warnings were heard from senior politicians abroad: Jacques Delors, the then President of the European Commission, was particularly vocal in his worries. The logic of the electoral victory, however, pointed to a government in which the Lega, Forza Italia and the MSI-AN shared the main offices of state, with Berlusconi taking the mantle of the premiership. Bossi eventually bowed to inevitability and got down to serious discussions on power-sharing with Berlusconi. The Lega’s key figures all got top jobs. Irene Pivetti, the acknowledged voice of the Lega’s Catholic wing, became the youngest ever president of the Chamber of Deputies. Just 31 years old, Pivetti was to handle the task of managing what would turn out to be the most turbulent parliament in post-war Italian history with some aplomb. Roberto Maroni, one of the founder members of the Lega and one of Bossi’s closest friends, became Minister of the Interior. Francesco Enrico Speroni was preferred as Minister for Constitutional Reform to Gianfranco Miglio, a fact which caused Bossi and his increasingly bizarre guru to engage in a noisy public divorce. Giancarlo Pagliarini and Vittorio Gnutti, two genuinely able northern businessmen, became Ministers for the Budget and European Affairs respectively. Franco Rocchetta, the president of the Lega Nord, became under-secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, in all, some 14 Lega deputies became junior ministers. The Lega only entered the government, however, on certain conditions. These were that the government should make a federalist reform of the state its primary constitutional objective; that Berlusconi should end the glaring anomaly of his being both premier and the head of the country’s largest media conglomerate; that there should be a concerted programme of privatizations; and that measures should be taken to combat waste and fraud in the public sector and to lighten the fiscal and legislative burden on small- and medium-sized enterprises. This is not the place to recount the tormented history of the Berlusconi administration in detail, but it is fair to say that this list of priorities did not figure highly in Berlusconi’s plans. Bossi’s own account of the Berlusconi government, Tutta la Verità, is naturally somewhat self-serving,

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but it is hard to dissent from his judgement that the objective of both the Milanese businessman and of Gianfranco Fini, the leader of the MSI-AN, was to occupy the state, particularly the television service, with their own nominees prior to engineering fresh elections in which the Right, armed with total control over the media, could win a majority without the assistance of the Lega (Bossi, 1995). The new government swiftly forced out a group of economics professors who had been charged with the thankless task of trying to restore some order to the chaotic state of RAI, the national television broadcaster, and replaced them with a board of directors which promptly got rid of the heads of the three public channels. These individuals, breaking a long tradition of political interference in Italian television, were well known for their independent-minded attitude, and under their editorial lead RAI had actually reversed the long-term trend of Italian audience share towards the commercial channels controlled by the now prime minister (Marro and Vigna, 1995, p. 51). Francesco Enrico Speroni’s swiftly produced plans for greater regional autonomy were obstructed by the MSI-AN in parliamentary committee and both Forza Italia and the MSI-AN favoured a less liberal approach than the Lega’s to the privatization of the state holding companies (indeed, in the case of the former neo-fascists it is dubious that they wanted serious privatization at all). Berlusconi’s allies, meanwhile, worked relentlessly to undermine the loyalties of the parliamentary contingent elected by the Lega in March 1994. The Lega, in response, waged guerilla warfare against almost every major legislative initiative proposed by the government, notably its policy on pensions, and, in effect, established itself as a force of opposition long before December 1994 when Bossi took the decisive step of breaking with Berlusconi and bringing the government down. An impartial account of the Berlusconi administration has commented: ‘The crisis finally came in December, but was not the history of the Berlusconi government the story of the agony of a majority that never existed?’ (Marro and Vigna, p. 163). As Bossi gloated in an open letter to the Lega’s activists in 1996: ‘Berlusconi will probably go to hell, but he’ll be given a less fiery spot than he deserves to make up for the eight months of hell that I put him through’ (Bossi, 1996b, p. 6). Bossi’s problem was that a large and growing section of his parliamentary party did not share his antipathy for the leader of Forza Italia. Berlusconi’s blandishments had won over a large part of the Lega’s parliamentarians by mid-December. When the Lega, in the company of the PPI, pushed for a vote of no confidence in the government on 21 December, Bossi found that a quarter of his troops refused to go over the


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top. Joined by the PPI and the PDS, however, there was a narrow majority for ending Berlusconi’s premiership. Rather than wait for the humiliation of a vote of confidence, Berlusconi resigned, but immediately set about overturning the narrow majority against him. In a febrile atmosphere, in which leading members of Forza Italia accused the Lega of mounting a coup d’état against democracy and themselves more than once threatened extra-parliamentary action, many Lega deputies and senators, including Bossi’s hand-picked substitute as secretary of the Lega Lombarda, Luigi Negri, were persuaded to pass into open opposition to the new party line. More than 50 members of the Lega’s parliamentary contingent abandoned the movement in the subsequent months, joining Franco Rocchetta, who had left some months earlier. What kept Bossi in his seat at the head of the movement was the delight of its mass membership, which had never digested the pact with Berlusconi, at the humiliation inflicted upon the ‘Berlusfascist regime’, and the fact that president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, who had been alarmed by the authoritarian tendencies of the Berlusconi government, was adamant that there would be no fresh elections until a par condicio, or equality of treatment, was established by the passage of a law regulating the media’s political coverage. Scalfaro appointed Lamberto Dini, another former governor of the Bank of Italy, to the premiership at the head of a government of so-called technocrats: jurists, academics and economists, none of whom was a member of parliament. Uniquely among Western nations, Italy no longer had a party system capable of forming a cabinet. Over the next year, the Lega, the PPI, the PDS and, on occasion, the PRC, were (just) strong enough to keep Dini in power and avert elections. Had Scalfaro called a snap poll, the defections from the Lega’s ranks would unquestionably have been far greater. Dozens of deputies and senators anxious to keep their seats would have fled to the safety of Forza Italia and a wounded Lega would have been forced to face Berlusconi’s media power in a state of total disarray. The only major figure within the Lega’s hierarchy who was openly prepared to say that Bossi was wrong, however, was Roberto Maroni, who had been one of the Berlusconi cabinet’s few successes as Interior Minister and who continued to believe that the Lega could gain more of its objectives by remaining in power. At a special three-day congress of the Lega Nord, held in mid-February 1995, Maroni courageously refused to endorse the movement’s political volte-face, and also refused to heed Bossi’s peremptory demand that supporters of the Berlusconi government hand in their party cards. Maroni was subjected to catcalls and a volley of abuse from the gathered delegates, but he spoke for many in

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the Lega’s hierarchy, though for only a small proportion of its base. With hindsight, Maroni’s strategy was the correct one for his political future. The majority of opponents to Bossi’s new line either joined Forza Italia or formed insignificant federalist parties that were swept away within a year. Maroni was able to gradually win his place back at the heart of the movement. He remains the only apostate in the church of the Lega that Bossi has been prepared to forgive, and, Bossi apart, is the movement’s most considerable figure.

Conclusions This chapter has largely been concerned with the somewhat pedestrian but strictly necessary task of describing the Lega’s development up to the fall of the Berlusconi government and introducing its chief personalities and early policy standpoints. It would be wrong, however, to finish this chapter without making an assessment of the impact the emergence of Bossi’s movement had on Italian politics in the first decade of its existence. How far was the Lega responsible for the collapse of the DCdominated First Republic? The Lega – which is never shy of blowing its own trumpet – was in fact quick to take the credit for the debacle of the Italian political system. As Bossi insisted in La rivoluzione: The time has come to wipe out a widespread prejudice . . . the idea that the blitz of the Milanese prosecutors is at the bottom of the political earthquake . . . let me observe that the relationship between cause and effect should be reversed: it wasn’t the revolt of the judiciary that rendered possible the political transformation, but the defeat of the traditional political parties that liberated some prosecutors from their age-old subservience. (Bossi, 1993, pp. 5–6) This defeat, in Bossi’s view, was largely at the hands of the Lega. One has, of course, to distinguish between the structural or historical causes of the crisis in the Italian system of government and the immediate triggering causes, of which the electoral success of the Lega was certainly one. The crisis of the Italian state in the early 1990s was ultimately due to its obsolescence. Post-war Italy had developed a ‘consensual’ democracy in order to prevent the central ideological cleavage in society between communists and non-communists from spilling over into civil conflict. The PCI was rigorously excluded from government, but was integrated into the system by virtue of an electoral law and


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institutional framework that guaranteed political representation to every current of opinion, however small, and which made parliament, rather than government, the focus for decision-making. In effect, ‘Italian democracy responded to the need to maintain the unity of a divided country by de-emphasizing the decision-making aspects of the political system and emphasizing the representative ones’ (Fabbrini and Gilbert, 2000, p. 33). Ministries were parcelled out between the parties of government; majorities were unstable because of the hyperproportional nature of the electoral system, which gave quite minor parties substantial veto power; the prime minister enjoyed few powers to ensure the co-ordination of government policies; the bicameral parliament possessed a powerful committee system which guaranteed that a powerful minority such as the PCI could exercise a de facto veto over any policy that it disliked. In these circumstances, in which an informal separation of powers prevailed, policy-making inevitably became cumbersome and slow: such new policies as emerged tended to be incremental in scope and distributive in character. The massive expansion of the Italian state in the post-war years, both as an economic actor in the industrial sector and as a welfare-provider, was at least partly due to the blocked institutional structure. The parties were essentially striving to maintain the consensus with generous dollops of public money and the extension of not always affordable social privileges to powerful interest groups. One negative consequence of this, however, was that the state became politicized. Party placemen were appointed to run the nationalized banks, the railways, the postal service, the power industry and telecommunications, and the management criterion in these sectors was political expediency rather than business efficiency. The political crisis at the beginning of the 1990s was, in brief, the breakdown of this form of government. The end of the Cold War, but perhaps even more the changing economic climate induced by Europeanization and globalization, rendered the Italian party-state an anachronism in the 1980s. The various forces that were the immediate causes of the downfall of DC-PSI rule can all be linked to the main structural flaws of the party-state. The Lega, as we argue at length in this book, was able to feed upon the discontent of the small businesses of northern Italy, which were in rebellion at the high taxes, overregulation, inefficient services and high social costs imposed by the politicized Italian state. The ‘virtuous minorities’ within the judiciary, to use the historian Paul Ginsborg’s term, were rebelling against the pervasive corruption festering within the public institutions under political control (Ginsborg, 1996). Other such minorities, appalled by the strong

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evidence of political links with the Mafia, were active in forming civic organizations in Sicily. The creation of the Rete party, led by the mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, was one result of this upsurge in southern opinion. The referendum movement for electoral reform grew from the analysis of a relative handful of professors and intellectuals who had gradually identified Italy’s blocked democracy and lacklustre institutions as the chief cause of its political pathologies and economic mismanagement. The sheer longevity of the ruling class’s hold on power was also a triggering cause of the collapse of the party-state. Faced with the rebellion of civil society, Italy’s leading politicians were revealed to be hopelessly unaware of the forces boiling up around them. At a moment when public opinion needed to be appeased by concrete measures of reform against the worst abuses of the system, the two dominant parties complacently assumed that the end of Italian communism meant that the Italian left would crumble as an electoral force and that they would be faced with no significant opposition to their traditional methods of government. This strategy, with hindsight, was seriously flawed for two reasons. First, it underestimated the resilience of the left. The PCI’s heirs did not wither away in the 1992 elections, though they were badly dented. Secondly, though the traditional parties found this impossible to comprehend, the Lega Nord was a genuinely attractive alternative for many people. Millions of broadly conservative people who would never have voted for the ex-communists, but who were outraged with the corruption and incompetence of the DC, could vote for the Lega with a clear conscience. For this reason, Bossi is probably right in thinking that the electoral challenge of the Lega was the single most important short-term cause of the collapse of the traditional party system. Had the Lega not existed, the 1992 election might well have seen abstentionism on a massive scale and a huge increase in the number of spoiled ballots (both phenomena had been growing steadily throughout the 1980s, providing a valuable indicator of the levels of public disgust with the party system), but the DC’s percentage of those casting valid votes would not have fallen by nearly so much, and nor would its parliamentary majority. Bossi’s lasting legacy for Italian history is that he conjured into being a mass movement that the DC’s traditional electorate in the North felt able to vote for in 1992. But the Lega Nord, though conservatives voted for it, was not a conservative movement. It promised radical change to the structure and institutions of the Italian state, not the cautious preservation of the status quo. So what was it? Few ‘new’ political parties have been so widely


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analysed by political scientists. The Lega has been labelled a ‘protest party’, a ‘populist party’, an ‘ethno-national’ movement, a ‘political entrepreneur’ and a ‘political sub-culture’. It is to these attempts at political etymology that we now turn.

2 Interpretations of the Lega Nord

Introduction Bossi’s movement appeared on the political scene just at the moment that many commentators were interpreting the end of the Cold War and the subsequent decline of the traditional, ideologically-based, mass parties as marking the end of Italy’s anomalous status in Western Europe. The country seemed to be heading for a relatively conventional party system in which a constellation of post-materialist, single-issue (smaller) parties existed alongside larger parties broadly representative of socio-economic interests. Such large and moderate parties were expected to be able to elaborate and implement distinct political programmes and form coalitions which would alternate in power. The rise of the Lega Nord seemed to contradict this optimistic vision of the evolution of the Italian party system and raised doubts concerning the emergence of pragmatic and concrete attitudes and behaviour among the electorate. First, Bossi’s movement called into question the unitary framework of the Italian nation state: an issue that had hitherto not been contemplated by all the other main political parties. It was the first time in Italian history – with the partial exception of the short-lived Sicilian separatist movement in the aftermath of the Second World War – that a political party had campaigned on an explicitly federalist or separatist platform. Secondly, the Lega vaunted a crusading appeal that sat uneasily with the idea that the unfolding of Italy’s political and institutional crisis would witness the emergence of pragmatic, nonideological parties. Thirdly, the electoral success of the charismatic, but downright vulgar, personality of the Lega’s leader, Umberto Bossi, puzzled all those who judged Italy to have completed the transition to a fully modernized and advanced industrial society. Bossi was loathed 42

Interpretations of the Lega Nord

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by most educated Italians, who tended to make fun of his accent, his phraseology and his inability to speak coherently in the abstract sentences beloved of the Italian political class. The progressive journalist Giampaolo Pansa, no lover of the Italian political class himself, encapsulated this disdain for Bossi and his followers perfectly, when he called his book on the collapse of the party system The Year of the Barbarians (Pansa, 1993). Despite these incongruencies, however, the irony of the emergence of the ‘barbarians’ was that voting for the Lega’s electoral programme was an understandable thing for large segments of the northern Italian electorate to do. Once the ideological straightjacket of the Cold War had been taken off Italian politics, it became entirely rational for a large part of the northern electorate to vote for a party that promised to put an end to misgovernment by the central state, uncontrolled immigration from the Third World and paralysing bureaucracy. Many of the academic interpretations (especially the early ones) of the Lega were coloured by a comprehensible but ultimately not very helpful refusal to acknowledge that the Lega’s programme could have any appeal for ordinary decent people. There was also a widespread desire to discredit the Lega in the eyes of existing and potential voters by highlighting its crude views on immigration and the selfish nature of its economic policies. But it is important not to confound progressive principles (however true we might think they are) for rational behaviour. By 1991, voters in general terms certainly knew that the Lega was against uncontrolled immigration; that it stood for federalism, for tax cuts for small businesses, for a review of central government policy towards the Mezzogiorno, and for a liberalization of the economy. For many northern Italian voters a vote for the Lega was not simply an act of revolt against ‘Rome’ and the misrule of the political parties, it was also a vote for alternative policies which until then had scarcely been raised or debated.

A protest against Rome? Initial interpretations of the success of the Lega Nord did tend mainly to emphasize the Lega’s good fortune in being able to profit from a large protest vote directed against the old political parties and obsolete political system. As Martin Bull and James Newell wrote in 1993, ‘It seems that the League successfully exploited both the proverbial sense of alienation from the political authorities felt by many Italians and the sense of frustration felt by many northeners in the face of the state’s

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dysfunctions’ (p. 218). Even more drastically, in his analysis of the 1992 election results, McCarthy (1993, p. 161) argued that ‘the parties which fed on the mood of rage and of “diffuse rebellion” had flourished’. Some of the most acute Italian political scientists and commentators insisted on the same point. Carlo Galli wrote in 1990 that the ‘leagues are less worrying for what they propose than what they implicitly and explicitly denounce: the degeneration of our state’ (p. 572). Renato Mannheimer, in a book which skilfully indicated the various strands in the Lega’s electorate, nevertheless added dismissively that ‘a vote for Bossi was primarily a vote to finish off the old regime without troubling oneself about what would replace it’ (Mannheimer, 1991). Gianfranco Pasquino argued that the rise of the Lega could be explained as the result of a ‘cocktail’ of three conditions: two institutional; one, for want of a better word, cultural. The institutional conditions were dissatisfaction with the parties and ‘institutional unease’ (without which, in Pasquino’s view, the Lega’s brand of federalism would never have received a hearing). The cultural condition was ‘a certain social intolerance’ among the burghers of northern Italy that had already been displayed towards southern Italian migrants during the years of the economic miracle and that was now rearing its head again (Pasquino, 1992, pp. 23–4). We are not, of course, denying that the Lega did genuinely represent a protest against the failure of the political class to provide Italy with institutions able to govern a vibrant industrial economy. Pasquino is right to stress that the Lega’s rise was entirely ‘resistable’ and that institutional reform and cleaner, more efficient politics would have quelled the well-documented groundswell of anti-system feeling that had been evident in Italy since the early 1980s and which subsequently provided the Lega with a part of its electoral market. But the sheer durability of the Lega gradually induced scholars to think that Bossi’s movement might be more than a ‘flash’ party riding a wave of anti-system hostility. Despite the emergence of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia movement – which swiftly established itself as one of the country’s two leading political forces with approximately 20 per cent of the vote and which borrowed much of the Lega’s free-market rhetoric in the process – the Lega substantially held on to the share of the vote (8–9 per cent) that it had obtained in the 1992 elections in the subsequent national poll of March 1994. In 1996, as we have seen, it managed to increase its vote and take a 10 per cent overall share. Clearly, the Lega owed its success to something more deep-rooted than disgust with the First Republic. Had the Lega been only a vehicle for protest it would have swiftly been substituted by Forza Italia. Despite Berlusconi’s well-known attachments


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to key political figures involved in the corruption investigations (which left Forza Italia open to the suspicion that it was not as new as it seemed), Forza Italia’s innovative use of the media and telecommunications in its electoral campaign, and technocratic promises to run Italy like a business, made the Lega’s reliance upon folkloristic gatherings, medieval symbols and myths, unsophisticated and uncouth activists, and an old-fashioned ‘mass party’ organization, seem like a quaint throwback to the 1940s and 1950s. Yet the Lega proved able to soak up Berlusconi’s competition and to prosper, at least until the late 1990s. Other scholars seeked to explain the electoral success of the Lega Nord in macroscopic terms by means of a comparative analysis of seemingly similar movements elsewhere in Europe. Indeed the 1980s saw the contemporaneous electoral breakthroughs of several right-wing movements across Europe. The Front National in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, all became important political forces despite being uniformly written off as mere protest parties when they first arrived on the political scene. Conversely, micro-nationalist or ethno-regionalist parties, like the Scottish National Party or the Catalan Convergenza i Uniò, also enjoyed a revival in Europe. Other scholars, by contrast, began to ask whether the resilience of the Lega might not be explained in terms of local or sub-cultural factors. Such scholars conducted a micro-analysis of the territory of northern Italy and tried to isolate the cultural, economic and social variables that had led to the Lega’s breakthrough and establishment. It is to an assessment of the ‘radical right-wing populist’ interpretations and to ‘sub-cultural’ and ‘ethno-regionalist’ interpretations of the Lega that this chapter now turns.

The Lega as a populist party Classic studies on populism, such as the ones collected in the volume edited by Ionescu and Gellner in 1969 and the volume by Canovan, published in 1981, indicated that the term was highly ambiguous and a great source of confusion, since it applied to a variety of different political movements, some of which attracted very specific electorates on the basis of radical policies and ideologies, while others were generic and fairly conservative ‘catch-all parties’. In many cases the term was used to refer to a particular style of politics, or more precisely a political technique and, as such, it could be used to effect in different circumstances and by different politicians (Canovan, 1981, pp. 3–16). Canovan also emphasized the highly controversial nature of the term ‘populism’

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itself. For liberals and democrats it tends to represent a dangerous political tendency which panders to the reactionary and xenophobic instincts of the grass roots, instigating them against the intellectual élites. Other democrats, however, feel some degree of sympathy for some forms at least of ‘populist democracy’, as opposed to ‘democratic élitism’ (pp. 172–92). Despite these various caveats, the studies mentioned above stressed a few recurrent elements in populist movements across the world. The most common element was the constant reference to ‘the people’ as well as the notion that ‘the people’ formed an organic and homogeneous community, sharing common values and undivided by conflicts of interest. Another element was the so-called ‘populism of the little man’, representing the values and beliefs of small proprietors, who generally are strong supporters of private property but dislike big business and big government and are also against liberal moral values. A third element was that of a charismatic leader who can appeal to the emotional and irrational sentiments of the masses. A fourth element was a rhetoric of anti-élitism accompanied by a distrust of politicians and ‘conspiracy theories, often cited as one of the illusions to which populists are prone’ (Canovan, 1981, p. 296). A fifth element was a strong tendency towards racism. Roberto Biorcio was one of the first to categorize the Lega as a populist movement. As he wrote, ‘in the Lombard League one finds all the typical features of the classic populist movements’ (1991, p. 71). He stressed in particular the notion of ‘the people’ as a homogeneous entity, the presence of a charismatic and strong leader, and a tendency towards racism. Rather surprisingly, he did not emphasize the preponderance of ‘small proprietors’ among the electorate of the Lega Nord, a characteristic which other commentators pointed to (Mannheimer, 1991; Natale, 1991; Diamanti, 1993). In addition, Biorcio (1991, p. 76) played down the importance of the political programme of the Lega and emphasized the absolute pre-eminence of an ideological identification of supporters and voters with their chosen party: ‘Individual actors are required only to acknowledge their fundamental belonging to the “Lombard people” and their support for the Lega: everything else is implicit (“the very powerful Lega will fix it”)’. In 1997, Biorcio further refined and developed his interpretation of the Lega Nord as a populist party, combining it with an ethno-regionalist interpretation. He analysed in depth the context in which the party originated, the main issues it articulated, its electorate and its internal structure. Biorcio emphasized the role of the Lega as political agency, a party which was able to construct a new repertoire of themes and images and in so doing broke up the prevailing


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consensus among all the other parties regarding what was politically and culturally permissible or taboo. In his book (1997), Biorcio showed how the various issues around which the Lega campaigned struck a cord with the party’s activists and voters, and even with the wider electorate. Compared to his previous work, he seemed to attribute greater relevance to the political programme of the Lega in the first half of the 1990s, whereas ‘the consensus for the Lega in 1996 became more and more independent of specific programmatic issues: it is primarily a vote for the new political actor’ (1997, p. 89). Outside Italy, as we have already suggested, various studies focused on the rise of neo-populist political movements across Europe and typecast the Lega as one of many radical right-wing populist parties to have emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (Betz, 1994; Kitschelt, 1995; Taggart, 1995; Betz and Immerfall, 1998). What distinguished these parties from traditional extreme right-wing parties was their apparent commitment to representative democracy and their rejection of the violence of traditional fascist rhetoric. According to Betz (1998, p. 3), ‘what unites these parties and movements is programmatic radicalism and populist appeal’. In particular, they are united by their hostility to the welfare state and to a multicultural society, as well as by populist rhetoric and syndromes. They are also characterized by support for free-market economics and a strong belief in a productivist and entrepreneurial ethos, revolving around the celebration of small- and medium-sized enterprises, which are seen to play a potentially major role in the economic future and well-being of advanced industrial societies, particularly if they are put in a position financially and technologically to compete effectively in the emerging global marketplace. (Betz, 1998, p. 5) Betz also stressed the specific external environment which allowed these parties to attract a considerable degree of support among the European electorate, namely the transformation of the global economy and the climate of uncertainty and insecurity generated by this process. Thus he suggested that the success of neo-populist parties in Western Europe ‘is largely the result of a profound and largely psychological crisis of the “popular classes”’, and that feelings of insecurity would be most pronounced among those groups that have the most to lose from structural transformation or that are least prepared to adjust to

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new circumstances and are therefore most likely to be anxious with respect to their personal and professional future: blue-collar workers, employees doing routine jobs, or young persons lacking formal educational credentials. (Betz, 1998, p. 8) The populist parties of the radical right, in other words, have thriven upon the insecurity, displacement and psychological crises engendered by the pace of economic change and have had great success in attracting the votes of those groups which represent the losers in the changes brought about by the process of economic globalization. Kitschelt (1995) distinguished between four types of populist parties of the radical right and defined the Lega Nord as ‘anti-statist populist’, characterized by an electorate made up primarily of the lower middle class with strong feelings of being marginalized by the state. Among the causes of neo-populism, he emphasized the socio-economic process of re-alignment which had taken place in postindustrial societies, leading to a repositioning of social and professional groups vis-à-vis political parties. More recently, Taggart (2000) put forward the view that neopopulist parties in Western Europe expressed a common critique of the dominant party systems and ‘burocratized welfare states’: ‘what unites the new populist parties is an extreme reaction to the party systems in which they find themselves and to the form that political parties are taking’ (p. 87). He also argued that neo-populism represented a reaction to representative politics, a ‘reaction of the ruled against the rulers’ (p. 109). The issues the new populist parties articulate may vary from country to country but their differences matter less than their similarities. While we agree that the Lega does meet many of the criteria for inclusion in the taxomic category of ‘radical right-wing populism’, we are less convinced by this interpretation’s explanation for the rise and durability of such movements. The ‘right-wing populist’ approach presents three fundamental weaknesses. The first weakness consists of an underestimation of the specific political projects pursued by these parties. Despite their generic comparability stemming from a common rejection of a multicultural society and the welfare state, these parties are deeply divided in other crucial respects. In the case of the Lega Nord, there is no denying its regionalist character, which at different times has figured as federalist, secessionist and even micro-nationalist. Diamanti (1995, p. 816) defined the Lega as above all federalist. Biorcio (1997), as we saw, judged it a populist but also ethno-regionalist party. A party such as the French Front National, by contrast, is openly nationalist in a


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traditional sense, that is, its nationalism is the nationalism of the nation state. Admittedly, the Lega Nord has increasingly moved away from the ‘minority nationalism’ of parties such as the Scottish National Party, the Catalan Convergència i Unió and the Parti Quebecois in Canada and come closer to radical-right parties. Nevertheless, the role played by the Lega Nord in and its impact upon Italian politics is very different from that of some of the other parties categorized as neo-populist. As we argue in Chapter 5, the most dramatic effect the Lega Nord has had on Italian politics has been the acceptance of a federalist restructuring of the Italian state by all the other political parties (with the exception of Communist Refoundation). As a result, Italy could become one of the most decentralized states in Western Europe, something which is not conceivable in France, for example. These are substantial dissimilarities, not minor ones. As Mény and Surel (2000, p. 282) rightly argued, there are many, extremely varied forms of political populism. The second fundamental weakness in the neo-populist interpretation consists of treating the electorate of these parties as being driven by psychological (therefore largely irrational) motives inspired by fear and insecurity. In some cases, there has even been an emphasis on a breakdown of traditional forms of social solidarity, and upon an increase in social fragmentation or ‘anomie’ (Mayer and Perrineau, 1989). Others have stressed the absence of social and cultural capital among those who vote for neo-populist parties (Eder, 1993). Immerfall (1998, p. 253) referred to ‘social alienation’ as a common condition experienced by supporters of these parties. Such explanations seem to echo the classic interpretations of fascism as a movement stemming from a process of increasing social disintegration and atomization (Fromm, 1941; Arendt, 1951). The main problem with this interpretation is that it is fairly vague and treats the ‘masses’ as unable to act rationally in pursuit of practical interests. Yet the populist character of the new radical parties should not make us overlook the fact that their electorates may actually have been behaving rationally and have had very clear ideas as to what their interests were. Many Lega voters knew precisely what they wanted in the early 1990s (less bureaucracy and immigration, lower taxes, greater decision-making autonomy, a more equitable division of resources between North and South) and rightly or wrongly came to the conclusion that the Lega was the most appropriate tool to achieve these goals. Furthermore, Lega voters were not alienated individuals with problems of social integration. They were generally well integrated in terms of their families, circles of friends, neighbours and work environment (Cento Bull, 2000).

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The third weakness of the neo-populist interpretation is its insistence that the recent changes brought about by economic globalization are perceived as a threat by the electorates of the new parties and that such electorates are primarily made up of the losers of these changes. Such a view obscures the fact that the process of economic internationalization has created anxiety among both winners and losers, which would explain why voters of neo-populist parties can be found both in inner-city urban areas which have undergone a process of de-industrialization and register high levels of unemployment and in wealthy areas (such as the Lega’s strongholds in some northern regions of Italy) where unemployment is almost non-existent. In one case, feelings of anxiety and insecurity are due to the presence of a dispossessed social group which may be looking for scapegoats for its perceived failure. In the other, such feelings may be due to a fear that the wealth accumulated may turn out to be short-lived, particularly if accompanied by a perception that the new opportunities opened up by the internationalization of business are being missed. In this context, the kind of responses to their perceived needs that these two types of constituencies are searching for at the political level will differ very substantially. What has been said so far points to a very noticeable gap in the neopopulist interpretation, namely, the absence of a clear and convincing explanation of why certain electorates vote for these parties at certain times. The proponents of the neo-populist interpretation often appear to treat the electorates of these parties as an immutable and ‘a-historical’ constituency (eg., ‘small proprietors’, whose values and beliefs appear to be fixed). Ironically, by doing this, the theorists have something in common with the neo-populist parties themselves, who also, as we saw, treat ‘the people’ as an immutable entity. Even when, in the case of the Lega Nord, the emphasis is rightly placed upon a milieu characterized by small- and medium-sized enterprises, little attempt is made to try and explain why such a constituency should have been transferring its votes to a neo-populist party in the North of the country but not in the Centre or the South, and why it should have done so at the end of the 1980s. References to issues of taxation, privatizations, fears of immigration, and insecurity are not, in this case, particularly enlightening, because they are too general. This criticism is much less pertinent in relation to Biorcio’s (1997) work on the Lega Nord, which established a direct correspondence between specific issues and ‘projects’ put forward by this party, and its supporters and voters, particularly in the North. Nevertheless, even in his book it remains unclear why the Lega managed to attract the votes of small entrepreneurs and artisans in some areas of


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Italy but not in others. In addition, Biorcio seemed to argue that the Lega constructed a ‘package’ of political issues and styles on the basis of which it was able to establish a preferential relationship with northern voters. The analysis is fairly subtle, but one is left with the impression that the voters were ‘manipulated’ and ‘mobilized’ by the Lega, as opposed to expressing a political preference which they could decide to change or withhold at other times. Biorcio’s interpretation has some points of contact with Schmidtke (1996), who combined the populist interpretation with an approach based on ‘new social movements’ theory. Schmitdke argued that the Lega Nord was primarily engaged in a process of construction of a collective identity: the construction of a collectively shared identity is not primarily interpreted as a prelude to politics, but as an integral part of the political mobilization itself . . . This notion suggests that in political fighting the symbolic repertoire of a collective actor does not have to be consistent. Rather, it can be characterized by contradictory elements that are guided by considerations of political expediency. (p. 93) Schmitdke’s interpretation is quite convincing and it also helps to explain the numerous ambiguities and contradictions of the Lega Nord, as identified in the previous chapter. Nevertheless, even his work, like Biorcio’s, gives the impression that a collective identity, once successfully created, is sustained through the actions of the political party, which ensure that voters and supporters remain mobilized. How then does one explain the fact that voters may (and do) turn their backs on populist parties? The answer could be that they no longer share in the collective identity and/or that they prefer the policies put forward by another political party. If the emphasis is purely on a collective identity the policy aspect is downplayed and voters’ behaviour becomes simply a question of identification/non-identification with the symbolic and ideological components of a party. As some of these issues have also been addressed by the proponents of the ‘subcultural’ interpretation of the Lega Nord phenomenon, we will now consider this explanation.

The Lega as a subcultural party Both Christian Democracy and the Italian Communist Party had for long represented territorial political subcultures in some regions of Italy, notably Lombardy and the north-eastern regions for Christian Democracy and the central regions for communism. As regional subcultures,

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Catholicism and socialism/communism developed in the 1880s, when they were closely linked to specifically rural socio-economic structures (Bull and Corner, 1993). After the Second World War, they survived the process of industrialization and indeed directly contributed to the forms it took in these areas of Italy. As Diamanti (1996, p. 31) pointed out, after the Second World War subnational political cultures were actually reinforced in Italy’s north-eastern and central regions by the emergence of a specific model of economic development presenting three main characteristics: a predominance of localized clusters of small- and medium-sized businesses, a network of small- and mediumsized urban areas and the absence of vast conurbations, as well as family and social solidarity. Various scholars have identified the main features of these territoriallybased subcultures in a shared system of values, a weakly polarised society in terms of class divisions, the identification of a ‘common enemy’ (which was equated with liberalism and socialism – later communism – in the Catholic regions and with both liberalism and Catholicism in the socialist and communist regions), a distrust of the central state, and the preservation of kinship and social networks and face-to-face familiarity typical of pre-modern communities (Bagnasco and Trigilia, 1984 and 1985; Trigilia, 1986). The Catholic subculture was also characterized by a strong productivist and entrepreneurial ethos (Cento Bull, 1989). Voting behaviour in such areas generally showed a strong identification with a dominant political party, so much so that voting constituted almost a ritual, expressed to signify identity: ‘the vote for the political force linked to the subculture represented in this context a kind of testimony, an obvious behaviour taken for granted’ (Mannheimer, 1991, p. 19). As well as the presence of a dominant political movement, what characterized each subculture was also a vast network of associations and organizations which were either socialist- or Catholic-inspired and which the majority of the local population either belonged to or regularly came into contact with. Each associational network had clear territorial boundaries, which were local and regional as opposed to national. Thus, in terms of collective and shared identities, in northern Italy there were both distinct ‘local communities’ characterized by faceto-face familiarity and social interchange, and ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991) (such as the ‘socialist’ or the ‘Catholic’ community) which coincided with both a global and a regional territory, but not with the nation state. Indeed, each imagined community was imagined in opposition to the nation state, as well as to each other.


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In the 1980s, political subcultures in Italy were found to be weakening, and in the early 1990s there was a general assumption that they would be replaced by a modern, pragmatic, pluralist electoral behaviour (Mannheimer, 1991; Mannheimer and Sani, 1994; Pasquino, 1995). Following Lipset (1960), it was believed that allegiance to a political subculture in a fully modern and industrial (let alone post-industrial) society represented a ‘cultural lag’, so that adjustment to the new social reality at the political level would only be a matter of time. What was not contemplated, however, was the replacement of one subculture and political ideology by another. Natale (1991) was the first to put forward the hypothesis that the Lega Nord represented a new subcultural party in areas previously characterized by the domination of the Catholic subculture and the Christian Democratic Party. He argued that traditional solidary values associated with the Catholic subculture had given place to a new type of solidarity and collective identity (Natale, 1991, p. 118). He stressed the common elements shared by the traditional subcultures and the Lega Nord: the identification of a ‘common enemy’ (which was no longer represented by a specific ideology, such as liberalism, Catholicism and/or communism, but by immigration and multiculturalism); strong feelings of solidarity built around localistic and particularistic values and a strong antagonism vis-à-vis the central state; the presence of a vast network of socially-based organizations which allowed the party to establish solid roots within the local society (pp. 119–21). Biorcio (1991) proposed an interpretation of the Lega Nord which drew upon both the populist and the subcultural explanations. We have already mentioned his argument that the Lega presented all the typical features of classic populist movements. However, he also argued that the populism of the Lega went hand in hand with both localism and regionalism. By localism, Biorcio referred to the particularistic values expressed by a territorial community confined within a limited space, so much so that each person can interact personally with a majority of the other members of the community (Biorcio, 1991, p. 51). This situation, generally regarded by sociologists as characteristic of premodern societies, still largely applies to the majority of Italy’s villages and small towns, including the heavily industrial ones to be found in some northern regions. By regionalism, Biorcio referred to a territorial identity based upon an ‘imagined community’ and therefore comparable, in many respects, to a national identity. What the Lega was trying to do, in his view, was to merge these two types of identification, thus tapping into the localistic values consistently expressed by northern

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Italian small-town dwellers and using them to construct a wider abstract community as an alternative to the nation state (pp. 67–8). One of the authors of this volume also put forward an interpretation of the Lega Nord as a subcultural party (Cento Bull, 1992 and 1993). She argued that the Lega was replacing the Catholic party at a regional level, while also recreating many of its subcultural features. She also argued that the Lega Nord had succeeded in taking on the political representation of the interests and needs of a regional model of small business development at a time when it was faced with a process of restructuring and was in search of political support. By prioritizing the creation of an established system of patronage and clientelism, the Christian Democratic Party had failed to grasp the significance of both local and national changes and had become increasingly less responsive to an important social and territorial constituency, which finally abandoned it for a new party. More recently, Messina (1998) elaborated further the subcultural interpretation, by identifying the defining feature of the Catholic subculture as a strong ‘anti-statism’. In the post-war period, this longstanding opposition to the central state was kept in check by the presence of the Christian Democratic Party as the dominant party in government. When that party collapsed, ‘anti-statism’ became increasingly apparent and was exploited by the Lega Nord. According to Messina, to understand the role of the Northern League we must be aware of the fact that it does not so much represent a social class, but rather a local identity . . . the PDS and the League are expressions of the same type of social class (small business) but with a different ideological orientation. (p. 476) Messina, therefore, was concerned with explaining why the same social class had expressed different political attitudes in different areas of Italy and recognized the important role played by ideology. In other words, small business in Italy is sharply divided in its political orientations and has not subscribed en masse to the Lega Nord. As we saw earlier, this is an aspect which the neo-populist interpretation consistently fails to explain. The ideological dimension of the type of localism promoted by the Lega Nord was also stressed by Iaccarino (1998). The subcultural interpretation is important in various respects. First, it gives prominence to the territorial and regionalist nature of the Lega Nord, which tends to be overlooked in the ‘protest’ and in some of the


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‘populist’ interpretations. Secondly, it brings to light the fact that many of the features identified as typical of populist movements are indeed also present in territorial political subcultures, including traditional ones not usually regarded as populist. Such features, as we discussed, are the following: a strong distrust of the central state and political system, a productivist and entrepreneurial ethos, the notion of an organic and solidary community with shared values and common interests. Admittedly, the ‘subcultural interpretation’ emphasizes the aspects of continuity in the existence of a collective identity, while the ‘populist’ interpretation (particularly Biorcio’s and Schmidtke’s versions) emphasizes the dynamic process of cultural construction and political mobilization. Thirdly, the subcultural interpretation raises the important question of what exactly constitutes the novelty of parties such as the Lega Nord. If in many respects they largely managed to revive a particular political tradition and collective solidarity, what precisely had changed, and why? If one subcultural party had been replaced by another, were the only changes represented by the fact that the new subcultural party presented populist features largely absent from its predecessor? Or were there also fundamental changes in terms of policies and ideologies? Finally, there is a wider issue implicitly raised by the subcultural interpretation which needs to be addressed, not least by the proponents of the ‘neo-populism’ theory. This issue concerns the timing of the rise of populist movements. We have already seen how this question is generally answered in terms of a general climate of insecurity and uncertainty associated with systemic structural changes. More pertinently, Schmitdke (1996) referred to both national and international ‘political opportunity structures’ which created an opening for new (populist) parties to emerge and create a political disruption. Even more pertinently, in her major book on populism, Canovan (1981, p. 169) argued that populist dictatorships tended to emerge in political systems ‘that have a pretence of democracy but retain real power in the hands of an oligarchy’ and that the best way to prevent the rise of populism was not ‘to keep the masses out of politics, but rather to bring them in in an effective way’ (p. 169). It is not difficult to see the relevance of her argument in the context of the political system of the Italian ‘First Republic’, which has been convincingly characterized as an oligarchy by a leading Italian political scientist (Fabbrini, 1997). In a recent article, Canovan developed further the issue of the relationship between populism and democracy, putting forward the view that populism acts as a corrective to increasingly sclerotic democratic institutions, particularly in cases ‘where radical populist mobilization against a partitocrazi

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[sic] leads to the formation of new parties or to a reform of the institutional structure’ (Canovan 1999, p. 14). What seems to be overlooked, however, is the possibility that populism, which relies heavily on a complex repertoire of myths, symbols, metaphors and slogans, as opposed to rational discourse, represents a deliberate attempt to change the prevailing cultural climate, by seizing upon the popular imagination. When Margaret Thatcher set about changing the traditional political consensus in Great Britain, with a view to establishing free-market economics and attacking the welfare state, she made full use of a populist style and rhetoric. In other words, her populism masked a very clear sense of direction and a specific political programme, the effects of which are still deeply felt in that country today. When the proponents of the neo-populist interpretation stress the particular combination of ‘a radical transformation of the socioeconomic and sociocultural status quo’ (Betz, 1998, p. 4) and populist features, it is possible to envisage a scenario in which the latter are subordinated to the former. Such a scenario may not necessarily apply to all of the new political parties. This brings us back to what is for us a fundamental concern, that is, the question of what kind of political project is pursued by the Lega Nord.

The Lega as an ethno-regionalist party An interpretation which has many points of contact with the ‘subcultural’ one identifies the Lega as an ‘ethno-regionalist’ party, albeit with some caveats. The two salient elements of ethno-regionalist parties are defined in a recent study as ‘(1) a subnational territorial border and (2) an exclusive group identity’ (Türsan, 1998, p. 5). The author recognizes that ‘the question of what is ethnic is highly disputed’ and concludes that ‘the creation of a sense of community which can consequently become the basis for collective action is a necessary condition for ethno-regionalism’ (p. 5). For this reason ethno-regionalist parties are defined by Türsan (1998, p. 1) as ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’. As far as the political project pursued by these parties is concerned, the Belgian political scientist Liueven De Winter (1998, pp. 204–5) argued that ‘the defining characteristic of ethno-regionalist parties’ programme is undoubtedly their demand for political reorganisation of the existing national power structure, for some kind of “self-government”. In fact, the centrality of this demand distinguishes this type of party from other party “families”’. Interestingly, both De Winter and Türsan included


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the Lega Nord in their list of ethno-regionalist parties, even though they acknowledged that the ethnic dimension had been largely invented, but excluded any right-wing nationalist parties of the populist variety. By contrast, the proponents of the ‘radical right-wing populism’ interpretation included the Lega Nord in their list but excluded all ethno-regionalist parties. This appears to be indicative both of the complex nature of the Lega Nord as a political party and of the different explanations of what it stands for which can be put forward as a result of how its various components are weighted by observers. On the one hand, those who classify the Lega as a radical right-wing populist party emphasize its anti-immigration policies, its ‘small proprietors’ ideology and its populist style of politics. Those who define the party as ethnoregionalist, on the other hand, attribute greater importance to its claim to be pursuing the right of self-determination for a given territory and ethnic group. The Lega has always been a proponent of both. Supporters of the ethno-regionalist interpretation also stress an important explanatory factor which has tended to be overlooked by the other theorists. This factor focuses on centre-periphery relations (Müller-Rommel, 1998, pp. 23–4), emphasizing both the reappearance of old territorial cleavages and conflicts and the ‘reterritorialization of politics and the emergence of new political spaces’ (Keating, 1998, p. 109). It is therefore argued that the restructuring of the nation state and the increasing erosion of its main functions in the current global times allow old territorial fault-lines to re-emerge, but also encourage the construction of new territorial identities. In this context, the Lega Nord has been presented as an example of a new territorial cleavage emerging in a country whose political system was destabilized by the end of the Cold War and in which, therefore, political opportunities structures could be exploited by new actors (Keating, 1998). Conversely, those who stress the continuing relevance of subcultural divisions and of the North–South divide within Italy prefer to talk of a new salience acquired by old-standing territorial cleavages. The American political scientist Dwayne Woods (1992), in particular, has argued that the territorial settlement which marked Italy’s First Republic from 1945 to the early 1990s has now broken down and traditional centre-periphery ties no longer function in the face of persistent patterns of regional disparities. He concluded (1995, p. 201) that ‘the breakdown of the center-periphery system of political and social integration mediated through political parties in Italy created opportunities whereby a new social force could attempt to constitute a new political movement out of alienated and dissatisfied voters’. As

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for regional identity, it was constructed out of ‘long-standing, albeit changed, subcultural identifications’ (1995, p. 195). Cartocci (1991; 1994) emphasized the continuing disparity in the geography of electoral behaviour in Italy, warning against any complacent interpretation of the end of the old ideologies in terms of a parallel demise of internal territorial cleavages. In particular, he judged that the tendency of voters in parts of the North to cast their preference out of identification with a political party had not disappeared and he considered the Lega Nord’s triumph at the expense of Christian Democracy a logical and to a certain extent predictable outcome of the erosion of the Catholic subculture. Mingione (1993) put forward the view that the salience of the North– South cleavage largely explained the resurgence of regionalism in Italy. He maintained that Italy was characterized by two modes of social integration, one prevalent in the North and the other in the South. The two societies were kept together by the central state mainly through clientelistic mechanisms of gaining consensus. After the 1970s, increasing political and economic constraints made this glue come unstuck, with the result that ‘the hegemonic dual arrangement on which the Italian republic was founded has now collapsed and it will be rather difficult to find a new arrangement capable of keeping the North and South together’ (1993, p. 317). Other commentators who emphasize centre-periphery relations point the finger at economic disparities and argue that the Lega Nord is an example of ‘the secession of the affluent’, that is, of wealthy and successful regions who want to break away from their nation states and go it alone because they claim that the other regions hold them back and exploit their prosperity (Torpey, 1994). The proponents of the ethnoregionalist intepretation have argued that the wealthier regions tend to show stronger ethno-regional voting, including Flanders, Catalonia and the Basque country, as well as northern Italy (De Winter, 1998, p. 217). Indeed, according to Keating (1998), economically weaker regions are generally less prone to support regionalist parties, since they rely on the central state for economic transfers. In the case of southern Italy, this is clearly demonstrated by the absence of any tradition of regional separatism, with the partial exception of Sicily during a brief period after the Second World War. Finally, centre-periphery relations are considered as having acquired a new prominence and being subject to restructuring in most countries due to the external environment, particularly to global economic changes. Unlike the neo-populist interpretation, however, the emphasis


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is not simply on the process of globalization generating feelings of insecurity and fear and leading to a desire for protectionism and closure against the outside world. The emphasis is at least as much upon the new opportunities created by global economic changes for regional economies, and in particular on a new competitive environment in which regions operate and in which old frontiers no longer make sense (Müller-Rommel, 1998). In this context, regionalist parties symbolize the success of modernization, not its failure (p. 22). An extreme view of the inevitability of the replacement of nation states by region states in the new global economy was put forward by Ohmae (1996).

The Lega as a political entrepreneur By now, the reader is probably fighting a sense of confusion. What is the Lega? Is it the product of electoral frustration at a political system that has refused to renew itself since the 1950s? Is it the beneficiary of the Christian Democrats’ reliance on patronage and clientelism rather than community links? Is it a populist party thriving on the insecurity engendered by global economic change? Is it the political voice of the nascent political identity of a region that is distinguishing itself by its ability to suceed in a competitive global market place? Perhaps it is all of those things to some degree or other? Certainly, the Lega seems to allow scholars to interpret it in the light of their pet theories with a remarkable facility. One scholar who has been sceptical of attempts to categorize the Lega purely by ethnicity, or as either a protest or populist party, is Ilvo Diamanti. Diamanti, whose two major books and numerous articles on the Lega represent the most complex corpus of research to emerge so far on the subject, approaches the subject from several different angles. Working as a political geographer, he maps the areas where the Lega’s electoral support is strongest; he is an insightful critic of the discourse of the Lega’s spokesmen; in his role as a sociologist, he has undertaken groundbreaking studies of the social and economic origins of the Lega’s activists and voters (Diamanti, 1991; 1993; 1996). Diamanti is one of the few scholars who has demonstrated a thorough knowledge and understanding of the northern constituency which gave the Lega its preferential vote at successive elections. Yet he also has a clear ‘interpretive model’ for the rise of the Lega and for its progress as a political movement that has been amended since its first apparition in his 1993 book, La Lega: Geografia, storia e sociologia di un nuovo soggetto politico,

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but which has proved to be a fruitful stimulus for other researchers working in this field (Barraclough, 1996). This model defines the Lega as a ‘political entrepreneur’ or ‘political actor’ which has skilfully ‘fed upon’ the tensions generated in Italian society and politics since the early 1980s to prize open the electoral market and win itself a substantial share of the vote. Diamanti argues that the Lega’s political ‘product’ or ‘offer’ (i.e., its programme and the principal themes it presents to the public) altered substantially four times before 1993 in response to changing ‘demand’ from the electoral market. Between 1983 and 1987, the regional leagues (both in Lombardy and the Veneto) exploited growing unease in the ‘white’ (Christian Democratic) areas of the North by putting forward an ‘ethnoregionalist’ policy which attempted to stoke nationalist sentiments in these areas. The strategic vision of its charismatic leader, its flexible organization, and its simple decision-making mechanisms enabled the Lega Lombarda to emerge as the predominating force in the northern autonomy movement between 1987 and 1990. In this phase, Lombardy was portrayed by the Lega’s propaganda as a ‘people of producers’ whose common interests were being thwarted by centralist government and welfare payments to the South. While extremely successful, this policy was superseded in 1991–92 by the third evolution in the Lega’s development, when Bossi centralized all the autonomy movements into the Lega Nord and presented the new force as the primary antagonist of the political system under the ‘charismatic centralism’ of his own leadership (Diamanti, 1996). Starting with the political crisis induced by the bribery investigations of 1992–93, the Lega began to position itself as a party of government that would restore ‘northern hegemony’ to the Italian state (Diamanti, 1993, pp. 17–18). Diamanti believed, however, that the Lega would not be able to cope with the challenge of becoming a party of government. Once in power, it would have to ‘measure itself’ with the promises it had made and would have its organizational and programmatic weaknesses exposed. For despite its chameleon-like ability (a metaphor also used to describe the Lega by the Italian writer Giovanna Pajetta) to reinvent itself (‘modellarsi’) at appropriate intervals, the Lega, in Diamanti’s view, has not succeeded in inventing a coherent body of original ideas or in imposing ‘any recognizable direction’ on Italian politics (Diamanti, 1993, pp. 121–2). Diamanti thus gets round the problem of characterizing the Lega by saying it has been (or has presented itself as) different things at different times. It began by articulating an ethno-regionalist appeal, shifted to a populist anti-government stance in the late 1980s and then led the


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protest vote against the political system as popular discontent with malgovernment grew. This is all true, but again it captures only a part of the nature of the Lega. Calling the Lega a ‘political entrepreneur’ is just another way of saying that it is a rank opportunist that exploits, or, more charitably, humours the mood of the northern Italian electorate, not a generator of ideas able to form or mould that mood. Tempting though this approach is (for the Lega undeniably is opportunistic), it does not do justice to the extent to which, throughout all its various incarnations, the Lega has stood (in both its own eyes and the eyes of public opinion) for a single clear project – northern Italian self-rule. From its birth in the early 1980s, the Lega has applied contractual logic to the performance of the Italian state. It has asserted – with some justice – that ‘Rome’ has broken the social compact with the regions of northern Italy. The Italian state has misgoverned the North, abused the North’s generosity and exploited its economic success. Northerners therefore have every right to demand to govern themselves. The only question is how. The ‘Republic of the North’ discussed in Chapter 1, and the subsequent campaigns to establish an ‘independent republic of Padania’ and ‘devolution’ for northern Italy (see below Chapter 4) have all been variations on this same theme – though this is not to say that there have not been important differences between these separate re-workings of the core idea. The impact of the Lega’s broad project, moreover, has been immense. Far from the Lega being a force that has shaped its political offer according to the whims and humours of the northern Italian political market, the Lega has been distinguished by its ability to set the agenda of political and public opinion. Federalism would almost certainly have become an issue in Italy in the 1990s – economic necessity would have seen to that – but the central place it has held in Italian politics throughout the last decade is largely due to the Lega’s rude eruption on to the scene. Another problem with the political entrepreneur model is that it assumes that the goal of the Lega’s political activity is election to office. The Lega, instead, is in politics for the revolutionary purpose of reconstituting, even dismantling, the Italian state. Electoral success is not, and has never been, an end in itself for the Lega. To give a pertinent example, the Lega’s behaviour when it entered the Berlusconi cabinet and subsequent to leaving government (Berlusconi, incidentally, fits the political entrepreneurship model far better than the Lega) was anything but ‘entrepreneurial’ in character. The Lega practised parliamentary guerilla warfare until the government collapsed and then fled into a dalliance with the former communists – hardly the

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preferred allies of the movement’s electorate. Subsequently, it began flirting with an idea – secession – that every opinion poll reported to be extremely unpopular (see below, Chapter 4) and after the success in the 1996 elections launched the concept of Padania on an incredulous world (literally: TV crews from more than 40 countries attended the foundation of the new ‘republic’ in September 1996). Padania, to employ the language of business, was a strategy which intentionally reduced the full range of the Lega’s ‘products’ to a single item which the ‘customers’ were peremptorily invited to take or leave. Few schools of management would recommend this as a strategy for would-be businessmen and few political scientists, including Diamanti himself, regarded Bossi’s move as rational. The Lega, by inventing Padania, had placed a higher value on an ideological construct than on building political success: indeed, by challenging Italian national unity, the Lega had voluntarily folded up its stall and excluded itself from the political market. The central flaw of labelling the Lega as a political entrepreneur can perhaps be shown by means of a hypothetical question: if public opinion in northern Italy were to swing strongly in favour of a return to a strong unitary state in Italy, would the Lega exploit this change of mood by abandoning its commitment to federalism? If one regards the Lega as a political entrepreneur, one is bound to say ‘Yes’ to this question. It is very hard to prove a negative, but we think that the Lega could not, under any circumstances, abandon its central message. Demanding northern self-rule, in one form or another, is what distinguishes the Lega from all other parties and is the doctrine that gives meaning to the Lega’s political activities. Diamanti himself, in fact, said in a 1995 article that the Lega is ‘above all federalist’ (Diamanti, 1995). In his work published since 1996, Diamanti has in any case chosen to describe the Lega more neutrally as a ‘political actor’ rather than a ‘political entrepreneur’ and has given an essentially internal explanation of the Lega Nord’s adoption of the Padania line. Diamanti has argued that the new line was useful to Bossi personally since it enabled him to centralize power in his own person and speak directly to the movement’s mass membership. As we argue below (see Chapter 4), this undoubtedly was one of the chief consequences of the decision to press for the creation of Padania. More interestingly, however, Diamanti has also begun to sprinkle his books and essays on the Lega with a descriptive terminology that echoes religious fundamentalism rather than the dry language of political economy. He talks repeatedly of the Lega’s ‘mission’, describes the


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Lega’s activists as ‘preachers’, calls Padania the ‘promised land’ (Diamanti, 1996). In so doing, Diamanti introduces but does not develop a theme which is also addressed in the neo-populist literature (Schmitdke, 1996; Taggart, 2000). There is no doubt that, in the late 1990s, Bossi’s movement developed strong points of comparison with fundamentalist Christian movements and with the early totalitarian parties. Like such organizations, the Lega Nord took on the characteristics of a sect with a strong ideological message, charismatic leadership and an evangelical congregation. The development of this insight is one of the most fruitful future avenues for research on the Lega.

Conclusions Academics have an innate tendency to defend their preferred theories jealously. Too often, academic debates generate more heat than light as the various participants abuse rival ideas as methodologically unsound and intellectually wanting. For this reason, we would like to state clearly that every one of the interpretations outlined above has contributed to a better understanding of the new political phenomenon represented by the rise and success of the Lega Nord. The ‘protest’ interpretation underlined the importance of institutional stagnation in leading to popular frustration with the established political parties. The populist and ethno-regional interpretations rightly emphasize that the Lega cannot be looked at in isolation: similar political movements have emerged in other European countries, a fact which inevitably leads one to speculate whether the ultimate cause for the rise of the Lega may not be found in international processes of cultural and economic change. Subcultural theories have underlined the vast variety of voting patterns in northern Italy and have focused researchers’ attentions on regional and territorial discrepancies in the Lega’s support. The ‘political entrepreneur’ theory has stressed the opportunism of the Lega and, incidentally, by so doing has reminded scholars of the Lega’s status as a free agent. At the same time, none of these approaches seem to us to provide a full explanation of the rise of the Lega Nord in particular and the increasing importance of the politics of regional identity in general. To do so, they would firstly have to characterize the Lega plausibly as a political phenomenon and, secondly, account for the timing of its electoral explosion. The ‘protest’ theory does provide a plausible answer to the second of these conditions, but has nothing much to say in answer to the first. The ‘right-wing populist’ hypothesis clearly does offer a convincing way of characterizing the Lega, but some of its explanations

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for the causes of the Lega’s emergence are somewhat vague. The ethnoregionalist interpretation is interesting and it has the merit of emphasizing the Lega’s pursuit of territorial self-rule. It is, however, dubious from the point of view of taxonomy: the Lega can surely only be characterized as an ethno-regional formation if one accepts its own mythology about the common ethnic background of the northern Italians: a concession which, to put it mildly, most Italians would regard as controversial. The ‘political entrepreneur’ model underestimates the extent to which the Lega is a crusade with an evolving, but nevertheless distinctive, project. Bossi is not a would-be aspirant for the Senate striving to ride public opinion to a congressional seat, but an ideologue who wants to revolutionize the political order in which he finds himself. It may be useful at this stage to distinguish between two levels of analysis: structure and agency. Structure refers to the socio-political context in which a political party originates and operates, as well as to local, national and international processes of change. Agency refers to political parties as autonomous and independent actors which are influenced by but are also able to impact upon, the external context as well as the behaviour of the electorate. Finally, agency also refers to the electorate itself. In terms of an analysis of the Lega Nord, many of the interpretations outlined in this chapter differ sharply in the way they address structure and agency. The ‘protest’ and the ‘centre-periphery’ interpretations (and to a certain extent the ‘subcultural’ one) focus primarily on structure. Yet, as Schmitdke (1996, p. 68) poignantly remarked: ‘it is the old problem: How does a region-in-itself become a region-for-itself?’ In other words, what makes certain territorial, class, religious or other types of cleavages become salient? The answer is agency, in the shape of social movements and political parties. This is why the neo-populist interpretation covers extensively the specific mechanisms through which the new type of parties mobilize supporters and voters and generate collective identities as well as (re-)create symbolic boundaries. In this sense, the interpretations outlined in this chapter complement each other and are all important for a thorough understanding of the Lega phenomenon. However, it is also the case that in the neo-populist interpretation agency tends to be analysed somewhat at the expense of structure. Structural causes are generally presented as an introductory background against which the neopopulist party is situated, but they also play a somewhat passive role. It is not simply a question of showing how structure and agency relate to each other: what seems to be missing is an analysis of the dynamic


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interplay between them, so that their reciprocal impact is brought to light. In short, there are three aspects that need to be taken into consideration when studying the Lega Nord: structural factors, the party’s programme and its evolving world-view, and the nature of its electorate. Each of these aspects affects the others and is affected by them. In addition, each of these aspects has a time dimension. Thus structural factors present at the end of the 1980s may not necessarily be relevant at the beginning of the new millennium, and vice versa. Similarly, the Lega Nord has evolved very considerably in the last ten years (at the time of writing), and today it bears little resemblance to what it was in the 1980s. Finally, the reasons why groups of voters voted for this party in the first place and why they chose the late 1980s and early 1990s to do it, may well differ quite substantially compared to the reasons why they vote for it now. In addition, the Lega today attracts a much smaller share of the votes than it did in 1994 or 1996, therefore its electorate has shrunk, something which needs explaining, too. In the next three chapters, we endeavour to consider the interrelationship between these three aspects by adopting a diachronic perspective. We start by considering both structure and agency at the local level. We analyse the socio-economic characteristics of, internal tensions within, and external pressures upon the industrial districts of northern Italy and link these to both the political and electoral issues put forward by the Lega Nord and the profile of its electorate in the late 1980s. These areas have been regarded internationally as models to emulate for their high levels of productivity, marketing skills and export prowess. But by the late 1980s, the small- and medium-sized enterprises that form the manufacturing economy of these areas were increasingly lagging beneath the burden of over-regulation, poor infrastructure and heavy taxation and social costs. To a quite exceptional extent, the Lega substituted the DC in the industrial districts of Lombardy as the largest party in the 1992 elections, and in 1994 and 1996 extended this success to the industrial districts of the Veneto. The Lega was the first party to vocalize the growing dissatisfaction of the small entrepreneurs of the industrial districts of northern Italy and the first party to propose remedies for the ills that afflicted them. In concrete terms, the Lega spelled out the (largely deregulatory and decentralizing) measures that were needed to preserve the region’s hard-won competitiveness. The Lega’s dense network of activists, local organizers and committed leaders spread the word. The Lega also devised a general vision for Italian society that struck a chord with the small proprietors

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and entrepreneurs of the industrial districts. Quite literally, as Biorcio (1997) demonstrated, it articulated the philosophy such individuals routinely applied in their own daily lives. However, at the end of the 1990s, the local and regional socio-economic context and the Lega had both evolved, each following its own trajectory, and as a result the Lega no longer had a broad resonance among the electorate of northern industrial districts. We analyse some of the reasons for this. We then focus on the ideological and political trajectory of the Lega Nord. Certainly the influence of small business has been pervasive on the Lega, which has recruited heavily from the ranks of the family businesses of Lombardy and Veneto. But, as Diamanti has understood, the Lega cannot be said to be wholly determined in its actions by any social reality. Too much of what the Lega does is dependent upon the whims of Umberto Bossi, and the ideological world-view of the movement’s most committed members, for it to be correct to speak of the Lega being the mouthpiece of anybody. The invention of the concept of Padania, and even more the obsessive drawing up of constitutions for a nonexistent state indulged in by the Lega in 1997–98, have been regarded as a preference for playing fantasy politics instead of achieving real reforms by the small business people who formed the Lega’s voter base. Finally, we look at structural factors in the shape of the process of globalization, and analyse the positioning of different political actors at local and national levels in terms of responses to this process in Italy. We argue that economic globalization has a direct bearing on the political struggles taking place in the country today, since it has affected the political actions and projects of both the Lega and its allies and opponents, who in turn seek to influence socio-economic change. In the face of the Lega’s trajectory from a position which was in favour of (or at least neutral towards) globalization to a fierce rejection of and resistance to this process, other political forces in the country have been elaborating their own responses. In all of these, remarkably, federalism figures prominently. Agency, however, in the shape of political parties and their electorates, is sharply divided, and coherent political projects which seek to manage and shape, rather than being driven by or clashing head-on with, the new processes of change have not yet emerged.

3 The Electorate of the Lega Nord: a Socio-economic and Territorial Constituency

Introduction At the general elections of 14 June 1987, the Lega Lombarda obtained 0.5 per cent of the votes nationally and 3 per cent in Lombardy, winning one seat in the Chamber of Deputies. Five years later, on 5 April 1992, the newly named Lega Lombarda-Lega Nord obtained 8.7 per cent of the votes nationally and almost 20 per cent in the northern regions, gaining 55 seats. The party was especially successful in traditionally ‘white’, that is, Catholic-dominated, north-eastern provinces, but it also attracted the support of many voters in the large urban conurbations and in the North-West. In the general elections of 27 March 1994, the Lega obtained 8.4 per cent of the votes nationally, losing votes to Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the large cities and in the North-West, but also showing that it could rely on a remarkably stable electorate in eastern Lombardy and the Veneto. The general elections of 21 April 1996 confirmed the stability of the Lega’s electorate, as the party gained 10.4 per cent of the national votes, despite various forecasts that it would collapse. Remarkably, it gained 29.3 per cent in Veneto and 25.5 per cent in Lombardy, two regions which proved once again to be the party’s strongholds. However, at the 1999 European and administrative elections, the Lega registered a loss of votes, only managing to poll 7.8 per cent in Piedmont, 11.3 per cent in Lombardy, 10.7 per cent in Veneto. Contrary to expectations, the votes lost by the Lega in 1999 went to the Radical Lista Bonino and to the Democrats of the Asinello rather than to Forza Italia, so much so that the Radicals polled 13.2 per cent in 67

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Piedmont, 11.9 per cent in Lombardy, and 12 per cent in Veneto. Opinion polls since then suggested that the Lega Nord had entered a phase of relative electoral decline. These predictions were partly confounded at the regional elections of 16 April 2000, when the Lega increased its share of the votes by 2 per cent in Lombardy and the Veneto compared to the 1999 European elections and proved stable elsewhere. More importantly, it was guaranteed the presidencies of the regional assemblies in the northern regions thanks to its alliance with the centre-right coalition (Casa delle Libertà, comprising Forza Italia and AN). In the early days, as we saw, the phenomenon of leghismo took many commentators and observers by surprise (and dismay). Particularly intriguing were issues concerning the timing for the emergence of a new type of regionalist party in Italy, the fact that the party was strongest in the wealthiest and most productive areas of the country, the nature of its electorate, and the relationship between the electorate and the Lega’s political programme. Let us consider these points one by one. The timing. Why was the Catholic vote in traditionally ‘white’ subcultural areas giving way to the phenomenon of leghismo at the beginning of the 1990s? If the answer was seen to lie in the general crisis of the traditional Catholic and marxist ideologies then it was hard to explain why the ‘red’ subculture did not appear to be threatened in the same way in its own strongholds, that is, in the areas of the Po Valley and in Emilia-Romagna. Indeed, many observers believed that the collapse of the communist regimes in eastern Europe would have accelerated the breakdown of the red subculture to a much larger extent than its white counterpart. The place. Why were Lombardy and the Veneto, two of the richest and most industrial regions of Italy, replacing a traditional subculture with a radical regionalist and to some extent xenophobic movement? With the end of the communist threat and thus of the perceived need to vote Christian Democracy as the most effective counter-party to the Communist Party, there was a general expectation that the electorate in these regions would replace a dying subculture with a neo-liberal, modern and managerial party, rather than a party with Alberto da Giussano as its symbol and the medieval communes as its ‘ideal-type’ economic and political institutions. The electorate. Who voted for the Lega? Were they primarily younger or older people, men or women? What were the social origins of the party’s electorate? What were their values and beliefs? Had their values changed since the days when Christian Democracy was the largest party?

The Electorate of the Lega Nord

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The programme. What did the Lega Nord stand for? According to Roberto Biorcio (1991), the relationship of the electorate with the Lega was one of maximum delegation to the party as far as the political programme was concerned. In other words, Lega voters gave their allegiance to the party on the basis of their identification with its ideology and showed remarkable disinterest for its proposed policies. This kind of relationship, Biorcio stressed, was typical of political subcultures and populist movements. Was this true? Was the political programme of the Lega less important to its electors than its ideological stance? In this chapter we will address some of these questions and answer them primarily by analysing the relationship between the Lega and a territorial socio-economic system which, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, proved to be the party’s most fertile electoral ground. We are aware that there are no simple explanations for the emergence and the resilience of the Lega Nord, and do not claim that our reading takes precedence over other types of approach. We do, however, believe that the angle we have adopted has tended to be neglected in the literature to date and that it will throw new light upon an undoubtedly complex phenomenon. Before doing so, however, we will analyse the composition of the electorate of the Lega in terms of age, gender, social status and geographical origins.

The electorate of the Lega Nord As indicated by various surveys carried out in Lombardy between 1989 and 1991, Lega voters, especially in the early 1990s, were predominantly young, male and from the lower middle class, the independent middle class and the working class (Mannheimer, 1991 and 1993). Diamanti (1991) also showed, on the basis of a survey of 1916 people resident in Lombardy, that many who sympathized closely with the Lega were young (40 per cent were aged 17–36, 26 per cent were aged 37–52, 18 per cent were aged 53–66 and 12 per cent were over 67 years of age). He also confirmed that most belonged to the lower middle class (21 per cent), the independent middle class (24 per cent) and the working class (42 per cent). A smaller but detailed survey of 234 Lombard residents (Cesareo, Rovati and Lombardi, 1989), carried out in 1989 to establish the social composition of Lega voters and sympathizers, detected the predominance of people born and still living in the same village or town, as well as the presence of a large proportion of people who were self-employed. The survey showed that professionals, entrepreneurs and the self-employed amounted to 21.6 per cent of the

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sample, whereas manual workers and teachers accounted for only 15.9 per cent of the total sample. As for the remaining 52.5 per cent, 23.3 per cent were white-collar workers, 2.9 per cent were managers and 36.3 per cent were not in paid work (pensioners, housewives, students, etc.). Among Lega members and activists, the weight of the independent middle class was even more pronounced. As the socio-professional composition of the 1992 paid-up members of the Lega in the province of Como shows, 38 per cent were artisans, entrepreneurs or liberal professionals while 15 per cent worked in commerce; only 4 per cent were employed in the public sector. The remaining 43 per cent were made up of wage earners (16 per cent), white-collar workers (15 per cent), pensioners (5 per cent) and students (7 per cent). The Lega itself made it clear that its grass-roots members and activists came from the smallbusiness class: ‘The cultural and professional origin [of Lega activists] is to be found in the independent middle class, characterized by a genetic spirit of perseverance, self-denial, and an obsessive sense of thrift’ (Lucchini, 1992, p. 5). Thus the electorate of the Lega Nord, while drawing support from a variety of social groups, clearly included a significantly high proportion of people from the independent middle class and the private sector. In terms of their political origins, Lega voters had previously favoured Christian Democracy to a larger extent than any other party (Cartocci, 1994; Natale, 1991; Mannheimer, 1991 and 1993). This was particularly true in the early period. Later, according to Diamanti (1994), the party was able to draw support from people who had previously voted for the Socialist Party or even the Communist Party. Cento Bull (2000) also demonstrated, on the basis of a survey of roughly 900 residents of two Lombard towns carried out in 1994, that a majority of Lega voters had previously supported Christian Democracy, although the Lega in 1992 was able to attract votes from other parties, especially the Socialist Party, the ex-fascist party (AN) and even the Democratic Party of the Left. In terms of the values and beliefs of Lega voters and sympathizers, both Mannheimer and Diamanti pointed to a mixture of intolerance towards southerners and foreigners, a dislike of the public sector coupled with approval for the private sector, strong feelings of belonging to a local territory, and a request for greater institutional and administrative ‘efficiency’, accompanied by feelings of rejection of existing political institutions. According to Mannheimer (1993, p. 102), a profile of the ‘average’ Lega voter was that of ‘a relatively young individual, of average cultural and social position, mainly from the independent middle class, with little interest in politics, rather “closed” towards the “different”


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and the exterior in general’. Cento Bull (2000) also established that Lega voters were predominantly young individuals (especially male), characterized by feelings of distrust towards ‘outsiders’, a lack of faith in existing social and political institutions, and greater commitment to their locality and region than to the nation state. In addition, they presented a mixture of individualistic and localistic values, as well as support for neo-liberal policies and for federalism coupled with feelings of intolerance towards immigrants. However, we would contend that the most significant and fruitful findings regarding the electorate of the Lega have been produced by those scholars who have adopted a territorial, ‘ecological’ approach. Age, gender and socio-economic background are clearly important factors, but they do not account for the fact that the votes for the Lega were not uniformly distributed across the national territory. They were not even uniformly distributed across northern Italy, except for a very brief period when it appeared that the Lega might become a ‘catch-all’ party. What was especially noticeable about the electorate of this party was its concentration in a few geographical areas within the North (Giordano, 1999). Natale (1991) demonstrated that the electoral strongholds of the Lega Nord coincided with the areas where Christian Democracy had for decades exercised a subcultural role. Specifically, in Lombardy, these were areas with higher than average levels of economic development, low levels of immigration, high percentages of the independent middle class, and a higher than average concentration of the population in small towns and villages. He also found that support for the Lega in Lombardy was higher in the eastern than the western provinces. Diamanti and Riccamboni (1992) pointed out that the votes for the Lega and other ‘autonomist’ parties at the 1992 political elections were highest in the Veneto region, which was also the area where Christian Democracy had enjoyed an uninterrupted supremacy throughout the post-war period. According to Diamanti (1994), the electoral geography of the Lega showed an interesting trajectory. In the 1980s, the strength of the party was limited to a few northern valleys and subalpine areas. In the early 1990s, the Lega showed signs of extending its popularity to the whole of the North, tapping into a discontented electorate in a period of anti-state protest. By 1994, it had reverted to being the party of the ‘northern industrial periphery’, and in particular of those areas which had previously been dominated politically by the Christian Democratic Party. These analyses strengthened the hypothesis, already discussed in the previous chapter, that the Lega Nord had taken on the role of a political

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subculture, replacing the Catholic party at a regional level yet also recreating many of its subcultural characteristics, for example, territorial and social solidarity, rejection of what is ‘outside’ the local (or regional) community, a shared ideology or at least shared moral/religious values and the identification of a common ‘enemy’. As we saw, the hypothesis that the Lega Lombarda (as it was then called) represented a new political subculture was first put forward, even before the 1992 political elections, by Natale in his contribution to a volume on the Lega (Mannheimer, 1991). Natale linked the rise of this party to the crisis of the traditional Catholic and communist subcultures and to the need, felt by many individuals, for a new identity and new political ‘certainties’. His explanation was convincing, but it still left many important questions unanswered. In previous work, Cento Bull hypothesized that it was possible to gain a greater insight into the phenomenon of leghismo if one connected the success of the Lega Nord to the particular model of diffused industrialization which characterized Italy’s subalpine regions, particularly Lombardy’s and the Veneto’s. Specifically, she put forward the hypothesis (Cento Bull, 1992), that there existed a close link between the electoral success of the Lega Lombarda-Lega Nord at the 1992 general elections and the model of localized industries or industrial districts which characterizes the Lombard region. She suggested that the identification of the Lega Lombarda with a political subculture, as put forward by Natale (1991, pp. 116–21) was basically correct but incomplete, because in itself it did not provide an explanation for the emergence of the Lega as a new political movement ready to challenge and to replace the Catholic party at a regional level – and with an uncompromising regionalist project. Nor did it provide a general interpretation for the crisis of Christian Democracy in its traditional electoral strongholds vis-à-vis the resilience of the ex-communists (as well as of the hard-line communists) in their own strongholds, namely the areas of the Po Valley and the central regions. In our view the role of the Lega Nord as a political actor which aspired to replace Christian Democracy in its strongholds as the new subcultural party cannot be properly understood without reference to the subalpine – and particularly north-eastern – model of small-scale localized industries. At the local level, structure and agency were closely related in a dynamic way. Substantial structural changes during the 1980s required political responses of a new type compared to the political offer Christian Democracy was able to provide, creating an opening for the emergence of a new party which, in a very short period of time,


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managed both to recreate a collective identity with a preferential electorate and to articulate the interests of this same electorate in clear and simple language. We will start by showing in what ways and to what extent northern Italy’s localized industries contributed to the electoral success of the Lega Nord, by taking Lombardy as a case study.

Small-scale industrialization and the rise of the Lega Nord in the manufacturing areas of Lombardy It is well established that Italian industry is made up of small- and medium-sized firms, usually family-run and operating in traditional manufacturing sectors. Small-scale industrialization in Italy has formed and continues to form a much-studied field of inquiry, both in Italy and throughout the world, ever since the Italian sociologist Arnaldo Bagnasco (1977) first coined the term ‘Third Italy’ to refer to the central and north-eastern regions which were able to industrialize in the 1960s and 1970s. Referring to this same phenomenon, Nanetti (1988, pp. 11–39) went as far as to assert that in the post-war period Italy underwent two ‘economic miracles’. The first, in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘was tied to the creation of big industrial enterprises . . . and the decline of the agricultural sector’ (p. 14), while the second took place in the 1970s and 1980s, and was ‘characterized by an increase in self-employment’ and by ‘a new structure of industrial enterprise dominated by small and medium-sized firms’ (p. 14 and p. 16). Not only has this feature of the Italian economy given rise to dedicated academic research, but also even popular weekly magazines now routinely include a survey of Italy’s small businesses when they publish special reports on the country’s state of affairs, pointing out such facts as ‘Fully one-quarter of Italy’s exports come from companies with only 11 to 100 employees’ (Time, 21 April 1997, p. 36), or ‘The average size of the workforce in Italy’s 450 machine-tool firms is 70, compared with 200 in Germany’s 320 firms’ (The Economist, 2 January 1999, p. 57). Throughout the post-war period, in a trend that accelerated dramatically in the 1970s, a myriad of new small and family-run firms were set up in traditional manufacturing sectors, particularly textiles and clothing, shoe and leather goods, woodworking and furniture making, as well as light engineering (Bagnasco, 1977). Far from being concentrated in large urban conurbations, the new firms were spread over the countryside, which came to be known as ‘urbanized countryside’. The regions affected – collectively named by Bagnasco the ‘Third Italy’ to distinguish them from both the north-western triangle and the underdeveloped

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southern areas – were primarily the Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trentino-Alto Adige, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, the Marche and Umbria. Despite considering Lombardy as part of the north-western model of economic development – based on large industrial plants and verticallyintegrated firms – Bagnasco recognized that eastern Lombardy shared many of the socio-economic characteristics of the ‘Third Italy’. Later studies have shown that the whole region of Lombardy has also been deeply affected by this type of industrialization (Cento Bull, 1989; Bull and Corner, 1993). In these regions, small firms form fairly integrated ‘local production systems’ (Garofoli, 1983a) or ‘industrial districts’ (Becattini, 1987; Goodman, Bamford and Saynor, 1989). There is now a vast but also highly specialized literature on ‘industrial districts’ or ‘system-areas’. The economist Alfred Marshall was the first to coin the term ‘industrial district’ by which he meant ‘the concentration of large numbers of small businesses of a similar kind in the same locality’ (Marshall, 1966, p. 230). According to Marshall, all districts presented some recognizable characteristics, namely the concentration and easy availability of skilled labour, the use of highly specialized machinery, the constant spread of innovation and the combination of social and economic forces. One of the experts on Italian industrial districts, Becattini, emphasized the social factors at play when he chose to define this phenomenon as a form of industrial organisation and, at the same time, a local community, which results from the interplay between a population of persons living and working in a certain geographical area and a population of small and medium sized firms belonging to a certain industrial branch (e.g. textiles, shoes, furniture etc.). (Becattini, 1989, p. 128; 1990) The theoretical reflection on industrial districts – their origins, industrial organization, performance vis-à-vis large firms, long-term chances of survival and/or development – has come to constitute a fairly coherent body of work, and the existing literature on the subject offers valuable criteria for a general understanding of this socio-economic phenomenon. However, to date there is little agreement between scholars as to the number and territorial distribution of industrial districts in Italy (Garofoli, 1983a; Sforzi, 1987). Generally speaking, the ‘Third Italy’ has been identified as the area where industrial districts have developed and thrived. Nevertheless, their relevance for Lombardy emerged very clearly from a study by Garofoli, published in 1983, which identified as


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many as 28 industrial districts (he prefers the term ‘areas of localized production’ or ‘system-areas’) in the region and described in some detail their characteristics and economic performance (Garofoli, 1983b). To sum up, both Lombardy and the Veneto – the main strongholds of the Lega Nord – witnessed a historical process of small-scale industrialization which resulted in the formation of complex ‘industrialsocio-territorial’ systems (Becattini, 1979). Such systems, according to the experts, could only be studied on the basis of an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together analyses of space, culture, politics, family and community. Firms were – and still largely are – run by local families, while the community forms both a socio-cultural referent and a specific economic organization. A recent article in Time described the phenomenon in the following terms: ‘Italy’s longstanding political and geographic fragmentation has encouraged a strong sense of “localismo” – or local pride and self-reliance – which, together with close family ties and a healthy handicraft tradition, favoured the creation of small family companies’ (21 April 1997, p. 37). We will return later to the human and cultural factors behind this type of industrialization. Is there a direct link between this type of industrialization and the electoral success of the Lega Nord in the early 1990s? We believe that there is, and that the evidence for this is now overwhelming. We have already seen how, in terms of the socio-economic background of Lega voters, there was a predominance of the independent middle class and of private-sector employees with a low-to-medium educational level. Both Moioli (1991) and Diamanti (1993) showed how the Lega was particularly strong in the subalpine areas, where clusters of industrial districts are especially common. Interestingly, Moioli stressed how difficult it was to ascertain whether the electorate of the Lega was made up primarily of middle-class or working-class voters, arguing that both social groups contributed to its electoral success. He did not distinguish, however, between workers employed in large firms and/or living in the large urban conurbations and those employed in small- and mediumsized firms located in towns and villages. Yet other scholars were able to identify, as we saw, the core of Lega voters in people working and living in small towns and villages with higher than average levels of economic development. By superimposing on to the map of ‘system-areas’ elaborated by Garofoli in 1983 that of the territorial distribution of votes gained by the Lega Nord at the 1992 general elections, bearing in mind that in 27 out of the 28 areas identified by Garofoli the Christian Democrats [DC] were in 1987 the party of relative majority, it was also possible to

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ascertain that the communes where the Lega obtained a higher percentage of votes than the provincial average and/or replaced or rivalled the DC as the main party were in most cases those forming ‘local production systems’ (Cento Bull, 1993). As Table 3.1 shows, among these were Como’s silk areas, Cantù’s furniture district, Lecco’s metalworking district, the textile villages in Val Seriana and the Gandino-Leffe area, Val Imagna (woodworking), Val Calepio (buttons), Palazzolo’s textile and engineering district, Botticino (tights and socks) and Lumezzane (domestic appliances). These are all long-standing industrial areas whose origins often go back to the nineteenth century. They also tend to be located along the subalpine valleys, and for many of them industrial manufacturing accounted, even in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for from 60 to 80 per cent of the employment of the local active population. As can be seen from Table 3.1, the Lega emerged as the first party in 13 districts, the second party in another 14 and the third party in just 1 district, Suzzara. Not surprisingly, Suzzara is located in a ‘red’ subcultural area and in this district the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) was the first party, with 41 per cent of the votes, followed at a great distance by the DC with 15.2 per cent and by the Lega with 13.1 per cent, that is, with nine percentage points below the provincial average. We would propose this case as further evidence of the resilience of the communist subculture and its greater resistance to the onslaught of the Lega when compared to the Christian Democratic Party. The Lega obtained results above the provincial averages in 20 out of 28 industrial districts (20 out of 27 if one excludes Suzzara). In particular, the Lega obtained results above the average precisely in those districts where the DC’s vote had in 1987 also been above the average, specifically in those districts which presented the typical characteristics of a subcultural political representation, that is, where the DC in 1987 commanded an absolute or nearly absolute majority. The districts where Christian Democracy continued to enjoy a high degree of success were also those where the Lega had been able to make considerable gains: Premana and Gandino-Leffe, where the Lega was the first party, Val Seriana, Val Imagna, Val Calepio, Lumezzane, Nave-Odolo, Palazzolo and the shoe manufacturing district in Bassa Bresciana. The only exception was Gardone Val Trompia, where the DC obtained almost five percentage points above yet the Lega stayed below the provincial average. The Lega managed to replace the DC as a dominant party in the districts of Tradate, Cantù, and Castelgoffredo (averaging 30 per cent of the votes) and showed that it was capable of potentially doing


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Table 3.1 Variations of the Votes for the Lega and the Christian Democrats in Lombardy’s Industrial Districts compared to the Provincial Averages and Classification of the Lega (Chamber of Deputies, 5 April 1992) Industrial District Bergamo plain, Mechanical area Botticino Brescia plain, shoe area Busto Arsizio Canneto sull’Oglio Cantú Castelgoffredo Como 2nd Como textile area Gandino-Leffe Gardone Val Trompia Lecco Lumezzane Meda-Lissone Mede-Lomello Nave-Odolo Oltrepò pavese Palazzolo Parabiago Premana Suzzara Tradate Turbigo Val Calepio Val Imagna Val Seriana Viadana-Casalmaggiore Vigevano

Votes Lega

Votes DC

– + + – + + + – – + – – + + + + – + + + – + + + + + + +

– – = – – = + – + + + = + + – + + + + + – + = + + + + –

Lega classification 2nd party 2nd party 2nd party 1st party 1st party 1st party 1st party 1st party 2nd party 1st party 2nd party 2nd party 2nd party 1st party 1st party 2nd party 2nd party 2nd party 1st party 1st party 3rd party 1st party 1st party 2nd party 2nd party 2nd party 2nd party 1st party

The sign + indicates a percentage of votes above the provincial average. The sign – a percentage below. The sign = a roughly identical percentage. Sources: re-elaboration of data found in the following newspapers: La Prealpina, La Provincia di Como, L’Eco di Bergamo, Il Giornale di Brescia, La Provincia Pavese, La Notte, Gazzetta di Mantova (7–8 April 1992).

the same in the districts of Busto Arsizio, Turbigo, Parabiago, MedaLissone and Vigevano. In short, the Lombard industrial districts contributed in no small way to the electoral success of the Lega Nord. Indeed, our own re-elaboration of electoral data published in the Lombard provincial press showed

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that, despite representing only a sixth of the Lombard electorate, industrial districts accounted for a fifth of all votes gained by the Lega Nord in the region. The 1994 and 1996 general elections provided further confirmation that the electoral strongholds of the Lega Nord coincided with the industrial districts of Lombardy, as well as the Veneto and the other north-eastern regions. Thus, in 1996, the Lega consolidated its position in most industrial districts situated north and east of Milan, completing the trend already in evidence in 1992, whereas in these areas Forza Italia failed to establish itself as the main representative of the business community. In particular, the Lega emerged as the dominant party in the industrial areas of the provinces of Varese, Como, Bergamo, Brescia and Mantua. Indeed, this last province split into two halves in electoral terms, with the Lega coming first in the industrial, north-western communes, and the Democratic Party of the Left remaining first party in the southern, more rural, communes. Interestingly, both Forza Italia and the PDS did better than the Lega in the provincial capitals of Lombardy, where the socio-economic mix of voters was much more varied and composite than in the areas of localized production. As for the Veneto, the Lega triumphed in the most important system-areas to be found in the region, including Bassano del Grappa (ceramics, furniture, jewellery), Thiene (textiles-clothing), Schio-Valdagno (textiles-clothing), Castelfranco Veneto (textiles-clothing, mechanics), Conegliano (furniture, domestic appliances), Belluno (optical products), Oderzo (furniture), Vittorio Veneto (furniture). A similar picture emerged in the FriuliVenezia Giulia region. As in Lombardy, the Lega failed to gain seats, and was overtaken by Forza Italia, in the large urban conurbations or in small towns and villages characterized by different socio-economic profiles. Summing up the party’s electoral performance in 1996, a leading Italian political scientist concluded that the Lega continues to be exceptionally strong in its sub-alpine strongholds with a shift towards the North-East which becomes the most leghist area: in this region (almost entirely the provinces of Pordenone, Belluno, Vicenza, Treviso, Brescia, Bergamo and Sondrio, and partially those of Verona, Varese, Como and Cuneo) can be found the electoral colleges (31 out of 179) where the Lega overflows with an average of 40% [of the votes]. (Ignazi, 1997, p. 131) To understand why the industrial districts of Lombardy and the Veneto were busy replacing a Catholic subculture with a regionalist and auto-


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nomist one, we have first of all to analyse the nature of the relationship between industrial districts and a political subculture.

Small-scale industrialization and territorially-based political subcultures The role played by territorial political subcultures in favouring and promoting small-scale industrialization has been analysed by Trigilia (1986). Trigilia himself explained that the term ‘territorial political subcultures’ referred to ‘some areas characterized by a specific political tradition and by a number of institutions – parties, interest groups, cultural and voluntary organizations – which are rooted in the territory and share the same politico-ideological origins’ (Trigilia, 1986, p. 13). Historically, in Italy, areas with a prevalent Catholic subculture and others with a predominant socialist and/or communist one came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite their deep ideological differences, the two subcultures have been widely credited as one of the most important factors behind the emergence of small-scale entrepreneurship (Trigilia, 1986; Bagnasco, 1988; Capecchi, 1990). Both performed more than just a political role, creating an environment of mutual trust and social cooperation which was conducive to the development of clusters of small businesses. As well as being the product of weakly polarized societies, both subcultures encouraged the formation of local political institutions bent on mediating between sectoral interests so as to promote class collaboration. Trigilia emphasized an important difference between the two subcultures: in his view local political institutions in the ‘red’ subcultural regions played a more active and dynamic role in promoting economic and industrial development in comparison to the Catholic regions. A similar point of view was expressed by Brusco (1986). The difference between the two subcultures in terms of their political institutions may help to explain the different behaviour of the electorate in Lombardy and the Veneto on the one hand and in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany on the other, at the 1992 general elections. We will come back to this aspect later. Both Trigilia and other scholars (Parisi and Pasquino, 1977; Biorcio, 1991, pp. 75–6) emphasized that the relationship between voters and parties in the subcultural areas was one of maximum delegation to the dominant party as far as the political programme was concerned. In other words, voters would give their allegiance to the party on the basis of ideological and cultural identity rather than its policies. The ideological component, however, was judged to have decreased

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constantly since the end of the Second World War. This led Trigilia to hypothesize an increasing importance of the more pragmatic and instrumental components of delegation to the party . . . In the longer term, consensus will become less stable and guaranteed and more directly linked to the quality of the ‘political offer’ that both the Communist Party and Christian Democracy will be able to formulate. (Trigilia, 1986, p. 309) By contrast, Biorcio (1991), in his early study of the Lega Nord, attributed extreme importance to the re-emergence of a populist delegation to the party, not linked to any appreciation of the more pragmatic and practical proposals put forward in the party’s political programme. In our view, the dichotomy between ideological and pragmatic components of the political offer is somewhat misleading, since it is very difficult to separate the two. Christian Democracy in these regions established itself as the dominant party after 1945 by offering conservative and traditional cultural values rooted in a rural society coupled with an acceptance of economic development, industrialization and vertical social mobility. The DC made it clear that it was committed to promote and sustain small-business development and in this way it provided a positive and concrete response to the strong demand for ‘social promotion’ expressed by the regions’ ex-sharecroppers and small tenant farmers. Conversely, the party’s electoral collapse happened in a period when its ideology was undermined as a result of a process of cultural secularization, and its pragmatism had been reduced to clientelistic exchanges. There exists therefore, in our view, a fairly direct link between industrial districts as ‘communities of interests’, and the electorate’s behaviour at the 1992, 1994 and 1996 general elections, although this does not mean ruling out other explanations based upon the behaviour of individuals as opposed to that of socio-economic constituencies. We intend mainly to put forward a reading of the Lega and its political success which has until recently been underestimated by observers. Nevertheless it is also the case that the role played by political institutions and actors, particularly the DC, in promoting the development of small enterprises would be especially relevant. An analysis of this role can help us outline the motives for the increasing dissatisfaction felt in these areas with Christian Democracy.


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The 1970s and 1980s were two decades of prosperity and development for Italy’s small-scale industry, particularly in the predominantly Catholic regions. Between 1971 and 1981, the number of enterprises increased by 38 per cent in Lombardy and 52 per cent in the Veneto, as opposed to 22 per cent in Tuscany and 28 per cent in Emilia-Romagna – the latter two being predominantly left-voting regions (Nanetti, 1988, p. 21). The vast majority of these new firms were small- and mediumsized enterprises, since the average number of employees per firm actually decreased in all the northern and central regions. From the late 1980s onwards, however, the economic climate drastically changed. Small was no longer beautiful and the Single European Market was viewed with increasing apprehension by Italian small firms. While the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought hopes of greater trade opportunities, there were also fears of fiercer competition from eastern Europe due to lower labour costs. Within Italy taxes were being increased and fiscal procedures remained as complicated and time-consuming as ever. Disparities in the fiscal treatment of the regions – the northern regions paid much more in taxes than they received back from the state compared to the southern regions – were increasingly noted and resented. Bureaucracy was felt to be stifling. A general feeling that they were being let down by the government and by the DC in particular emerged from various interviews one of the authors had in 1992 and 1993 with Como and Lecco entrepreneurs who supported the Lega. Some denied that the DC had ever favoured the small-business sector while others admitted that Christian Democracy had for many years promoted the interests of small entrepreneurs but added that this was no longer so. Informants claimed that internal struggles within the local DC in the second half of the 1980s had greatly undermined the representation of the interests of small-scale industry and strengthened the construction/building speculation lobby. In some areas Christian Democracy tried to present a new image to the electorate and show itself more responsive to local demands for a new type of political offer, at the risk of deep internal cleavages. One of the most dramatic examples of these internal divisions was at Brescia, where in the early 1990s the political current of the party led by Mino Martinazzoli (later general secretary of the party) clashed with the current led by the ex-Minister of Public Works Giovanni Prandini (later under charges of corruption). Born at Calvisano, in the Bassa Bresciana, Prandini impersonated the cunning, manipulating and arrogant politician of the 1980s, even proclaiming that Bossi would never succeed at Brescia. He was soon proved wrong: in

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November 1991 the Lega obtained a narrow victory in local elections in the town. Prandini’s approach to politics was in many ways both modern and managerial, even though fairly corrupt, and ought to be considered as part of a process of formation of political consensus of a predominantly ‘pragmatic’ type. The problem for Christian Democracy was that this form of pragmatism had become increasingly uneconomic and was placing unacceptable burdens on local businesses. While political mediation of a clientelistic type could have its usefulness in bringing public contracts and funds to local constituencies, it was in no way a substitute for efficient services, speedy bureaucracy, lower taxes and educational and professional training. The relationship between industrial districts and political institutions appeared to influence the electoral fortunes of Christian Democracy in Lombardy. One example is that of the Brescia district of Lumezzane, which was described in 1991 as presenting strong overlapping ties between economic and political actors, so much so that five councillors out of seven and half of all local government representatives, as well as the city mayor, were also owner-managers of small manufacturing firms. The Christian Democratic Party, in turn, was able to rely upon a powerful local artisanal association (Espansione, November 1991, p. 138). It may have been just a coincidence, but in 1992 the district of Lumezzane gave the DC the highest percentage of votes of all the Lombard districts: 38.12 per cent against 25.78 per cent for the Lega Nord. The electoral success of the Lega in the most industrialized provinces of Lombardy depended at least in part, therefore, on the attitude adopted by the Christian Democratic Party vis-à-vis its traditional socioeconomic constituency. Where the DC adopted a more clientelistic role and lost its capacity to represent the interests of the local producers, its loss of votes was heavier. Conversely, the ability of public institutions and political parties to interpret correctly and respond adequately to the new needs and new demands expressed by the business world enhanced their chances of success with the local electorate at times of uncertainty and turmoil.

Facing new challenges: Italy’s industrial districts and political institutions in the 1980s and 1990s In the next two sections we will address the crucial question of why a regionalist and federalist party emerged in Italy in the late 1980s, and will argue that the timing of the appearance of the Lega Nord coincided


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with an increasingly urgent quest for regional autonomy expressed by northern Italy’s industrial districts, which went largely unheeded by all mainstream parties. Political regionalism, in fact, has been conspicuous for its absence in the history of unified Italy (Lyttelton, 1996). Its sudden appearance during the crisis of the First Republic, therefore, needs careful explaining. The ‘neo-populist’ interpretations of the Lega Nord have stressed the appeal of a territorial identity to voters experiencing a period of uncertainty and a loss of traditional values and beliefs, thus putting the emphasis on the party’s exploitation of a mythical community of interests. We have chosen further to explore the links between the Lega and industrial districts, by matching the strong demand for regional governance coming from industrial districts with the simultaneous supply of a regionalist project put forward by the Lega. We will start by analysing the needs and challenges facing industrial districts at the end of the 1980s, and the inability of existing political institutions to provide adequate responses and solutions. At the end of that decade, some industrial districts were clearly in difficulty, whereas others were doing relatively well. One sign of difficulty was loss of employment, although this did not necessarily indicate economic decline; in many cases it simply reflected high levels of investment in new technology and labour-saving machinery. It was generally acknowledged, for instance, that Lombard manufacturing industry invested heavily in the 1980s and this should be seen as a sign of vitality (Biffignandi, 1987). In reality, some districts represented highly mature industries which were undergoing restructuring processes and were shedding labour, despite remaining important creators of wealth; others were in crisis and decline; others still continued to grow. What is relevant in terms of our analysis, however, is the fact that the local population tended to measure economic performance with growth, especially growth in industrial employment. Indeed a survey of 2564 manufacturing workers in 18 Lombard firms revealed that a third perceived their firm as being in decline, despite the fact that this was often not the case, and that two-thirds judged the general economic situation as being one of crisis, basing their perceptions on the situation of the labour market (CGIL Lombardia-AASTER, 1991). Almost threequarters stated that they were worried about the employment prospects of the young generations. Whether or not they were still expanding or had entered a more mature phase, all districts without distinction were having to face up to the challenges presented by the process of internationalization and globalization. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s they had been able to

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rely on relatively low-cost labour and on the quality of their products to achieve highly successful export rates, by the late 1980s these factors were no longer of great relevance. While the cost of labour in Italy was among the highest in Europe, it had become relatively easy to move production to other countries, where such cost could be down to onetwentieth, and in some cases even one-fortieth, of its Italian level. In this context, even old-standing practices of tax evasion and casual labour appeared to have lost their attractiveness. Thus Italy’s industrial districts were not an exception to the process of out-sourcing, and were starting to shift part of their production abroad, generally to eastern European countries. This process was viewed with mistrust by many who feared that it would lead to a generalized loss of employment and, more particularly, to closures by subcontracting firms operating within the districts due to pressures to cut costs and profit margins. While industrial districts reacted in a dynamic way to the need to cut production costs, even though the ‘solution’ implemented, that is, outsourcing, was likely in some cases to be painful in terms of loss of employment for the local working population, other problems proved more intractable. Among these were the need to obtain greater access to information, to be able to innovate constantly, to penetrate outside markets not just on the basis of the quality of one’s own products but on the basis of marketing and distribution capabilities, to network with suppliers and subcontractors outside the district and not just within its boundaries, to rely on an efficient transport and communications system, to cut the red tape of time-consuming bureaucratic procedures, and to have proper financial backing. An industrial-district-Plc was no longer a sufficient guarantee of success: the solution appeared to lie, in the eyes of the experts, in a region-Plc. Various studies showed that local production systems were no longer able to rely on their internal synergies and inter-firm cooperation, or on informal information networks (Franchi and Rieser, 1991; Garofoli, 1994; Berra, Piatti and Vitali, 1995). Firms within districts needed increasingly to establish and strengthen relations with the outside. A new role needed to be played by state and political institutions. According to Garofoli, with reference to the Lombard industrial district of Lecco, what was required was ‘the interaction between public and private, or state and market’ (1994, p. 391), particularly at local level, coupled with the emergence of ‘“a culture” based on the planning and governing of the economic transformation of the area’ (p. 391). Other analysts and experts stressed the growing importance of the regional dimension and of regional political institutions, as opposed to locally-


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based ones. Local government institutions, by general consensus, were now considered too small to govern the economic transformation of industrial districts, typically comprising up to 20 neighbouring villages and towns, often located in different provinces. As Brutti and Calistri (1990, p. 137) remarked: in the past, local authorities have played a crucial role in the formation, strengthening and growth of industrial districts. It is now a question of massive decentralization to the regions of an important part of industrial policy, permitting a co-ordinated and well-targeted use of resources. Trigilia summed up the dilemma faced by industrial districts at the end of the twentieth century as follows: ‘It seems that the development of industrial districts is facing a problem of scale’ (1990, p. 182). He went on to argue that the regional scale was in many ways ideal because it remained small enough to be able to interpret and respond to the needs of individual districts within its boundary while simultaneously being large enough to provide a co-ordinating and pro-active role in generating services for all districts and in relating to international markets. Since Italy already had a system of regional decentralization in place, it is important to establish what was wrong with or lacking in the existing framework. A regional system had become operational in Italy in the 1970s, when a series of laws was passed by the Christian Democratic-led government, partly as a concession to the left parties. The 1972 decrees followed the 1970 regional elections granting the regions limited powers. Law 382 of 1975 gave the regions wide-ranging powers within the scope of the Constitution, that is, without primary legislative authority. The 616 decrees in 1977 ‘institutionalized the regions as real centres of policy-making’ (Nanetti, 1988, p. 81). The decrees gave the regions control over 25 per cent of the entire national budget (Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti, 1985, p. 80). It should be noted, however, that according to art. 119 of the Constitution the regions enjoy ‘financial autonomy in the forms and within the limits prescribed by the Republic’s laws which coordinate it with the finance of the State, Provinces and Communes’. The prevalent interpretation of art. 119 was restrictive, and the financial autonomy of the 15 ordinary regions was very limited, as they could not impose new taxes or regulate the imposition or distribution of taxes which were already in place. Thus the ‘financial autonomy’ attributed to the regions by art. 119 consisted mainly of the

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autonomy to administer directly their income as fixed by the state. Greater financial autonomy was attributed to the 5 regions with special statute, although only in exceptional cases did they have the power to impose their own taxes. The creation of a regional system in the 1970s had been accompanied by widespread hopes that it would regenerate democracy and promote effective administration. However, these were soon replaced by feelings of disappointment and a general consensus that the regions had become entrenched in the corrupt and paralysing system of ‘partyocracy’. In addition, the performance of the Italian regions had varied greatly. Various studies brought to light the consistently better performance of the central and northern regions vis-à-vis the southern ones (Leonardi, Nanetti and Putnam, 1985; Putnam, 1993). A positive example comes from ‘intelligent’ and dynamic regions such as Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, which have successfully established a support system for local production areas operating within their boundaries. In Italy they have been at the vanguard of regional administration (Leonardi and Nanetti, 1994; Cooke and Morgan, 1994). Thus Tuscany, in the words of Leonardi (1994, p. 5), ‘has taken an active part in the political debate on the regions and played a crucial role in the experimentation of economic and social policies at the regional level’. Similarly, in EmiliaRomagna, according to Cooke and Morgan (1994, p. 109), ‘the regional government has endeavoured to build a support system tailored to the needs of SMEs [small and medium-sized firms]’. Both these regions belong to the ‘red belt’ of Italy, that is, to an area characterized by a strong left-wing subculture. Of the regions located in the area with a traditionally Catholic subculture, the two which appear to have performed satisfactorily and have fulfilled a dynamic role since their creation in the 1970s are Lombardy and the Veneto (Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti, 1985). Nevertheless, there seems to have been a qualitative difference in the nature of the role played by regions located in a red subcultural area as opposed to those situated in a white subcultural one. The former appear to have performed better and to have been more active in terms of their legislation concerning economic development and the small business sector (Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti, pp. 248–78). With specific reference to local industrial systems, it appears that Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna have been better able to respond to their needs. In particular, they have been substantially more successful in setting up ‘business service centres’ which ‘allow for economies of scale in information that the market would not provide to small firms’ (Garmise, 1994, p. 32). Various experts have emphasized the relevance


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of the functions carried out by such centres, particularly in terms of the diffusion of innovation and the creation of external economies (Brusco,1986; Brusco and Righi, 1989; Bellini et al., 1991). Garmise pointed out that Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna stood out among all Italian regions for the number of business service centres they possessed, in stark contrast to regions like Lombardy and the Veneto. According to his data, Tuscany came first, with a total of 12 such centres, followed by Emilia-Romagna with 11. Next came Lombardy with 6, on a par with a southern region like Apulia and a north-eastern region (Friuli). The Veneto turned out to be one of the worst regions in this respect, having established only 1 service centre. Another north-eastern region, Trentino, came last, with no centre at all. In comparison with their European counterparts, all Italian regions have underperformed, according to the experts. As Cooke and Morgan found out, in comparison with other European regions, such as BadenWürttemberg, even a forward-looking region like Emilia-Romagna had ‘been constrained by antiquated national regulations’ (1994, p. 113), including a centralized higher education system, which prevented universities from participating in regional science parks and developing innovations for the local economy, and a banking act which forbade local banks from investing in the local industry. Indeed the authors marvelled at the excellent performance demonstrated by this region: ‘In view of the limited powers and scarce resources available to the Italian regions it is a tribute to the Emilian authorities that they have achieved so much with so little’ (109). According to Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti, all Italian regions lost steam in the early 1980s following the big spurt in their legislative activity in the late 1970s, and their performance also worsened (1985, pp. 248–78). Some regions, however, lost steam more than others. Once again, the regions situated in the ‘red’ subcultural area performed better than those located in the ‘white’ subculture. Thus, while the performance of Lombardy, measured by a composite index, fell by 56 per cent between 1970–75 and 1978–84, and that of the Veneto by 53 per cent, Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany experienced a less dramatic decline (34 per cent and 35 per cent respectively). The authors concluded their study by advocating greater administrative efficiency and the creation of a better qualified regional political class, rather than further devolution of powers by the centre, as the best way forward for improving the performance of regional government. They appeared to be concerned that, if the stronger regions were able to pull away and to gain a higher degree of autonomy, the weaker would suffer as a result, to the detriment of the entire country.

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By contrast, in their more recent study, Cooke and Morgan signalled their concern that, without greater autonomy, the stronger regions themselves would end up being among the weak ones in Europe. In their view, the economic well-being of the Tuscan economy – and of its SMEs in particular – was closely linked to the transformation of the Italian political system and a systematic devolution of powers to regional bodies. In their own words, ‘the restructuring of the Italian state system, triggered by the crisis of public finance on the one hand and the malaise of the ruling political coalition on the other, may be a blessing in disguise for the stronger Italian regions’ (1994, p. 113). It appears, therefore, that Italian regions (and the Italian state) were largely unable to develop new functions and strategies for promoting economic development, particularly in relation to SMEs, even though some proved more dynamic than others. According to Wild (1998), the greater disadvantages suffered by the north-eastern regions can be attributed in large part to the attitude adopted by the Christian Democratic Party towards the process of administrative decentralization in the 1970s and 1980s. The party tried to delegate as little authority as possible to regional institutions, relying on local party bosses, such as Antonio Bisaglia in the Veneto, to mediate between the centre and the north-eastern periphery, while ensuring that the centre would continue to exercise its powers in financial and economic matters (Ibid., pp. 188–93). By the 1980s, however, even Bisaglia, who represented in many ways a very successful and skilful Christian Democratic politician, had come to the conclusion that the party no longer suited the needs and aspirations of Italy’s North-East (Allum, 1995), and that it needed an influx of local business people. These views were indirectly (and quite presciently) confirmed by the already cited study of the Italian regional system carried out in the 1980s (Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti, 1985), which pointed out that there appeared to be a growing conflict between the regional and the national levels of government as well as signs of increasing irritation in some regions for the excessive degree of authority exercised by the centre. Christian Democracy’s practice of requiring regional governments faithfully to reflect the political composition of national coalition governments was cited as a typical example of the kind of authority imposed by the centre (pp. 189–90). With specific reference to the Veneto, the authors remarked that: ‘the multiplying of autonomist forces in . . . the Veneto, is another sign of the frustration of the regional electorate for the interference of national parties who forget the existence of specific local conditions’ (p. 191). Piero Bassetti, industrialist and president of the Milan Chamber of Commerce, expressed


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similar views when he wrote in a recent book (1996, p. 60) that, whereas in Emilia-Romagna industrial districts were supported by political and institutional bodies, in the North-East ‘the extreme flexibility of the productive system, faced with a rigid and inefficient State, produced the recent [political] ruptures. Of course geography is also relevant: the North-East borders Germany whereas Emilia does not’. At the beginning of the 1990s, the frustration experienced by some Italian regions at the limited powers they exercised vis-à-vis the centre became both widespread and forcefully expressed. Two north-eastern regions, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino-Alto Adige, put forward requests for a federalist reform of the Italian State. Their initiative was followed by two north-western regions, Valle D’Aosta and EmiliaRomagna. Their main cause for complaint were the persisting obstacles to greater regional autonomy. As a study promoted by the Fondazione Censis and the Centro Studi Nord-Est (1992, p. 38) pointed out, the north-eastern institutions were pressing for the full implementation of the regional framework foreseen by the Italian Constitution, ‘in open dissent with the centralism that prevails today’. The study added that this situation ‘has produced a form of resentment in the local communities, especially in the North, which have been disappointed in their expectations of greater territorial autonomy, albeit in the context of a clear and unitary national framework’. The mood of these regions and their electorates appeared to coincide with that of industrial districts themselves. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in the Lombard province of Bergamo in the 1990s, Wild concluded that small- and medium-sized businesses operating in industrial districts were now openly in favour of greater regional autonomy and strongly critical of a centralized mode of governance (1998, p. 191). While this had been appropriate for the Italian economy in the 1950s, given its dependence on large-scale industry and the dominance of hierarchical, top-down social and political institutions, it was no longer appropriate in a pluralist and highly diversified economy and society. Thus, in Wild’s view, it was not simply the increasingly clientelistic role – as opposed to a subcultural one – carried out by the Christian Democratic Party which had caused its electoral downfall in its traditional northeastern strongholds. Another important factor was related to the party’s attitude towards the process of decentralization, which hampered the emergence of regional institutions capable of developing forms of competence and promoting innovation processes which would sustain local production systems in their efforts to face up to the challenges of internationalization. These two weaknesses combined to make Christian

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Democracy increasingly irrelevant to its socio-economic electorate in the North-East from the 1980s onwards, while its direct rival, the Communist Party, succeeded in retaining its popularity in the central regions. In the meanwhile, a new political actor had appeared forcefully on the scene, putting itself forward as the new (regional) political voice for small businesses in Italy’s North-East.

The Lega Nord, small business and regionalism The position of the Lega vis-à-vis small firms in the early days was both well articulated and extremely clear, as can be seen from their 1992 electoral programme. The very first paragraph of the section dedicated to industry, commerce and the artisanal sector stated that ‘industrial policy is currently strongly centralized, with the result that small- and medium-sized businesses are unable to have their needs taken into consideration’ (Lega Nord, 1992, p. 1). In the nine pages comprising this section of the party’s 1992 electoral programme the needs and problems of small- and medium-sized firms were discussed 17 times. By contrast, large firms were referred to only 4 times and then only in negative terms. Thus the party made it abundantly clear that it was the political voice of small enterprise and even recreated the anti-monopoly, antibig business polemics which had formed such an important component of DC ideology after the Second World War (Weiss, 1988). Many commentators who noted the predominance of small-business people and the self-employed among the electorate of the Lega also commented on the importance of the issue of taxation in the party’s propaganda and as one of the factors behind its success. Diamanti (1993, p. 70) remarked that this social group had suffered disproportionately from the growth of the fiscal burden in Italy during the 1980s and had accordingly started to vote for the Lega. Moioli (1991, pp. 167–8) also remarked that the Lega’s tax protest had been conceived primarily for the benefit of the entrepreneurial class. In a similar vein, Gallagher (1994, p. 460) argued that the small independent producers had been particularly receptive to the Lega’s protestations that the productive northeners had to pay taxes in order to subsidize the parasitic southerners. Torpey (1994) went as far as to suggest that in this respect the Lega was no different from other world-wide secessionist movements which were motivated primarily by reasons of selfishness and greed. More recently, the ex-Mayor of Venice and a strong supporter of federalism, Massimo Cacciari (2000), remarked that the key to Bossi’s success in Lombardy (and to a lesser extent in the Veneto) was fiscal federalism,


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which appealed to the newly made small-business owners and entrepreneurs of these regions. According to Cacciari, Bossi’s message was very simple and straightforward, amounting to the following: ‘You, small entrepreneurs and artisans of the North, are being robbed of the wealth you have created by the bureaucratic-centralistic mechanism of the Italian state.’ It is easy to see, on the basis of these comments, why the Lega has tended to be considered primarily as a populist political movement rooted in a petite bourgeosie in revolt against the state. Gallagher (1993, p. 620), for example, openly compared the Lega to the French Poujadists of the 1950s and the Italian Uomo Qualunque movement of the 1940s. Yet the comparison only works at a superficial level. The Lega’s proposed policies were not generically representative of the Italian petite bourgeoisie, they were tailor-made for the small-business sector in its ‘industrial district’ configuration. Among the proposals put forward in the 1992 programme for sustaining small firms great importance was placed on those concerning services to industry (creation of business service centres, incentives for setting up co-operatives and consortia, information and innovation services), and research and development (creation of applied research companies with public and private funds, close links between universities and industry, incentives to small firms for setting up joint ventures with foreign companies). These proposals were in line with the ones put forward at the time by economic experts (Gobbo, 1989) and often also by field operators. The economic programme of the Lega received the unconditional approval of a well-known Italian economic weekly: if there is an economic programme which is concrete, detailed, and which addresses ways for increasing the productivity of the system, strong but not vague in its denunciation of assistentialism, that is the programme of the Lega Nord. It is the only programme which cannot be confused or swapped with the others. (Mondo economico, 28 March 1992) The Lega’s critique of big business did not subside after 1992, while its economic proposals in support of small businesses were further refined and restated in the party’s 1996 electoral programme (Lega Nord, 1996a). The Lega specifically and openly made its 1992 economic programme dependent on a radical restructuring of the Italian state, based on the premise that economic competiton at the international level no longer took place between states, but between regions or macro-regions. While

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it advocated the political division of Italy into three macro-regions, the North, the Centre and the South, in terms of its economic programme the party made it clear that its proposed policies in favour of the smallbusiness sector were predicated on a greater devolution of powers to the existing regions. Services to industry, the promotion of innovation and diffusion of information, the creation of public-private companies with the participation of universities, local industry and political institutions, were all presented as policies to be implemented at a regional (as opposed to a macro-regional) level and with the active involvement of regional government. The regionalization of the university system was also put forward in the 1992 electoral programme of the Lega, with a view to making universities financially dependent on the regions as opposed to the central state. This would help steer higher education in the direction of producing applied research of direct relevance to the local and regional business community. Universities would also be encouraged to obtain private funding for up to 50 per cent of their financial requirements, and one of the ways of doing this would be through research financed directly by the private sector. The 1996 electoral programme reinforced these proposals, directly linking the regionalization of the university sector to the needs of small- and medium-sized firms: As far as applied research is concerned, it is necessary to reorganize it by research sectors and at regional level. Applied research is in fact the sector which must remain in close contact with the various production systems present in the territory, and in particular with small- and medium-sized firms which are the backbone of the national economy and the main recipients of technological innovations. Such innovations, which depend on applied research itself, in turn sustain competitiveness and economic development as a whole. (Lega Nord, 1996a, pp. 50–1) Finally, an analysis of the bills presented in parliament by representatives of the Lega Nord between 1992 and 1996 showed that the majority concerned either specific issues of interest to particular northern localities or more general issues related to administrative and fiscal decentralization, industrial and employment matters, and constitutional revisions (Fassini, 1998). Various bills concerned the artisanal and small-business sector and quite a few asked for the creation of new provinces, all of them in the North. A few more proposed the reduction or abolition of taxes. A small number proposed official investigation of alleged malpractices in the South.


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According to Wild, this striking symmetry between the political and economic programme of the Lega Nord and the needs and demands of industrial districts as repeatedly expressed by economic experts close to the districts is no coincidence. In her view the Lega represented more than just the political voice of industrial districts. She defined the party as ‘the self-representation of industrial districts’, that is, a political movement whose leaders at local level were drawn directly from the small-business sector and were entrusted with the task of devising and promoting an economic programme which responded to the weaknesses and inadequacies perceived as crippling any further development (1998, pp. 193–9). This would explain why many members and grassroots representatives of the Lega had previously had very little or no political experience, as repeatedly found in various surveys carried out in the 1980s. It would also explain what puzzled some commentators when attempting to interpret the nature and policies of the Lega, that is, its apparent inability to appeal to a national electorate made up of private-sector employees and the self-employed, whose interests can be argued to differ sharply from those of public-sector workers, whether employed by the state or by nationalized industries. Thus De Marchi (1993) lamented the Lega’s recurrent localism, which in his view condemned the party to remain perpetually confined to the north-eastern regions, without realizing that this political movement was itself born as an expression of specific local and regional interests. This did not mean that it could not adopt a national perspective and appeal to a national electorate; nevertheless it was clear that it would find the transition particularly problematic, in view of the fact that the Lega represented a territorial political subculture as well as a party with a radical, neo-liberal programme.

The Lega Nord as a political subculture The economic programme of the Lega Nord, however important to its electors, particularly in industrial districts, cannot solely explain its electoral success. Alongside its largely credible and detailed policies relating to the management of the economy, the party also developed and popularized an ‘ethnic’, populist, even racist image of itself. These ideological and cultural components point to the existence of a shared system of values among party voters and supporters, which is one of the reasons why, in our view, it is substantially correct to identify the Lega with a political subculture marked by strong populist features. Despite the growing importance of ‘pragmatic’ and ‘instrumental’ components,

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a political subculture, as we have seen, also rests on an ideological and moral affinity between the electorate and a political party. In the early years there was, in fact, no fundamental contradiction between the Lega’s pragmatic and managerial economic programme and its populist and quasi-racist undertones, at least as far as areas of small-scale industrialization were concerned. The main characteristic of industrial districts, according to Becattini (1989), is a dynamic interrelationship between an economic model of development and a relatively cohesive community. A political party, to be successful in these areas, must be able to offer an effective representation of the interests of the local model of development but also a shared system of values which guarantees the preservation of a collective identity. As Cento Bull (1996, pp. 178–9) argued in previous work, the process of industrialization typical of the regions with a strong political subculture rested on the preservation of a tightly communitarian society which was built upon the distinction between Us and the Other, and which the League politically exploited and ‘ethnicised’. According to Piore and Sabel, small-scale industrialization was itself the product of a strong local community: ‘The cohesion of the industry rests on a more fundamental sense of community, of which the various institutional forms of cooperation are more the result than the cause’ (Piore and Sabel, 1984, p. 165). In his famous book on Italian democracy, Putnam (1993) argued that cooperation and trust foster networks of civic engagement and are conducive to a smooth and efficient functioning of democratic institutions. However, trust and social cohesion should be considered more appropriately as part of a dual process of inclusion and exclusion. In particular, when trust and solidarity are strongly embedded in a ‘closed’ community it may be difficult for ‘outsiders’ to obtain access to and benefit from the public good generated by these civic virtues. This seems to apply to Italian industrial districts, as they are characterized by a clear-cut division between those who are considered full members of the local community and those who are perceived as strangers (Becattini, 1989, p. 114). As Cento Bull (1996, p. 179) noted, the ‘outsiders’ are not necessarily physically outside the community as long as they are outside the community of small manufacturing producers, i.e., as long as they are not employed in manufacturing or


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related activities. This explains why occupations in the public sector and in public administration have always been viewed with contempt and judged to be foreign. ‘Outsiders’ are also those who do not speak the local dialect. It is interesting to note here that the dialect is still widely used in business transactions involving local entrepreneurs in areas of small-scale industry: it is, therefore, yet another factor conducive to trust. The ‘cultural communitarianism’ of industrial districts tends to clash with the need for immigration from outside, as required by their own economic expansion: The community of the district requires fresh blood . . . The persisting success of some Italian industrial districts since the last war is partly explained by their strong capacity for assimilation, and by the fact that – at least at the outset – immigration was a short-distance phenomenon. (Becattini, 1990, p. 40) In other words, industrial districts are characterized by a constant tension between the imperatives of economic development on the one hand, which require their opening up to external flows and influences, and, on the other, the need to preserve shared values and trust relations, which are perceived as essential factors guaranteeing them unique competitive advantages. Such a tension can generate a situation of equilibrium or disequilibrium, reverberating onto the socio-political sphere. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s the Catholic subculture had successfully managed this inherent tension by fostering universal and solidary values, the crisis of the Italian political system and a growing sense that industrial districts were facing new challenges and even threats can explain the rejection of sentiments of solidarity and the development of exclusionary feelings towards ‘outsiders’, which appear as the hallmark of Lega voters in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Cento Bull, 2000). A similar interpretation was put forward by Bagnasco (1996, p. 209), with specific reference to areas of small-scale industrialization: ‘Faced with the Christian Democratic collapse, the mix of market and communitarian values expressed by entrepreneurs and the selfemployed . . . are taken up and radicalized by the Lega, at a time which appears critical also in economic terms’. It is thus fairly accurate to describe the Lega as a political party which exploited sentiments of

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rejection towards ‘outsiders’ already present among the northern population, particularly in areas of diffused industrialization. According to Bagnasco (1996, p. 210), the rise of the Lega had highlighted the specificity of the ‘social world of small businesses in Italy’, whereas Forza Italia, in his view, represented the interests of new economic sectors, based on the production of ‘immaterial goods’. As he wrote, ‘being workers, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, employees in Treviso is not exactly the same as in Turin or Palermo, and for some aspects it can in fact be a very different thing’ (p. 209; Lago, 1996). The Lega phenomenon had proved that the interests and values of areas of small-scale development could be aggregated at the political level and used in opposition to the rest of the national society (Bagnasco, 1996, p. 209). There was also, as the centre-left ex-Mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari (2000), told us in interview, an element of mass psychology, since most of the small and medium entrepreneurs in the Veneto and other northern areas had built their successful businesses ‘in conflict with the political and trade-unionist culture of the left. During the seventies they experienced a situation of cultural and psychological inferiority vis-à-vis the student and youth movements, etc.’ This situation may explain some of the raw edges shown by Lega’s voters and supporters, as well as their pronounced anti-élitism and anti-intellectualism. In terms of the existence of widespread prejudices in many areas of the North against foreign immigrants, a member of the Left Democrats and regional councillor for Lombardy, Benigni (2000), voiced the opinion in interview that many small towns and villages in northern Italy had been going through an accelerated period of change, which had generated a number of fears: fear that the opening of external markets might bring economic decline, fear that the influx of immigrants from outside the EU might threaten the local cultures and put an end to local trust for good, even fear that many of the immigrants were better educated than the local people were and might one day gain the better jobs. In many cases, small and medium entrepreneurs in the North are still only one or two generations away from a rural past: industrialization was a gradual process, emerging out of the slow decline of an earlier industry, based on textile production and spread across the countryside (Bull and Corner, 1993). As a result, many vestiges of a rural society are still tangible and visible throughout the subalpine arc, ranging from small cultivated plots of land to country fairs and working farms. The Lega Nord deliberately strove to recreate this peasant past in mythical and idealized terms, as a perfect world that had been lost or, to put it more precisely, that had shaped the recent industrialization and should


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not be allowed to be entirely destroyed (by immigration and multiculturalism) (Ferrario, 1991; Allievi, 1992, pp. 57–8). Thus, while the economic programme of the Lega Nord was heavily in favour of small- and medium-sized firms and sensitive to the needs of local production systems, the party also explicitly adopted and promoted the cultural values of small-scale industry, emphasizing its exclusionary aspects, its local communitarianism and its anxieties and prejudices. The Lega itself made it clear that its economic programme was conceived in terms of protecting and defending a specific value system: By defending small- and medium-sized firms and the artisanal sector, we believe we are defending all citizens because behind this mode of production there is a society rich in important values such as: the family, friendship, a humane environment, social cohesion etc. (Lombardia Autonomista, 27 January 1993) It was in this same context that the party rejected the idea of an ‘open’ and multicultural society: The Lega Nord intends to represent the interests of small- and mediumsized firms, not just for their mode of production, but also for the type of society which is behind these same firms. A society which is not multi-racial and therefore disintegrated, but is instead characterized by a continuity of relations between citizens and institutions, so that the citizen feels part of society. It is this union which guarantees democracy. (Lavoro e federalismo, Supplement to Lombardia Autonomista, no. 22, 15 July 1992) In the pages of Lombardia Autonomista, the Lega’s official paper before it was replaced by La Padania in 1997, there used to appear a cartoon entitled ‘La famiglia Brambilla’. The family symbolized Lombard ethnicity and was described as counting among its ancestors a Longobard and the grandfather of Alberto da Giussano. One of the strips revealed the occupation of Mr Brambilla as that of owner-manager of a small manufacturing workshop. It showed him working from dawn to late night, arriving home in time for the last news bulletin, in which it was announced that the government had asked for financial sacrifices for the development of the South (Lombardia Autonomista, 7 August 1992). The cartoon strips portraying the Brambilla family were also interesting in terms of their stereotypical gender and generational representations.

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Mr Brambilla was the head of the family, his wife looked after the home and children, and the paternal grandfather lived with them. The chosen name itself, Brambilla, is a very common one in Lombardy and it often stands to signify a typical self-made entrepreneur. The name therefore conveyed the idea of ‘Lombard ethnicity’ as linked to ‘normality’, and also associated ‘normality’ with gender stereotypes and small-scale entrepreneurship. Back in 1991, Mannheimer had emphasized three key characteristics of the electorate of the Lega Nord. The first was a marked support for greater territorial autonomy for the regions of the North in a variety of fields, particularly economic and fiscal matters. The second was a feeling of alienation from the traditional parties and politicians. The third was a certain degree of ‘closure’ towards those perceived as ‘different’: ‘an attitude of generalized “closure” develops as the intensity of support for the Lega increases’ (1993, p. 101). Mannheimer concluded by saying that the electorate of the Lega was both composite and attracted to ‘the defence of a large number of interests (often contradictory to each other) in some way connected to the territorial dimensions’. He therefore argued that the ties holding together such a composite group of voters were weaker than those of the old mass political parties. And yet the three key characteristics he listed appear totally compatible to each other and make perfect sense if viewed in the context of an electorate located in areas of small-scale industry, particularly at a time of great turmoil and change.

Recent developments Even though the Lega was largely successful in taking over from the DC the representation of the interests of the local small-business model of development, the party gained much publicity and popularity both in Italy and abroad less for its promotion and defence of local economic interests than for its ethno-regionalist stance and its invention of a new nation, Padania. Thus the ability of the Lega was to translate the localistic culture of the northern communities of small firms into the myth of North Italian ethnicity. Despite failing to effect the transition from a regional to a national party, but also partly because of this failure, the party focused upon and enjoyed some success in converting its regional constituency into a ‘minority nation’. It therefore claimed – and to a large extent achieved – international recognition alongside long-standing political movements such as the Catalan and Scottish nationalist parties. To the dismay of some commentators who had initially been sympathetic


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to the Lega’s political programme (De Marchi, 1993), the party opted for a radicalization of its links to a territorial constituency, rather than promoting neo-liberal reforms in favour of a national social class – the so-called ‘producers’. The conversion allowed the Lega to anchor its own subcultural and localistic values to an already well-developed and increasingly influential ideology. However, with hindsight, it also put into motion a process of decoupling between the Lega and its socioeconomic territorial constituency, which the other political parties have in recent times capitalized upon, in an effort to reduce the gap between mainstream politics and a vitally important regional model of economic development. These trends will be analysed in the next two chapters. Industrial districts, in turn, have been busy acquiring a new visibility by promoting new initiatives and co-ordinating their efforts, while also distancing their requests from the political project of the Lega Nord. A new round of interviews, conducted in October 2000 among entrepreneurs and bankers in the Veneto, established that the regional economy had considerably strengthened in the last decade, offsetting some of the uncertainties, constraints and anxieties which were widespread in the early 1990s. Outsourcing is now an accomplished reality. In the last five to seven years production has been relocated to Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, taking advantage of low labour costs and making up for the lack of a labour force at home. According to Benincasa (2000), President of the Cassamarca Spa, at least 5000 firms from the Veneto had relocated production in Romania alone. Partly as a result of this development, his own bank was planning to expand its business to central Europe. Moretti Polegato (2000), President of Geox, a shoe and clothing firm from Montebelluna, confirmed that outsourcing was now both widely practised and considered unavoidable, while fears of intense and low-cost competition from eastern Europe had subsided. Veronesi (2000), President of Veronesi Spa, went as far as saying that the Veneto was ‘Europe’s strongest economic region – the North-East has literally exploded and the number of firms in the region can only be marvelled at’. The inefficiences of public administration and the lack of infrastructures were still lamented but in a climate of greater confidence and optimism than had been detected in the series of interviews carried out in 1992 and 1993. Other weaknesses, which had been denounced by the Lega in the early 1990s, were now being addressed. According to Mosele (2000), Rector of the University of Verona, institutions of higher education in the region were making a very considerable effort to modernize, and relations between them and the local business community had greatly improved. There was

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now a growing awareness that they had to find new ways of collaborating with and sustaining each other, with a view to raising skills and enhancing research and development. The greatest change of all, however, appeared to concern attitudes towards immigration. Industrial districts are now faced with the real and urgent need to import a labour force from outside the EU (as well as outsource components abroad). Faced with this economic imperative, entrepreneurs in the Veneto were taking the lead in emphasizing inclusion rather than exclusion. They did not seem prepared to trade off economic prosperity for a defence of a traditional society and values, and accepted the prospect of a multi-cultural society. As will be argued in the next chapter, this position is in conflict with what the Lega Nord is currently advocating. Indeed, industrialists in Treviso, a city and a province in the Veneto both administered by the Lega, recently launched a campaign for attracting extra-EU immigrants to their locality, and to this end chose to portray themselves as ex-migrants. Many firms also deliberately stressed the multi-ethnic composition of their workforce in their publicity material. Nor did the industrialists interviewed in October 2000 appear concerned or anxious regarding the possible loss of their local roots or traditions. On the one hand, they sounded confident that it was possible to reconcile these traditions with an infusion of external cultures brought by the different groups of migrants. On the other hand, they all stressed the positive value, in economic terms, of local specificities and cultures. They seemed to have rediscovered the importance of ‘local traditions’ as a marketing tool, to be sold to, as opposed to be shielded against, the outside world. As far as the Lega was concerned, although no explicit questions were asked of their voting behaviour, there was a general and undisguised feeling of disappointment among all the businesspeople interviewed. According to Moretti Polegato, the Lega’s protest had been both useful and legitimate, but the party had failed to act ‘in positive’. Today in the Veneto there was ‘no-one: not Berlusconi nor D’Alema’ and indeed many people, particularly the young, looked up to the entrepreneurs as if they possessed a solution to all the problems. Veronesi stated that ‘we believed in Bossi’s discourse, above all in federalism because for us Rome is further away than London or New York. Venice itself is far away, let alone Rome’. He added, however, that ‘Padania does not exist, it is just one of Bossi’s inventions’. Among the various initiatives promoted by regional business was the creation, in November 1994, of an Industrial Districts Club, in order to ‘give voice and representation to local production systems, a typically


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Italian economic-territorial model’ (http://www.clubdistretti.it, November, 1994). The main objectives of the Club were to promote relations with decision-making centres responsible for industrial policy, both at national and European levels; to foster links and exchanges of information between the various Italian (and non-Italian) industrial districts; and to promote the image of industrial districts, as well as financing studies and research projects leading to the identification of appropriate economic and industrial policies. Numerous conferences and workshops were also organized at local and regional level, sponsored by private associations and public institutions, on topics of direct interest to and responding to the needs of industrial districts. One such conference, on ‘The new Challenges for Industrial Districts’, with particular reference to the North-East, was held in Venice on 19–20 January 1998 (http://www.ilsole24ore.com/nordest, January 1998). Among the various speeches, there were repeated requests for institutional reforms in favour of greater decentralization and fiscal federalism, so as to facilitate the increasing – and inevitable – territorialization of economic development and economic policy. More recently, the Regional Federation of Veneto Industrialists launched a five year (2000–2005) strategic plan for revitalizing the regional economy. The plan revolved around three fundamental proposals: regional federalism, including the creation of a senate of the regions, political and fiscal autonomy, and subsidiarity, particularly from the public to the private sector. At the same time, the document made it clear that regional business supported federalism because ‘it is useful, not to create nations or peoples in opposition to the national state’. It therefore condemned the ‘excess of ideology’ which weakened the political project of federalism and argued that the role of regions in Europe can only grow if decoupled from any ethno-nationalist concept (http://www.ilsole24ore.com/nordest, January 2000). A similar pragmatic approach was adopted by the ‘Foundation NorthEast’, which put forward its own proposals for constitutional change in Italy (Il Sole 24 Ore, 15 February 2000). The Foundation proposed the creation of a federalist system of variable geometry, modelled along the lines of the Spanish system of ‘Autonomous Communities’. Individual regions would be left free to decide which areas of policy-making (out of those not attributed exclusively to the central state) they would want to become responsible for and the timescale they would require to do so. In this way, some regions would be able to proceed more quickly than others along the road of fiscal and political autonomy, and to respond in a flexible manner to the specific needs of their economies.

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Conclusions This chapter started by addressing some key questions related to the rise and electoral success of the Lega Nord in the late 1980s and 1990s. It then proceeded to link this party to a specific socio-economic constituency (industrial districts), representing both a cohesive community and a model of industrialization. We explored this link both in electoral terms and in terms of the economic programme and the cultural values espoused by the party. On the basis of the arguments put forward in this chapter it is now possible to answer the questions raised in the opening section. In terms of the timing for the Lega Nord’s political success in the early 1990s, this can be explained to a large extent by the fact that it took on the representation of the interests of a local model of economic development, replacing a party (Christian Democracy) which was unable to offer efficient public services, reduced bureaucracy, access to finance, reduced fiscal pressures and, last but not least, effective regional governance. In this context the difference between voters’ behaviour in the ‘white’ and ‘red’ areas can be attributed at least in part to the greater efficiency and more active involvement of local government and political institutions in supporting economic development in regions like Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany compared to the performance of the local and regional governments of Lombardy and the Veneto (Brusco, 1986; Trigilia, 1986). The replacement, in the most productive and ‘modern’ areas of the country, of one political party with another presenting comparable traits in the form of an ideology based on the idea of an ‘organic community’ and a collective identity, was not surprising. The main characteristic of ‘local production systems’ is not liberal individualism; rather, they combine entrepreneurial values with informal social networks, an industrial economy with an unpolarized society and an urban with a rural landscape (the so-called ‘urbanized countryside’). Incidentally, this highlights the difficulty of defining neo-populism as a reaction against liberal individualism (Taggart, 2000, p. 116). In general terms this is certainly true, nevertheless liberal individualism in Italy was not the defining trait of any of the major parties of the First Republic. The main difference between Christian Democracy and the Lega was that one emphasized inclusion and the other exclusion, but they both dealt ‘in collectivities’. It is perhaps more accurate to define the Lega in terms of fear of liberal individualism, whereas in the heyday of Christian Democracy there was an unchallenged dominance of family,


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religious and community values. The irony is that the core of Lega’s voters in areas of small-scale industrialization at the beginning of the 1990s appeared to have embraced individualistic and market values, accompanied by an exclusionary commitment to their locality and region as well as intolerance towards immigrants. By contrast, Christian Democratic voters in the same areas expressed either familistic or solidaristic values, but also multiple territorial identities and tolerance towards outsiders (Cento Bull, 2000). The (re)creation of a collective identity out of localistic values and cultures went hand in hand with a pragmatic political offer. The political programme of the Lega Nord, with its emphasis on regional autonomy and regional governance, fewer taxes for businesses, and less bureaucracy, was devised in response to and showed great awareness of the needs of small- and medium-sized enterprises forming integrated industrial districts. If this was the milieu from which the Lega originated and whose interests it represented in the first half of the 1990s, the relationship between the party and its territorially-based socio-economic constituency has since experienced alternate fortunes. In the second half of that decade, there were signs that the paths followed by the northern industrial districts and the Lega Nord had started to diverge. The districts learnt to raise their voice using their own channels of communication, rather than through the medium of a political party, and clearly rejected ethno-nationalism. They also started to resurrect their traditional ‘strong capacity for assimilation’ (Becattini, 1990, p. 40) vis-à-vis immigrants from outside, despite the perceived cultural and geographical distance of the ‘new immigrants’. The Lega, in contrast, decided to embrace the ‘minority nationalism’ project, with uneven results, so much so that it has now played it down. The 1999 European elections appeared to indicate that the symbiosis between the economic and political protagonists of the north-eastern regions which characterized the 1990s was coming to an end. Yet at the recent regional elections the party obtained a respectable, though no longer commanding, result in both Lombardy and the Veneto. These same elections demonstrated that, whether or not the Lega can continue to play a subcultural role in some northern regions, the project of ‘regional devolution’ appears to be winning, thanks to a renewed alliance between this party and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, which was subject to the latter accepting the need to promote regional autonomy. The next two chapters will trace the ideological trajectory of the Lega Nord from regionalism to extreme nationalism and the uneven attempts

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by its competitors to erode and absorb its preferential electorate. Whatever the long-term political and electoral outcome, it is doubtful, however, whether the north-eastern socio-economic constituency would have been able to gain sufficient confidence (or indeed credibility) to put forward bold and radical proposals for political and fiscal federalism, as it has been doing in the late 1990s, without the maverick behaviour, uncompromising regionalist attitude, and even publicity stunts of the Lega Nord.

4 Padania and After

Introduction This chapter has a threefold purpose. First, to describe the Lega’s decision to press for the secession of all northern Italy from Tuscany upwards from the Italian state and to found a new ‘Republic of Padania’. This is certainly the aspect of the Lega’s political activity that has attracted most international attention. Hundreds of journalists from all over the world attended the symbolic foundation of Padania in Venice in September 1996. Secondly, the chapter aims to analyse the nature of the justifications advanced by the Lega to support the call for secession (and to suggest why Bossi believed secession was politically feasible). Previously, as we saw in Chapter 1, the Lega had limited itself to proposing the transformation of Italy into a confederation of three ‘macro-regions’. A more concrete exposition of the Lega’s ideas was produced in January 1995, when the Lega presented a blueprint for a federal re-organization of Italy to parliament. Drafted primarily by Francesco Enrico Speroni, the Minister for Constitutional Reform in the 1994 Berlusconi government, the plan’s most striking innovation was the recommendation that Italy should introduce a new tier of local administration, so-called ‘states’, on the model of Catalonia, as an intermediary between national government and the regional governments. The concept of Padania, however, was a much more audacious challenge to the integrity of the Italian state. Thirdly, this chapter wishes to record the Lega’s evolution into a party of the extreme right. Many commentators have described the Lega as being part of the ‘far right’, or ‘new right’, since its inception. Although aspects of the Lega’s political platform and style gave credence to these judgements, pigeon-holing the Lega in this way is inaccurate. There was 105

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a distinction between the populist neo-liberalism espoused by the Lega before 1995 and the ideology of movements such as the French National Front, or Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria. Since the foundation of Padania, however, that distinction has been eroded and the Lega should now be counted as an authentic member of the far-right ‘family’ of political parties.

The making of Padania Bossi began to talk of outright secession for the North almost immediately after the presentation to parliament of Speroni’s bill. Throughout 1995, while he continued to support Dini’s makeshift government in parliament, Bossi launched a number of initiatives designed to keep the movement’s increasingly vocal ‘independentists’ happy, and to recast the Lega’s long-term strategy as one of confrontation with the authority of the Italian state. Following better than expected results in local elections held in April-May 1995 (1.8 million votes, 6.6 per cent of those who voted), Bossi announced the formation of the ‘Parliament of the North’, which would meet in Mantua (a small town on the borders of Lombardy, the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna that the Lega had previously designated the ‘capital’ of the Republic of the North) to decide the precise nature of the federalism wanted by the Lega and to draw up a constitution for an autonomous northern state. An openly stated goal of this body was to bind the Lega’s leading members more tightly to the cause and to remind its leadership élite that their first duty, irrespective of their political beliefs, was to fight for the ‘independence of the North’, not the ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ of the Italian political system (Bossi, 1996a, p. 7). The ‘parliament’ (which was composed of all the Lega’s elected officials) met for the first time on 7 June 1995. Bossi was subsequently investigated by the local public prosecutor for the secessionist tone of his remarks at this gathering (Article 241 of the Italian penal code, despite a constitutional guarantee of free speech, makes ‘attempts against the integrity, independence or unity of the Italian state’ a crime punishable by life imprisonment). Bossi continued to proclaim the possibility of secession throughout the run-up to the general elections which, after a January government crisis, were fixed for 21 April 1996. At first sight, this hard line was surprising. Politics in Italy had been revitalized in the wake of the crisis of the Berlusconi government by the formation in February 1995 of a new political subject, the Ulivo (Olive Tree), a 12-party grouping of the centre and left that included both the PDS and the PPI but did not include Communist Refoundation. This

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coalition acknowledged the leadership of Romano Prodi, an economics professor from Bologna who had successfully managed the huge stateholding company IRI in the 1980s, and had already achieved one partial success in the May 1995 local elections when the Ulivo parties had inflicted an unexpected defeat on Forza Italia, the AN and their allies (Gilbert, 1996, pp. 101–7). Prodi committed himself early on to ‘a German-style federal system with a strong form of fiscal and administrative autonomy balanced by a solidarity fund . . . that transfers resources from the richer regions to the poorer ones’ and insisted that ‘agriculture, schools, healthcare, planning, development and industrial policy’ ought to be decentralized from Rome to the periphery (Prodi, 1995, p. 43). Bossi was already collaborating in parliament with the Ulivo’s constituent members, and Prodi’s acceptance of federalism (which was fleshed out in the coalition’s December 1995 manifesto) seemed to mark the new alliance out as a potential electoral partner for the Lega. The Lega’s secessionist rhetoric – which was beyond the pale for the mainstream parties – snubbed this overture and compelled the Lega to compete in the 1996 elections as a ‘third pole’ between Berlusconi’s ‘Liberty Pole’ alliance and the Ulivo. Ilvo Diamanti regards this approach essentially as a tactic. Bossi, he argues, was trying to ‘canalize all sources of dissent and tension emerging in the North’ by turning the election into a referendum on northern autonomy (Diamanti, 1997b, p. 86). At the same time, Diamanti suggests that the Lega expected this strategy to backfire in terms of votes: opinion polls consistently predicted that the Lega would have to submit to a substantial fall in their vote and a reduction in their parliamentary contingent to 20 deputies or less. Diamanti contends, however, that the Lega still hoped, even with this limited bloc of deputies, to play a pivotal role in the new legislature, since its leaders believed that the new parliament would have no stable majority (Diamanti, 1997b, p. 87). It is interesting to compare this analysis – which presents the Lega’s position as a matter of fine political calculation – with Bossi’s own explanation of the movement’s political line. Bossi’s ‘Lettera ai Militanti Leghisti’, diffused to party activists on the eve of the poll, presents the Lega’s position as an existential struggle between the forces of ‘Roma Padrona’ and Padania. The Roman forces were divided into two camps; the Liberty Pole, representing the ‘Mafia’, and ‘southernism’, and the Ulivo, which apparently represented ‘Big Capital’ (One of the Lega’s electoral slogans was: ‘A Vote for the Ulivo is a vote for Agnelli’). Both ‘Roman’ forces, despite their different paymasters, were allegedly united in a single philosophy: ‘The North should work. Rome commands’.

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Both ‘Roman’ coalitions, Bossi warned, would like to have ‘the Lega’s votes, but not its ideas’. For this reason, the Lega was determined not to be drawn into ‘political deals with those who want it dead’, but would press on with its project to construct an independent northern state governed by a political class that was uncontaminated by Roman corruption (Bossi, 1996b, pp. 9–10). Despite his peculiar language, it is clear that Bossi wished to underline that the Lega’s choice of staying aloof from political horse-trading was a question of the deepest principle. A more Machiavellian reading is possible. The Lega’s distinctive political identity would have been compromised had it co-operated with the centre-left to bring into law solid, concrete measures of administrative decentralization. By declaring for secession, Bossi was upping the ante and staking out territory where he knew nobody would follow him. Had he then held the balance of power in parliament, he might have been able to negotiate with the Ulivo while retaining the Lega’s claim to be the only party truly committed to genuine autonomy for the North. In an interview we conducted with Marco Formentini, a fourth explanation was suggested. Formentini considers that Bossi’s decision to make Padania the centre piece of the Lega’s programme was the fruit of a guess about Italy’s future economic prospects. The task facing any elected Italian government in 1996 was daunting. Italy had committed herself to entering the Euro on schedule in 1999. But in 1996, Italy’s public finances and economic model were not ready for the single currency. The public debt languished at 123 per cent of GDP (the Maastricht criterion was 60 per cent); interest rates were several points higher than Germany’s; the annual public spending deficit was 8 per cent of GDP; inflation was well over the EC average. Any Italian government elected in 1996 could only realistically offer five years of austerity and five years of socially divisive reforms such as privatization. Bossi, according to Formentini, guessed that Berlusconi would not even try to meet the Maastricht criteria and that the Ulivo would disintegrate under the effort. Italy would face exclusion from Europe and northern Italy’s small-business community would see their core market threatened. Under such circumstances, it was not fantasy politics to imagine that support would grow in the North for secession from Rome. The Lega would have been able plausibly to say that Europe had not rejected Lombardy and the Veneto, but had turned its back on the incompetence and corruption of the Italian state (Formentini 2000). Almost certainly, too, Bossi would have found plenty of political allies in northern

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The General Elections of 1996: Chamber of Deputies

Party/Coalition

FPTP Seats

Ulivo R. Comunista Polo libertà Lega Nord Others

247 15 169 39 5

PR Votes (%) 13 051 3 216 15 781 3 778 1 669

PR Seats (34.8) (8.6) (42.1) (10.1) (4.4)

38 20 77 20 0

All votes expressed in thousands and rounded to nearest thousand. FPTP Seats: candidates elected in Single Member Constituencies. Parties obtaining less than 4 per cent of vote excluded from PR distribution of seats. Ulivo vote includes: PDS, PPI, Rinnovamento Italiano (Italian Renewal: RI), Verdi, 11 smaller parties. Source: Politica in Italia: Edizione 1997 (Bologna: Il Mulino), p. 50.

Europe who would have been as reluctant to see Padania out of the Euro-zone as they would have been delighted to see the rest of Italy excluded. Whichever interpretation is preferred as an explanation for the Lega’s decision to contest the 1996 general elections alone, the electoral success of Bossi’s choice cannot be gainsaid. The Lega’s performance in the 1996 election was one of the most remarkable successes achieved by a non-traditional party in post-war European history. The Lega won a startling number of seats even in the single-member constituencies, and asserted itself as the foremost political force north of the river Po. After the results of the 1996 poll, it was no longer possible for anybody to dismiss the movement as a party of mere protest that would not endure. The strength of the Lega’s vote illustrated beyond argument that it was capable of exercising a genuine representative function for millions of northern Italians of all social classes. With these results, the Lega re-established itself as the fourth largest party in the country. Only the PDS (21 per cent), Forza Italia (20.6 per cent) and the National Alliance (15.7 per cent) were bigger. In Lombardy, the Lega became the largest party for the first time in a general election, with over 1.6 million votes. In the ‘Lombardy 2’ electoral college, the Lega won 20 out of 39 seats directly and took almost 36 per cent of the vote. It won over 30 per cent of the vote in six provinces in Lombardy, three in the Veneto, and in the provinces of Pordenone and Cuneo. The Lega gained hugely in the North-East, recording nearly 1 million votes in the Veneto (almost 30 per cent) and 200,000 in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The only setback was the movement’s relatively weak performance in

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the large towns. The movement obtained a relatively disappointing 12 per cent of the vote in Milan and less than 10 per cent in Genoa, Turin, Bologna and Trieste (Biorcio, 1997, p. 91). Another fly in the ointment was that the Lega, despite its larger than expected parliamentary contingent, was not able to act as the pivot between the two coalitions. Nearly three million more people voted for Ulivo candidates in single-member constituencies than in the proportional ballot: a huge vote of confidence in Romano Prodi, the coalition’s nominated leader, who subsequently became premier. This success in the 475 seats decided by first-past-the-post enabled the Ulivo, with the parliamentary support of Communist Refoundation, to pull off a narrow overall majority of five seats in the Chamber of Deputies (and a larger majority in the Senate). President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro had no hesitation in allowing the Ulivo to form a government that contained ten senior ministers from the PDS. For the first time in post-war Italy, the Left, albeit in a new liberal guise, had arrived in power. The Lega, by dint of its victories in Lombardy and the Veneto, and by virtue of its decision to run alone in April 1996, had added insult to the injury of overturning the Berlusconi cabinet and had consigned a broadly rightwing country over to the liberal left and its centrist allies. The electoral success gave a fillip to the secessionist tendency in the Lega’s policy. In the months following the April election, Bossi and the Lega became the centre of international attention as the movement set out to establish the institutions of Padania. In May 1996, the ‘parliament’ of Mantua changed its name to the ‘Parliament of Padania’ and adopted new standing orders. The Lega Nord changed the name of its group in the Italian parliament to the ‘Lega Nord for the Independence of Padania’. Still in May, a ‘Government of the Sun’ was established, with a former minister in the Berlusconi administration, Giancarlo Pagliarini, as prime minister. In June, a ‘Committee for the Liberation of Padania’ headed by Roberto Maroni, was created. Ominously in the eyes of many, the Lega decided that the new ‘state’ required a security force to maintain order at the Lega’s rallies and meetings; these so-called ‘greenshirts’ were denounced by Irene Pivetti as evidence of a fascistic turn in the movement’s history. In fairness, alarm over the ‘greenshirts’ has proved to be misplaced: there have been no recorded episodes of fascist-style violence on the part of the greenshirts, although vigilante groups including Lega activists have been involved in heavyhanded behaviour towards immigrants in some northern towns. Pivetti, however, paid heavily for voicing her doubts. In the summer of 1996, she was driven out of the movement – the first of many relative

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moderates within the movement who would find swallowing the new party line to be impossible. As Ilvo Diamanti has pointed out, there is no doubt that an important aspect of the decision to found Padania was Bossi’s desire to ‘close ranks and to re-take control of an organization and a mass membership that had become too diverse in character and contradictory in their views’ (Diamanti, 1997b, p. 98). In September 1996, before the watching eyes of the world’s press, Bossi symbolically founded the new state of Padania by travelling down the river Po with a ‘sacred ampoule’ of water from the river’s source to Venice where the ‘Government of the Sun’ swore allegiance to the new ‘Provisional Constitution’ of Padania. According to the Lega, four million people took part in the celebrations: the police estimated that between 400 and 700,000 participated, still a far from insignificant number. The ‘Declaration of Independence and Sovereignty for Padania’, to which the Provisional Constitution was attached, is a document well worth studying in detail. Its lengthy preamble gives a remarkable insight into the mind of the Lega’s leaders and activists. The overwhelming impression that is left by the document is one of authentic rage towards Italy and the Italian state. The ‘history of the Italian state’, it argues, is ‘a history of colonialist oppression, economic exploitation and moral violence’; the Italian state ‘has compromised the serenity of future generations of Padanians by throwing away enormous resources on spendthrift, criminal, clientelistic and fraudulent policies that have brought Italy to an inevitable state of bankruptcy’; it has ‘cheated the peoples of Padania’ into financing the wasteful ‘clientelistic and mafialinked welfare dependency of the South’; it has ‘deliberately attempted to suppress the languages and identities of the peoples of Padania via the colonization of the public schools’; it has ‘enforced the application of its iniquitous laws in Padania through an openly racist selection policy for judges’; it has maintained order in the provinces of the North via the prefecture system which had guaranteed a regime of the ‘most odious colonialism’. The gathered leghisti represented the ‘last hope that the Roman colonial regime can soon be brought to an end’ (Lega Nord 1996b). The following May, the Lega held a ‘referendum’ throughout Padania on the question ‘Do you wish Padania to become a sovereign independent republic?’ According to the movement, 4.8 million people voted and chose by a massive majority in favour of the creation of the new state. It might be more accurate to say that 4.8 million votes were cast, but it was clear that plural voting took place on a massive scale.

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Nevertheless, several hundred thousand people undeniably did turn out to vote. In October 1997, the first elections to the Padanian parliament were held. Different lists, including Communists, Catholics, an agriculture and field sport alliance, European Liberal Democrats, the ‘Padanian Right’, presented candidates. Again according to the Lega – but this figure was quite fantastic – over six million people voted. The 210 ‘elected’ representatives took their seats in November 1997 and were given the task by Bossi of preparing two alternative draft constitutions, one ‘federal’, the other ‘confederal’, for an eventual further ‘nationwide’ plebiscite. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the controversial Russian nationalist leader, was an honoured guest at the ceremony. Beneath the pageantry and the symbolism, and the absurd series of rigged referenda and elections, the Lega was doing something deadly serious. It was trying to establish the institutions of a parallel state that might become accepted as the voice of the North. If, as an Italian scholar has argued, secessionism in the last resort is less about the capacity of the secessionist movement to win the intellectual case for its ideas than about its ability to mobilize public opinion and threaten the existing public order either democratically or with force, then the Lega, for all the absurdities of the Padania campaign, was not doing too badly (Nevola, 1998). The idea of Padania clearly did politicize hundreds of thousands of people in northern Italy and it energized the hard core of the Lega’s membership in a way that no other policy could have done. It also unquestionably contributed to a climate of rebellion in northern Italy that found expression in the disquieting attempt by a small band of self-styled ‘separatists’ in May 1997 to seize the bell-tower in Saint Mark’s square in Venice with a home-made armoured car. The eight men in the gang were swiftly arrested and given short prison sentences, but the incident – which was exploited by the Lega after some initial hesitation about appearing to condone illegality – was not as ludicrous as it at first seemed. Many in the Veneto supported the men and shared their view that they were political prisoners who had been engaged in a justifiable protest against Roman imperialism (Rumiz, 1997, p. 15). The idea of Padania was tapping into a reservoir of resentment that urgently needed to be drained if it were not to spill over into violence.

The theory and practice of Padanian nationalism The construction of Padania represented a decisive shift to ethnonationalism on the part of the Lega. While the Lega was under the influence of Miglio’s views, the movement’s political activity was directed

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primarily against the institutions of the Italian state. The centralized Italian national state was held to be functionally outmoded and, consequently, incapable of commanding its citizens’ loyalties. Padania, by contrast, represented an attack on the idea that Italy was a nation. The Lega’s ideologues, like the classic theorists of nationalism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Herder, Mazzini), increasingly suggested that Padania should become an independent state because its people(s), despite minor differences, shared a common identity that was distinct from the identities of the other peoples of Italy. The most important of these ideologues, Gilberto Oneto, is a minister for culture in the ‘Government of the Sun’ and is a regular contributor to the Lega’s daily newspaper, La Padania. Oneto’s book, L’invenzione della Padania, is a key document for scholars interested in understanding the Lega’s ethno-nationalist turn, and deserves extended treatment for this reason. Oneto’s central argument is that Padania exists geographically, ethnically, linguistically, culturally and economically; that its citizens throughout its history have struggled to assert their national identity; and that, consequently, Padania’s subordination to Rome should be seen as a historical injustice. The title of his book is hence something of a misnomer: there is no need to ‘invent’ something which already exists. Oneto says, however, he is using the word ‘inventare’ in an older, less commonly used sense meaning to ‘refind, return to, rediscover’ (Oneto, 1997, p. 7). As the failure of the centralized Italian state becomes ever clearer, Oneto says, the peoples of Padania are discovering ‘a desire for identity’ (p. 11). Each of Oneto’s arguments for the national identity of Padania could no doubt be the source of a lengthy quarrel with specialist ethnographers, linguists and geographers. Geographically, he argues that Padania is the ‘non-peninsular’ part of Italy that is drained by the great river Po: the Italian ‘boot’ in his view begins with the Apennines, which differ from the Alps in so far as they are ‘a hard-to-penetrate barrier’ (Oneto, p. 33). For centuries – right up, in fact, to the modern age – the peoples of Padania looked over the Alps rather than south of the Apennines for trade and cultural contacts. In fact, he plainly regards the Padanians as being but one of a larger group of middle European peoples such as the Occitans, Romansch, Tirolean Germans and Slovenes who have always – he claims – found the Alps a unifying rather than dividing natural barrier. The Padanians themselves, Oneto contends, on the whole come from different genetic stock to the peoples of middle Italy and the Mezzogiorno.

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Making reference to scholarly studies on the biological make-up of the Italians, he asserts that the genetic patrimony of northern Italians is derived primarily from the various pre-Roman ‘Celtic’ tribes, with a strong strain of Lombard mixed in, while central Italy is dominated by Etruscan genes and the Mezzogiorno by a DNA link that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks (pp. 49–59). His point is less that of showing that there is a Padanian ‘race’ – which would lead him open to the most unpleasant suspicions – than with showing that there has been remarkably little alteration in the gene pool of the region, which itself naturally implies that there has been great cultural continuity: a factor which Oneto regards as being far more influential than racial similarity in the creation of the sentiment of nationhood. Today’s inhabitants of Milan or Brescia or Verona are the direct descendants, for the most part, of shadowy tribes lost in the depths of time, although Oneto warns darkly that in recent generations ‘massive immigratory influxes’ and the low birthrate of the Padanians themselves, have begun to change the genetic picture in a way that even the Roman settlement of the area – which, with a flash of wit, he refers to as the ‘first Roman occupation’ – failed to do (p. 58). Oneto objects to the way that the rich genetic diversity of the Italian peninsula (and hence its cultural diversity) was ignored by the Fascist state’s racial laws, which attempted to impose the concept of the ‘Italian race’ on all the different cultures living under the jurisdiction of the Italian state. Even more strongly, he objects to the way that the languages of northern Italy have been denigrated as mere dialects lacking a written literature by the ‘Italocentric power structure’ and replaced by a ‘televisual, thin, banal’ Italian that is full of ‘Mediterranean inflexions and maritime sounds’. Giving way to hyperbole, Oneto describes the Italianization of local languages as an act of ‘cultural cleansing’; more moderately, he argues that the elimination of the region’s native languages has brought about a ‘levelling process’ and a grave loss in cultural pluralism (pp. 68–9). Oneto controversially claims, in fact, that the numerous languages of northern Italy are not especially close relations of Italian at all. They are ‘sisters’ of ‘Gallo-Romance’ languages such as French, Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese, but only ‘cousins’ of both Tuscan (the original source of Italian) and Italian proper. Despite these assertions, the book itself is written in (pungent and very readable) Italian, an irony of which Oneto appears to be unconscious. Oneto insists, however, that the cultural oppression practised by the Italian state has not managed to eliminate entirely the distinctive features of the common culture of all the various northern Italian

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ethno-linguistic groups. One such feature is the strong Catholicism of the area. Padania as a whole is a place ‘where religion is lived seriously’; a region that has produced both saints and popes (six out of the last eight) yet which has also been a constant source of schism and heresy (and hence innovation) within the Catholic faith. Padania, Oneto implies, is in fact the heartland of the Catholic faith: Rome has always been ‘papist’, he says, but for reasons that ‘have little to do with religious substance’, while the Mezzogiorno only became fully Catholic in the late Middle Ages (p. 104). A second unifying cultural factor is art and architecture. Oneto finds a common love of intricate decoration and bright colours in the popular art of Padania and claims that these traits can be traced back to Celtic and Lombard origins. The area has its own iconography and its peoples use symbols (the sun, the cross of St George, the Celtic cross, the dragon) which do not occur elsewhere in Italy. Cooking in Padania, despite local variations, differs sharply from the rest of Italy – a point, Oneto says, which may seem minor but which is really fundamental in characterizing daily life (p. 109). The area is distinguished by a strong sense of communal belonging. Oneto makes skilful use of the work of Robert Putnam, who, he says, has shown scientifically in Making Democracy Work what everybody in any case took for granted, namely, that the level of civic pride and organization is far higher throughout Padania than anywhere else in Italy and that the political culture upon which democracy rests is far more deeply rooted (Oneto, 1997, pp. 112–13). But this communal sentiment is allied throughout Padania to a profound economic individualism and entrepreneurial flair that sets the region apart from most of the rest of Italy. Padanians have a common interest in ensuring that the state is organized in such a way as to promote this characteristic and have a common sense of resentment that so much of their labour should have been exploited and wasted by the same alien state that has done so much to harm their language, traditions and way of life. Economic maltreatment has only aggravated a wider infringement of cultural identity; indeed, it is probably true that it was economic wrongs that roused the padani to a more general consciousness of their lost nationhood. The area’s defining cultural characteristics had remained substantially intact despite the onslaught of the Italian state and official Italian culture; economic disaffection has provided the peoples of Padania with the impulse to rediscover and valorize them (pp. 122–5). The sense of Padania being a ‘lost nation’ like the Kurds or the Basques is very powerful in Oneto’s book. It is very clear that Oneto

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regards northern Italy as a natural political unit whose formal constitution as a state has been prevented only by accidents of history and the malevolence of the Italian political class. The earliest projects of unification in the nineteenth century – by Vincenzo Gioberti, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Ferrari, Marco Minghetti – all took the constitution of a northern Italian state within a loose Italian federation for granted: only the Mazzinians (whom Oneto calls ‘irresponsible’) and a handful of ‘freemasons’ and ‘economic nabobs’ dared to think of uniting the entire peninsula. The undeniably statist, centralizing tendencies of the Italian state since unification, Oneto argues, have been the logical outcome of the fact that ‘nobody wanted a state like that and not many people wanted an [Italian] state at all’ (p. 89). With the creation of the Italian state, the age-old liberties of the city states of northern Italy were suppressed and the fiat of absolute central government imposed first through an artificial system of prefectures and then – in post-war democratic Italy – by the institution of regional government, an experiment which the Lega is not alone in believing to be a wasteful disaster (pp. 88–92). The North was not only not united in the mid-nineteenth century, it was deprived of its traditional ‘organic’ instruments of selfgovernment by an unscrupulous political élite. The problem with this analysis, of course, is that if any region of Italy lost out from unification it was the South. Probably Oneto would say that every part of Italy was robbed of its freedom when Italy was created. Certainly, this is the opinion of the more articulate members of the Lega Nord. The Risorgimento, one Lega pamphlet has argued, brought into being ‘A nation that isn’t’ (Grassini, 1995). Reading Oneto’s book, one is impressed by its coherently argued character. Anderson has shown that all nations are constructed by intellectuals on the basis of myths – ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991). Oneto’s book can and should be read as a sophisticated (and almost certainly conscious) attempt to fulfil this function for the Lega’s project of Padania. But the problem that Oneto faced was that founding myths need to enjoy widespread support for the nationalist project to be turned into reality. As Herb argues, a nation ‘evokes a stronger loyalty from its members than other communities’ (Herb, 1999, p. 16). In the case of Padania, this condition was not forthcoming. While some Lega activists – the fanatical hard core – did identify themselves with the new ‘nation’ (Biorcio, 1997, p. 203), relatively few northern Italians took Padania seriously. A poll carried out by the respected Milanese polling agency Diakron, in September 1996, found that 88.7 per cent of Italians were against the division of Italy into two halves. Even among

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northerners questioned in the sample, only 15.6 per cent agreed with secession – although this figure rose to nearly 21 per cent in the NorthEast, and to highs of 70 per cent among Lega diehards. A similar poll, carried out in January 1998 on behalf of the magazine liMes, found that 68.9 per cent of interviewed northerners regarded secession as ‘unacceptable or disastrous’. A further 17.4 per cent regarded it as ‘advantageous but unacceptable’. A mere 13.7 per cent regarded secession as ‘advantageous and desirable’. Among Lega voters, however, 45.5 per cent of those interviewed considered the foundation of Padania to be desirable (Diamanti, 1998, pp. 151–62). This evidence that the Lega’s views were merely those of a vocal minority was unsurprising, because, for all Oneto’s talk of a unified ‘Padanian’ culture, the cities, provinces and regions which constitute Padania are far from homogeneous. People from southern Italy live in its major cities in large numbers; to anybody but a Lega ideologue, all of Padania is culturally far more like Rome or Florence than Bolzano, Geneva or Klagenfurt; within the ‘Padanian’ people itself, there are substantial differences in cuisine, language, tradition, political culture. The Lega never explained how politically ‘red’ regions like Emilia-Romagna and Liguria were to be fitted into the Padania scheme; nor how the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano, which jealously guard their autonomy, were to be persuaded of the idea. The Lega might, arguably, have concentrated upon its regions of core support – Lombardy, the Veneto and Friuli – and claimed that these regions (which had been an administrative unit for decades under the Austrians) constituted a potential nation. But even this reduced version of Padania (which did at least have some historic provenance) would have fallen foul of the fact that the Liga Veneta was openly dubious of the Padania project. Many of the Veneti regarded their own region as a nation in the making. Once one begins emphasizing the distinctions between territorial identities, one is extending an open invitation to further fragmentation. Relatively minor variations of language or custom can, once they are politicized, rapidly be transformed into questions of deep principle. In fact, the short history of Padania illustrates this point very clearly. The task entrusted to the ‘Parliament’ elected in October 1997, of deciding whether Padania should have a ‘confederal’ or ‘federal’ constitution rapidly became the source of intense ideological conflict within the movement. Was Padania, as Oneto argued, a nation whose common cultural, economic and linguistic features authorized the establishment of a strong federal state on the American model? Or was it to be a mere

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co-ordinating body, on the Swiss model, for staunchly independent cantons enjoying almost total autonomy? The ‘Confederal Charter’ reflected the doubts of the Liga Veneta. Its leaders persisted in thinking of Veneto as being itself a nation and were suspicious that the concept of Padania was a device to extend Lombard hegemony over the movement. The charter proclaimed that Padania is ‘a voluntary union of free and independent communities’. Each and every community was free to secede from the union and no restriction or limitation could be placed upon this right. All powers were to be retained by the individual ‘nations’ composing Padania and the federal organizations would only have such powers as were conceded to them by the national communities. The two principal governing bodies of the new state (the ‘Padanian Council’ and the ‘Assembly of Delegates’) were to be entirely composed of individuals nominated by the respective communities. The federalists, by contrast, took the line suggested by Gilberto Oneto and stated that the peoples of Padania constituted a natural community that was more than the mere sum of its parts. They proposed the creation of a ‘Federal Union of Padania’ whose government was to be led by a ‘Federal Directory’ representing all the different component nations of the Union and chosen by the ‘Congress’ of the Federal Union, which was itself divided into an ‘Assembly’ and a Bundesrat-like ‘Chamber of Nations’. Secession from the ‘Federal Union’ was rendered extremely difficult and a long list of policy areas were declared to be the exclusive competence of the federal institutions (La Padania, 14 July 1998). In the end, no compromise was reached between the two draft constitutions. The debate over ‘which Padania’ merely exacerbated a concurrent clash between the Lega’s hierarchs over the movement’s political strategy. Reconstructing the internal conflict which wracked the movement from April to October 1998 is an exercise in Kremlinology since the only concrete evidence is elliptical interviews given by the protagonists to the movement’s newspaper, La Padania, and to other newspaper sources. It seems clear, however, that the leaders of the Liga Veneta, notably its secretary, Fabrizio Comencini, preferred a more pragmatic strategy to Bossi and proposed allying the movement to the other rightwing parties, notably Forza Italia, with the purpose of joining the regional government and pressing for concrete concessions on greater autonomy for the Veneto from Rome. Obtaining ‘special status’ as a region, like the Veneto’s neighbours Trentino-Alto Adige and FriuliVenezia Giulia, would by itself vastly increase the revenues that the regional government was entitled to spend and would enable the Lega to say to the voters that they had made real progress on redressing some

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of the legitimate grievances of northern Italian business and society. To Comencini and his supporters, this strategy seemed a far more sensible approach than wasting weeks drawing up fantasy constitutions in a pretend parliament. After blowing hot and cold on the idea of making an electoral pact with Forza Italia, in the summer of 1998 Bossi announced a further evolution of the Lega’s policy: the formation of the so-called ‘blocco padano’. This change of line tacitly acknowledged that the Lega’s political activity had become too abstract and ideological by emphasizing that the Lega’s public officials, particularly their mayors, had to take a higher profile and campaign more actively to combat the specific issues (urban delinquency, loneliness among the old, lack of spiritual values among the young, petty criminality and illegal immigration) that were being voiced by civil society in northern Italy. To achieve this goal the Lega has blatantly borrowed the techniques of the former PCI and is attempting to permeate the society of northern Italy through a web of associations that are trying to involve different groups from civil society in the Lega’s political struggle. Pensioners, Catholics, hunters, farmers, small businesses have all been targeted. Lega scout troops, and even associations for immigrants and gays have been created. A TV channel – Telepadania – has been on air since October 1998. As the Gramscian overtones of the new strategy suggest, the Lega’s objective was to build hegemony in Padania by winning over the hearts and minds of the ordinary citizens who care less for theoretical debates over nationalism and more for safe streets and their traditional way of life. The new line led to a thorough purge of Comencini and the regional councillors who backed him. The idea that the Veneto could win itself ‘special status’ was derided and supporters of the Veneto leader were denounced as ‘traitors’, ‘mafiosi’, ‘sharks’ and ‘sell-outs’. For several days in September–October 1998 the correspondence and editorial columns of La Padania were the theatre for a public show trial of the deviants who had dared to challenge the party line (see La Padania, 7 October 1998, for an especially gross example). Militants and party bosses fell over themselves to abuse Comencini in the grossest terms and to laud Bossi’s political acumen and leadership qualities. The overall impression left by the episode was one of near-Stalinist conformity. Comencini, by challenging the party line, had become an unperson, or, more accurately perhaps, a ‘Goldstein’ hate figure upon whom true Padanians could vent their spleen. In 1999, when Bossi began to inch the party’s political line back towards an alliance with Forza Italia, and thus adopted Comencini’s policies without the encumbrance of Comencini

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himself, the same blow torch of intolerance – to use Orwell’s brilliant metaphor – was swung in the direction of the handful of former loyalists, led by the former Mayor of Milan, Marco Formentini, who continued to argue the by now forlorn proposition that the Lega should be a party of the liberal centre, closely co-operating with the progressive Catholic and social democratic parties then in government. The Lega has never been tolerant of deviance from the party line. Nevertheless, since the ‘invention of Padania’, its internal schisms have been more frequent and its treatment of dissidents has been more brutal. It is surely plausible to attribute this growing intolerance to the negative influence of nationalist ideology. Isaiah Berlin convincingly argued that nationalism is a combination of two convictions. The first conviction possessed by nationalists is that a given community of human beings is distinguished from other communities by belonging to a particular territory, by having particular laws, traditions, forms of artistic and religious expression, language and so on. The mass of the Lega’s membership and leadership plainly believes that Padania is a nation in this sense (though its view is open to question). The second conviction is that one achieves human fulfilment by identifying oneself with one’s community’s values and mores – not by pursuing your own individual ends in your own way and subscribing to your individual ideas and beliefs (Berlin, 1982, pp. 341–3). It is un-American to be a communist. In this second regard – which can so easily lead to intolerance and the branding of any unorthodoxy as perilous deviancy – the Lega passes the test with flying colours. Oneto’s book blames ‘psychological encrustations’ induced by ‘italocentric propaganda’ for the fact that many northern Italians continue to believe that Italy should be a unified state with a capital in Rome (Oneto, 1997, p. 148). Such people are, in short, suffering from false consciousness; have not realized their true identity; must be shown the light by the missionaries from the only true party of the padani. In the same way, the notion that the Italian North-East (roughly speaking the belt of territory running from Verona to the Austrian and Slovenian borders) might be a separate industrial and cultural reality from the rest of Padania is dismissed by Oneto as a ‘piece of mythology’ invented with the goal of sowing dissension among the ranks of the Padanian body politic (p. 124). Admitting this fact (which is well attested to by social scientists and economic historians) is simply not thinkable to Lega ideologues. In their eyes, the Veneti, while a valuable strand in the broader weave of Padanian culture, are part of the greater Padanian whole. Anybody within the movement who denies this ideological imperative is regarded, in the most literal sense of the words,

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as an ‘enemy of the people’. Comencini and the Liga Veneta, therefore, did not just call into question Bossi’s hegemony over the movement in 1998, they betrayed the national cause – and received the treatment that traitors deserve.

The sectarianism of the Lega Doctrine alone, however, does not explain the viciousness of the Comencini episode. The Lega’s mindset is essentially sectarian and the movement has always been organized as a conspiracy against the Italian state. Just as it is widely accepted by scholars of early Soviet history that the tightly disciplined underground organization of the Bolshevik party was an important breeding ground for the intolerance and ruthlessness of the government of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, so it seems probable that the Lega’s subordination to Bossi for over 20 years has inculcated the conviction that to dissent from the party line (certainly to organize support for one’s own dissenting view) is an act of betrayal towards the supreme leader. Immediately after the defection of Comencini, control over dissident behaviour was tightened still further. An analysis of the Lega’s latest statute (approved on 24–5 October 1998) confirms the sectarian character of the movement all too clearly (Lega Nord, 1998a). The font of institutional authority in the Lega is the so-called ‘Federal Congress’, which, under normal circumstances, meets every three years to elect the federal president and the federal secretary; to modify the statute; to ‘define the movement’s political and programmatic line’; and to elect the two bodies responsible for the day-to-day running of the Lega in between congresses: the ‘Federal Council’ and the ‘Federal Assembly’. An emergency congress, however, can be called by either two-thirds of the Federal Council, or by the Federal Secretary – Bossi, naturally. Delegates to the Federal Congress are died-in-the-wool leghisti of great commitment and experience and are mostly drawn (though some of Padania’s ‘founding fathers’ have automatic right to participate) from the 14 ‘nations’ federated within the movement. The ‘nations’ (the regional federations of Lombardy, the Marche, the Veneto, Valle d’Aosta, Tuscany, Piedmont, Umbria, Liguria and Friuli; the provinces of Trento, Alto Adige, Emilia, Romagna and Trieste) are represented at the congress by their local leaders plus one delegate for every 300,000 citizens and two delegates for every percentage point (or fraction thereof) obtained in the most recent European, general or regional elections. This last clause, though reasonable enough in terms

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of democratic principle, has the effect of ensuring that Bossi’s Lombard power base is the preponderant minority at the congress. The congress is essentially the body that expresses the General Will of the movement. But the interpreter of the General Will is the Federal Secretary, who is intimately involved at every institutional level. As article 15 of the statute states, the Federal Secretary ‘has co-ordination and supervisory functions towards all the organs of the movement’. Most importantly, he calls meetings of and presides over the Federal Council, which is, in effect, a somewhat unwieldy cabinet (it has over 30 members) that has ‘the power to direct the day-to-day organization of the movement’. Crucially (article 14), it may, ‘upon the request of the Federal Secretary’, ‘dissolve any national council that is acting in open contrast with the political, moral and administrative line established by the Federal Congress’. In other words, Bossi, so long as he maintains control of an absolute majority of the Federal Council, can quash any signs of dissent at sub-federal level by invoking this article of the statute. Equally importantly, the Federal Council has the final say on the list of candidates that the movement will present in any general or European election, although the national secretaries draw up an initial list. This is a significant power of patronage. Bossi, via the council, can make or break the career of the movement’s high flyers. The Federal Secretary also belongs to the Federal Assembly, which is the movement’s parliament consisting of 50 members elected by the Federal Congress, plus all the movement’s representatives in the Italian national parliament, representatives from the ‘national’ and provincial organizations, plus elected regional councillors. Although this body, which has the task of ‘evaluating the work of the Federal Council’, is presided over by the Federal President, not the Federal Secretary, the Federal Secretary may call it into session. In the event of a rebellion against the Federal Secretary in the Council, this power could be used to reassert the Secretary’s authority, not least because no one may be an elected member of both bodies. Ideological control over the movement is maintained through the powers of the ‘Office of the political secretariat’, a kind of inner cabinet approximating to the ‘Directing committee’ of the old PCI, which the Federal Secretary chairs. This office, among other things, controls the activities of the ‘Enti Locali Padani Federali’, whose chief co-ordinator can be both nominated and sacked at the discretion of the Federal Secretary. According to the statute (article 19), these bodies ‘implement the concrete application of the political line of the movement, in accordance with the directives of the Federal Council, and provide

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technical, judicial and legislative support to the organs of the movement’. In other words, they ensure that the legislative and political activities of the ‘nations’ and the provincial and communal federations in every stratum of local government follow the party line. To our knowledge, these bodies have never been the object of systematic study and it is unclear to what extent their remit turns them into a watchdog against deviance at local level. Their potential to act as commissars on behalf of the Federal Secretary is obvious. The Lega’s institutional structure thus reveals itself to follow the classic sectarian model. It is based upon a charismatic leader whose font of power is his ability to inspire and personify an assembly of committed party members, but who shores up his position in between assemblies through his centrality to the functioning of a complex institutional structure. Bossi has done his best to make his position institutionally fireproof. The only way he could be challenged would be if a numerically large conspiracy of two-thirds of the Federal Council invoked an extraordinary Federal Congress and presented a convincing alternative candidate and programme. Bossi has evidently read Machiavelli. The larger the conspiracy, the harder it is to commit regicide. Long before any conspiracy against Bossi reached danger point, the secret would be discovered and the heresy stamped out. It is also difficult to imagine, in any case, that any alternative leader could ever build up a sufficient power base among the mass membership. The Lega’s membership is subjected to rigid supervision of its opinions and behaviour. All members, from Bossi downwards, belong to one of two categories of membership: ‘Ordinary Militants’ or ‘Supporters’. All would-be members have to begin as ‘Supporters’ and have to prove their worth to the movement during a six-month trial period. At the end of this period, the ‘Supporter’ may present his or her request for promotion to the municipal section of the party. Rather like the banns before a marriage, this application is openly exhibited for 20 days in order to give objectors time to formulate their doubts. The leaders of the municipal section then forward a report on the individual to the provincial party leadership, which makes the final decision. No ‘Supporter’ can be made an ‘ordinary militant’ in the month preceding a provincial, ‘national’ or Federal Congress. ‘Ordinary Militants’ have the right to vote in the movement’s various internal elections, but otherwise, as members of the elect, they only add to their duties by becoming full members. Article 30 (a) of the statute clearly states that ‘Ordinary Militants’ have the ‘duty’ to participate actively in the ‘associative life’ of the movement. Their membership is

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controlled territorially – if an ‘Ordinary Militant’ moves from one region to another, his or her membership is re-evaluated by the national council of the region to which he or she is moving, on the basis of a report written by the two provincial management committees. For a move within any given province, the same procedure holds, with local sections having to report to the provincial party authorities. ‘Ordinary Militants’ may not belong to any other political party or political movement, may not be a freemason, may not even belong to any unauthorized ‘civic list’. Expulsion is immediate for any breach of this rule. ‘Ordinary Militants’ may also be degraded to the status of ‘Supporter’ for a full year if, in the view of their local section management committee, their political activity has been insufficiently zealous. A National Council and/or the Federal Council can decide to dissolve and reconstitute (article 31) entire municipal sections on the same principle; provincial sections can be dissolved by the Federal Council. Article 51 of the statute sums up neatly the disciplinary procedures preferred by the movement: ‘Each organ of the movement watches over (vigila) the political behaviour of each member and the extent to which he or she observes the provisions of the statute’. The Lega’s members need to catch their superiors’ eye to get promoted, and once promoted they need to conform their opinions to the prevailing view of the party hierarchy. Not doing so runs the risk of being judged immoral or of being insufficiently zealous in the cause.

A far-right party The Lega’s sectarian organization, its intolerance of internal dissent, its nationalist doctrines, its hostility towards non-white immigration, plainly locate the Lega Nord on the right of the political spectrum. Indeed, many scholars have classified it as a party of the ‘extreme right’ or ‘far right’ from its very inception. (see Betz, 1994, for a bibliography). Yet its location in this category was long dubious in so far as even the broadest definitions of the extreme-right ‘family’ of parties seemed to exclude it. Falter and Schumann, for instance, have identified ‘Extreme nationalism, ethnocentrism, anti-communism, anti-parliamentarianism, anti-pluralism, militarism, law-and-order thinking, a demand for a strong political leader and/or executive, anti-Americanism and cultural pessimism’ as the hallmarks of a far right party (Falter and Schumann, 1988, p. 101). In several important ways, the Lega Nord fitted this definition imperfectly until after the birth of Padania. At first, the Lega was anything but

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an extreme nationalist party. It saw its activity primarily as a struggle for the federalist principle both within Italy and without and was a keen proponent of European integration, although with the important qualification that it was opposed to what Bossi described as the Europe of the ‘great concentrations (centralismi) that are favoured by the capitalist barons (rei del denaro . . . who) . . . constitute a shadowy and anti-democratic oligarchy’ (Bossi, 1992, p. 202). A Lega document from 1993 described the Lega’s ‘great project’ as being the foundation of ‘an Italian federal state based upon macroregions that reflect the principal social-economic areas of our country and in which the macroregions themselves are the principal point of reference for the European Community’. The Lega lauded the decision to create a ‘Committee of Regions’ at Maastricht and pointed out the undeniable contradiction inherent in the Italian state’s willingness to sign international treaties that were based upon the principle of subsidiarity, and its reluctance, in domestic politics, to renounce its ‘eighteenth-century conception of the state’ by granting more powers to sub-national tiers of administration (Lega Nord, 1993). This general approach was repeated in the movement’s 1996 election manifesto. There, the Lega argued that Maastricht should be revised to encompass a generic right to self-determination for all peoples, and a substantial increase in powers for the Council of the Regions, leading eventually to its becoming a second parliamentary chamber for Europe as a whole. Valorizing the role of the regions, the Lega argued, was the ‘best antidote to the rise of a European super-state’ (Lega Nord, 1996a). The Lega was anything but crudely anti-communist. Of course, Bossi – legitimately in many ways – lumped the PCI in with the power structure of the Italian First Republic and the party came in for its share of the Lega’s ritual propaganda. But he was able to live in parliamentary harmony with the PCI’s heirs, the PDS, between 1995 and 1996, and he has more than once expressed his esteem for the ex-Communists’ leadership. The Lega has to some extent, as we have seen, also expropriated the PCI’s language and organization: the last refuge of democratic centralism is the institutional structure of the Lega Nord. Throughout the early 1990s, the Lega never played the anti-communist card in the way that Silvio Berlusconi has, despite the fact that its public of small entrepreneurs and shopkeepers were more than willing to listen to extremist rhetoric on this topic. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia continues even today, long after the old PCI has been transformed into a reformist Social Democrat party with a liberal agenda (Gilbert, 1998) to warn of the red peril in Italy, to highlight the moral and material failures of

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communism and, invidiously, to suggest that the collapse of the First Republic was a coup d’état carried out by communist sympathizers in the judiciary to rid the post-communists of uncomfortable opponents like Bettino Craxi and Berlusconi himself (Burnett and Mantovani, 1998). One of the more striking paradoxes of the Lega has been its nearpacifist line in international questions. It opposed the Gulf War in 1991 at least partly out of pacifist principle and Bossi has expressed his admiration for Gandhian tactics of civil disobedience: his notorious comment in August 1993 that the Lega would take up their kalashnikovs and shoot if they were denied political power is generally regarded as being a typical piece of verbal pyrotechnics rather than a serious threat. Unlike, say, the National Alliance, Italy’s post-fascist party, the Lega appears to have relatively little following among policemen and soldiers. None of the Lega’s elected candidates in the 1992 parliamentary elections had been a professional soldier or policeman (Canteri and Ottaviani, 1992). The movement has always opposed the death penalty, and its statements on law and order, which have always been at the heart of its local appeal for northern voters, while undeniably strident (and deeply stained with anti-immigrant feeling) have not been noticeably out of tune with what most middle-class Italians actually think about the precipitous decline in civic standards in the urban North. The increase in street crime, prostitution and drugs has become a major issue in northern Italian cities and plenty of politicians on the left have been echoing the Lega’s calls for greater security and stiffer prison sentences. One can find off-the-cuff remarks in Bossi’s early writings against American capitalism, but they do not add up to a cultural critique. ‘New Right’-style homilies to the glories of European civilization and the dangers presented by consumer capitalism – a staple in the newspapers and magazines of the AN (Ignazi, 1995) – are also conspicuous by their absence both in Bossi’s first books and in the Lega’s publications more generally. The Lega’s vision of the culture of the society it saw itself as representing was positive, even triumphalist, in its early years. Although the Lega took an apocalyptic position on the future of Italy and prophesized that Italian society was facing ruin, its confidence in the ability of the North to save itself from the wreckage was unbounded. The image of the North diffused by the Lega between 1987 and 1996 was of a prosperous, hardworking, bourgeois society whose virtues had made it a world leader in manufacturing and whose talents would enable it to surpass even the United States and Germany once the dead

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hand of Roman corruption and maladministration was removed from its shoulder. These qualifications are important for understanding the shift that has taken place in the Lega’s political line since the ‘Invention of Padania’. Until 1996, the Lega can and should be represented as a movement whose ideology had some points in common (notably over immigration) with the extreme right, and whose organization and political style was certainly reminiscent of far-right movements elsewhere in Europe. On the other hand, it was not anti-communist (despite the fact that it could certainly have gained an electoral advantage by playing the anti-communist card), was not militarist, and paid rather more than lip service to liberal internationalist theories of European co-operation and federal ideals of self-determination. More recently, however, the movement has abandoned its idiosyncratic positions on these questions. The Lega’s propaganda has increasingly directed its fire against multiculturalism, American capitalism, European integration and the ‘Other’ and is diffused with profound cultural pessimism. The key document here is a pamphlet produced by the office of the ‘Enti locali padani federali’ in December 1998 called Padania, identità e società multirazziale (Lega Nord, 1998b), which the Lega recommends to its members as essential reading. This document illustrates its theme with unabashed clarity from the very first paragraph: Immigration from outside the European Union is sponsored and sustained by a combination of forces that represent a minority view within society but which are hegemonic in the cultural and economic spheres. These forces present immigration as a ‘spontaneous and irreversible’ phenomenon against which it is useless to resist. The so-called multiracial society is supported above all by the alliance between global capitalism and the international left, which in Italy has found expression in (‘si concretizza’) the Agnelli-ProdiD’Alema-Bertinotti axis. (Lega Nord, 1998b, p. 3) The desire to write (sic) after this statement is overwhelming. The Lega is saying, in other words, that Italian big business and the former communists are actively co-operating – the left because they have an ideological preference for multiculturalism, business because it wants cheap workers and a rootless mass of consumers – to end all local cultural differentiation. The document goes on: ‘The apostles of non-white (extracomunitaria) immigration want to deny that peoples and nations

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exist, by backing an individualistic cosmopolitanism of the masses (un cosmopolitismo individualista di massa) that will cause local identities and the sense of territorial belonging to crumble’. The ‘principal opponents’ of this trend ‘are peoples and their desire for independence and selfdetermination’. There is, of course, nothing wrong as such with criticizing multiculturalism. Conservatives who wish to preserve their way of life (which in northern Italy objectively is being rapidly altered by large-scale immigration) have the right to free speech the same as anyone else. To give just one example, the programme adopted by the ex-fascist AN at its Verona conference in January 1998 raises many of the same points about Italy’s greying population, the imbalance in populations between the North and South banks of the Mediterranean and the nature of national identity that worry the Lega, but does so without the extremist language adopted by the Lega (Alleanza Nazionale, 1998). Does this mean that the Lega should be regarded as outright racist? Certainly, anybody of broadly liberal opinions who reads Padania, identità e società multirazziale is likely to come to that conclusion. The pamphlet is full of invidious statistics about the percentage of crimes committed in Padania by different ethnic minorities, condemns the ‘hypocritical distinction’ between legal and illegal immigration, and attacks the ‘Turco-Napolitano’ law of 1997 regulating immigration and race relations in Italy. Article 41 of this law, which defines discrimination as ‘any behaviour that, directly or indirectly, leads to a distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based upon racial grounds, colour, national or ethnic origin, religious convictions or practices . . .’ comes in for particular disgust. The pamphlet furiously, and somewhat naively, objects: So, an employer who doesn’t want to take on foreigners, the owner of a bar who objects to his place being taken over by outsiders (extracomunitari), the householder who doesn’t want to rent his house to a gang of Albanians (just to give a few representative examples) will all be slotted into the wide catalogue of discriminatory offences forseen by article 41. (Lega Nord, 1998b, p. 24) The pamphlet closes with a five-point plan to ‘defend our people’ (Lega Nord, 1998b, pp. 27–30). In order, these five points are, first, the refusal to extend the vote to ‘foreigners’ (including, it would seem, citizens from other EU countries), on the grounds that they can apparently

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never feel a true sense of obligation and duty to the community. The Lega is now in favour of basing the law upon ‘Ius sanguinis’ and denying Italian citizenship to anybody who does not have at least one native parent. Point two of the plan is ‘Saving the specificity of our people’. What this means in practice is opposition to any attempt to teach multiculturalism and tolerance in the schools and a concerted effort to inculcate local traditions, history and culture into school children. A subsequent pamphlet by the Enti locali padani federalisti has actually proposed a plan for an education system based upon such principles (Lega Nord, 1999). The third point is ‘priority for Padanians and other Europeans in the social services’ – the intention of which is to ensure that public housing and the social services more generally will be assigned first to people of European descent. Point four is ‘preparing for the polite return of non-Community foreigners to their homes’. Each region, it is argued, should institute a repatriation committee which would manage a social fund that would make investments in the countries of origin of the immigrants in order to give an incentive for their return. In addition, it would impose and administer a tax on employers who hired immigrant labourers ahead of native citizens. Point five urges investment in the domestic agriculture of non-European countries in order to permit a ‘dignified alternative’ to migration. This relatively ‘liberal’ note, however, is somewhat spoiled by a threat to cut off all aid to countries who refuse to accept their migrant workers back. It is interesting to compare the rank intolerance of these five points (which would deny migrants of any political rights, any opportunity to get a job – for which employer would give work to an immigrant, knowing that he would be investigated and taxed by the regional authorities? – and any opportunity to live in affordable housing in the community) with a well-known quotation from Vento dal Nord. Not even the Christian Democrats believe we are racists any longer. Federalism is a democratic and liberal theory, nothing else. I myself am not capable of racial or any other kind of hatred. For me, all men are equal, in the sense that they have the same dignity. The blackest man on earth has the same rights as my next door neighbour. Mind you, he also has the same duties. He should therefore contribute to the common wealth, before obtaining the right to a house, to unemployment benefit and health care . . . rights like these do not grow on trees, they are not guaranteed to all human beings in the way that the rebels of 1968 believed, with their idiot slogan ‘everything now’ . . . Don’t come to me mouthing the word ‘solidarity’. This word

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is a hypocritical slogan that means everything and nothing . . . It is just the worst kind of philanthropic drivel if it is not backed up with action. We can’t be ‘solidary’ with everybody. Unfortunately, as I was saying, resources are not sufficient. You have to direct your efforts, sacrificing some for the benefit of others. For this reason, the Lega retains that we should first show solidarity towards our own people, towards people like us. (Bossi, 1992, pp. 143–4) The shift is subtle, but significant. The Lega of the late 1980s and early 1990s justified its opposition to immigration by saying that the migrants were not paying their way (and, as in the famous slogan ‘bringing blacks here is slavery’, were themselves being exploited). In the movement’s 1992 manifesto, this principle was made concrete by a proposal that no immigrant would be allowed on to Italian territory in the absence of a work contract with an Italian company and the explicit guarantee of an Italian sponsor who would be legally obliged to provide the migrant with decent housing and be financially liable for any costs incurred if the state was obliged to expel the immigrant from Italian soil. Less restrictively, it also proposed that immigrants in work should be allowed to bring their families to join them and that a special pension fund should be established to enable immigrants to realize a lump sum in the event of their deciding to return to their native lands. The Lega’s argument to justify this mix of policies was: Legal immigrants should be guaranteed not the meaningless (fantomatici) ‘rights of citizenship and participation’ they currently receive, but a minimum of decent treatment that is not detached from a firm and coherent request that they should respect the rules and established customs of our social order. (Lega Nord, 1992) This, obviously, is a programme that is unlikely to win any plaudits from progressives. It is arguably racist: certainly, it is not a policy that would encourage the inclusion of migrant groups into the community. Immigrants would know that they were guest workers who were wanted while they worked. But it is unquestionably more liberal than the policy put forward by Padania, identità e società multirazziale. The Lega is now saying that it will organize the labour and housing markets to ensure that immigrants can never ‘contribute to the common wealth’ and thus win themselves a place in the community. At a moment when the Italian

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labour market is in desperate need of new recruits to maintain economic growth, the Lega now only wants ‘people like us’ on the streets of Milan. It wants to turn the clock back to a monochromatic world in which every citizen of Treviso, Bergamo or Brescia communicated in dialect and ate polenta. The truth is that the Lega’s new party line on multiculturalism goes far beyond the standard racial small-mindedness of northern Italian burghers. Its paranoid vision of the forces conspiring against the good folk of northern Italy, and its nervous defensiveness of Padanian culture and identity, bespeak a movement which sees many of the certainties and principles that its community and electorate have traditionally relied upon being swept away. All of a sudden, the Lega is less confident that its territorial base can take on and conquer the world. Globalization (mondialismo), both of culture and of the economy, has become the main enemy in the Lega’s propaganda, and a distinct ‘new right’ note has crept in: The real racist menace should be searched for in the theory and destructive practice of globalization, which, via a world-wide commercial subculture, is planning to construct a ‘global village’, which will be Anglo-Saxon in language and culture (anglofono) and totalitarian, upon the ruins of peoples. These globalizers are the true racists in so far as they deny the diversity of cultures and peoples. Patriotism is the last obstacle to the progress of the American and Islamic planetary empires (sic!). (Lega Nord, 1998b, p. 14) The ideology of globalization is based . . . upon a series of principles. The first is ‘utopian immersionism’ (panmixismo utopico), which affirms that humanity is destined to become half-caste and its cultures are bound to be squashed together – along the lines of the American melting pot – into a One World Order where universal peace will reign. (Lega Nord, 1998b, p. 15) The multiracial model is the essence of American society. Europe by contrast has never been multiracial . . . the different European ethnic groups have maintained a substantial homogeneity and a reciprocal affinity deriving from their common Indo-European origin . . . the USA, with the aim of perpetuating its universal domination looks favourably upon migration into Europe. It hopes to achieve two main objectives.

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The indirect diffusion of their social and cultural model, and their image (Fast Food, Rap etc.). Objectively weakening the internal cohesion of our societies, exposing them to the risk of inter-ethnic conflict. (Lega Nord, 1998b, p. 22) At the risk of multiplying quotations, it is useful to contrast the passages quoted above with a frequently cited remark from Vento dal Nord. European man . . . has a multiplicity of belongings. He belongs to his family, to the local community, to his city or region, to his nation or ethnic group, to his professional group, to the culture of his social group and so on. The sociological fact is the ideal starting point for federal institutions based upon the principle of subsidiarity, of grassroots sovereignty, of a capillary democracy inserted into a great continental confederation, which would be the guarantee of constitutional rules and individual liberty . . . the Lega’s theories have nothing in common with the cultural provincialism and economic isolationism that were, instead, the hallmarks . . . of fascism as a regime. (Bossi, 1992, p. 202) Clearly cultural provincialism is now at the heart of the Lega’s message. The complexity of human identities has been sidelined, and has been substituted by a blank identification with a single ‘national’ identity – that of Padania. The Lega’s objective now is the preservation of Padanian culture and identity from the powerful global forces arrayed against it – Fortress Padania. Liberals like Formentini despair of this ideology of closure towards the changing outside world and the Lega’s ever more open allegiance to the paranoid rhetoric of the far right (Formentini, 2000). But they have been driven out of the movement and no longer exert any significant influence upon it. Extremists like Mario Borghezio, a Piedmontese lawyer who can vaunt a past in the neo-Nazi organization Nuova Europa, now set the tone of the movement’s public utterances. In an interview with La Padania in January 2000, Borghezio launched into an attack on the Benetton clothing company’s advertising campaign, ‘The United Colors of Benetton’, which features children of all races and cultures dressed in the company’s latest fashions. This seemingly innocent ploy was denounced as being part of a plot to subvert ‘our specificity and ethno-cultural roots, which will be sacrificed on the altar of the “oneworld globalizer” of international capital’. In the same interview,

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Borghezio warned sinisterly that the ‘architects of globalism’ were intent on using ‘Islam as a sword against Europe. Grist to the mill (a vantaggio di) for the sanctuaries of big international capital and the usurers’ (La Padania, 12 January 2000). With much the same respect for logic, and the same penchant for conspiracy theories, one finds in La Padania articles warning of the ‘hidden communists’ at work in Western democracies. Far from being dead, one particularly lurid example of this genre warns, ‘communism . . . is more active and threatening than ever’. It is, however, nowadays at the service of the multinationals, and is sponsoring mass immigration to European countries in order to create itself a new proletariat (La Padania, 29 August 2000). An academic historian sympathetic to the Lega, Franco Cardini, has written that the EU sanctions against Jörg Haider were a ‘Soviet-style campaign against a country whose only crime was wanting to change its governing coalition’. As a historian, Cardini added, Haider’s comment that not all the Nazi concentration camps were for extermination purposes was ‘a selfevident truth’ (una verità lapalissiana). Other contributors to La Padania have speculated on the role of freemasonry in the process of globalization and have spoken of ‘a one-world government’ whose goal is the subversion of all identities (La Padania, 5 May 1998). The war against Serbia – ‘the shield of Christendom’ – was, by the Lega’s interpretation, launched by the United States to ‘make everyone understand that international law has been cancelled to create the world empire’ (La Padania, 29 April 1999). There is no need to multiply examples – though an assiduous search through Lega websites and through the columns of La Padania would undoubtedly provide a rich trove of similar material. The Lega now uses language that is strikingly similar to the American militia movement, or to the European New Right. Recent research on the French National Front has emphasized that the French far right has become increasingly anti-American, increasingly protectionist in economics, and has given increasing pride of place to global conspiracy theories in its propaganda (Bastow, 1998, p. 59). But unlike white separatists in Idaho or Dakota, the Lega has to operate in one of the most densely populated and industrialized areas of the world. Globalization and multiculturalism are simply realities that northern Italians have to deal with. They do not have the option of retreating to mountain-top homesteads and shutting out the modern world. It is this fact that induces the suspicion that there is an element of theatricality about the far-right ranting of the Lega. While Borghezio probably does believe in the peril of the ‘one-world government’, it is

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just possible that for Bossi, at least, the new line is nothing more than a tactic. The movement has had all its substantive policies, above all federalism and privatization, stolen by the mainstream parties of both the right and the left. Forza Italia, moreover, has transformed itself into a well-organized party with real local roots in Lombardy and the Veneto. It is no longer the ‘virtual’ party of 1994–95 that was so reliant on Berlusconi’s media power for the size of its vote, but an increasingly well-organized movement that has become the point of reference for the small-business community that used to vote for the Lega (Tarchi and Poli, 2000). Bossi may be having to appeal to the lunatic fringes of society in order to ensure the Lega’s continued existence as a party. Yet attacking globalization is unlikely to win the small-business community back. The architects of mass immigration in Italy are not sinister lobbies or ex-communists in search of a proletariat, but, as we saw in Chapter 3, the small- and medium-sized businesses that have been the backbone of the Lega’s support. Small businesses and manufacturing in northern Italy are facing a labour crisis and are desperate for new workers on the assembly line. There are many clandestine immigrants in Italy, but there are far more who are gainfully employed in factories and farms. Northern Italians are also in general sanguine about their ability to resist cultural levelling and are far from antiAmerican in attitude. All the indications are that the Lega, whose vote fell in the 1999 European elections to less than 5 per cent of the vote, will fail to mobilize more than a hard core of extremist voters with its new line. Paradoxically, however, the Lega’s electoral decline has been accompanied by a significant rise in its political influence. With a piece of political acrobatics, Bossi managed in 1999 to re-form his alliance with Berlusconi and has even managed to insert some of the Lega’s core demands into the electoral platform of Berlusconi’s new coalition, the Casa delle libertà (House of Freedoms). To get this deal, Bossi had to eat his own words. Since the Lega brought Berlusconi’s government down, the Milanese entrepreneur has been accused in the grossest possible terms of having plotted to destroy the Lega, of being associated with organized crime, of being a convicted criminal (this last charge, of course, is true, though Berlusconi is appealing against several convictions), of being the Lega’s principal enemy. In a public rally at Verona on 28 September 1998, for instance, Bossi worked himself into a fury of rage against Comencini, whom he accused of plotting for a year on behalf of the ‘mafioso’ (Berlusconi) and announced: ‘We, at the Federal Congress, expressed our opinion as clearly as it is possible to do. With

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the mafioso, we will never ally ourselves. Never!’ (La Padania, 29 September 1998). Following the Lega’s heavy loss of votes in the European elections of June 1999, ‘never’ became ‘perhaps’, and after a government crisis in December 1999 had shown the fragility of the centre-left coalition government headed by Massimo D’Alema, ‘perhaps’ became ‘certainly’. The imminence of national elections, in which Berlusconi, with his undeniable charisma and media networks, would have been a formidable competitor, forced Bossi’s hand (Biorcio, 2000). In regional elections in the spring of 2000, the Lega supported lists all over northern Italy headed by Forza Italia’s candidates and was rewarded by a dramatic victory across the North, although the movement was in electoral terms very much the junior partner to Forza Italia. The pact with Forza Italia, if it holds, may bring the Lega closer to achieving its central objective of northern self-rule than at any time in the past. While the Lega’s overall ideological pendulum has swung violently to the right, its position on secession has been intelligently moderated. The Lega now calls for a Swiss, Catalan or Scottish-style devolution of power, to be symbolized by the election of a ‘Parliament of the North’, which possesses real legislative authority. The idea that northern Italy as a whole requires co-ordinating legislative institutions over and above the separate regions is neither stupid nor romantic and marks a distinct improvement, in terms of political realism, from the daydream of Padania. The ‘House of Freedoms’, which is favoured to win the 2001 elections, has committed itself to implementing devolution in some form or other. This is not least because almost all the leading northern members of Forza Italia also support greater regional autonomy. This may be due to the fact that the right-wing parties are in government at local level and out of power in Rome. Once in power at national level, the ‘House of Freedoms’ may change its mind. But it may not. The Lega, if it meets the 4 per cent threshold required to win seats under the proportional component of Italian electoral law, will probably hold the balance of power in the Italian parliament. Berlusconi may not want to repeat the experience of 1994. He may decide that devolution is an acceptable price to pay for maintaining his parliamentary majority. In that case, the Lega’s 20-year quest for greater northern autonomy will be rewarded.

Conclusions Bossi’s new alliance with Berlusconi closes the secessionist phase in the Lega’s history. It is worthwhile concluding this chapter by trying to

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understand the Lega’s motives in launching the Padania strategy and analysing the causes of its failure. The decision to take a secessionist turn was taken for a combination of the motives that we outlined above. It undoubtedly redefined the Lega at a time when the mainstream parties were stealing its programmatic clothes. It enabled Bossi to reassert his leadership over the movement. It placed the Lega in a position to benefit from a revolt in northern Italy had the Ulivo government failed to enter European Monetary Union. It was a decision, therefore, that was taken in the plausible expectation of political advantage, and the fact that these expectations were subsequently to prove unfounded should not detract from the calculated nature of the Lega’s choice. But was the Lega’s choice mere opportunistic calculation? How sincere were the Lega’s spokesmen and leaders in advancing the case for Padanian self-determination? Did they truly believe Padania was a nation in the sense that Scotland, say, plainly is, or was Padania a well-choreographed ruse? It is extremely difficult to answer this question with any certainty. Anybody reading the ‘Declaration of Padanian Independence’ or Oneto’s L’invenzione della Padania is likely to conclude that the movement’s leadership was convinced of Padania’s case for being recognized as an independent people. These two texts are deeply felt statements of nationalist principle. Moreover, Padania, or something like Padania, had been implicit in the Lega’s political programme from the very beginning. As this book has suggested elsewhere, the Lega’s political activity has always been predicated upon a sense that the social pact binding the Italian state together has been broken by the political parties’ corruption, inefficiency and misrule. Northern Italy, in the Lega’s view, no longer has any obligation to recognize the authority of a state that has so egregiously ignored its interests for so long. The decision to secede follows logically enough from this conviction. Yet at the same time, Padania represented a departure into new territory for the Lega. As we saw in Chapter 3, the Lega had always identified with the cultural values perceived to be common everywhere in rural and small-town northern Italy (though less common in the big cities), but its arguments for northern self-rule nevertheless concentrated upon the need to obtain economic justice for the North’s producers. With Padania, the Lega changed horses in mid-stream and embraced the politics of identity. Because the burghers of northern Italy are said to speak approximately similar dialects (or languages), eat roughly the same food, descend from the same distant ancestors and worship in the same churches, therefore they are a people deserving their own state.

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In this respect, of course, it was following a path well-trodden by every, or almost every, modern nationalist movement. But it was an immensely ambitious undertaking, and not only because northern Italians themselves were very conscious of their differences. The Scottish Nationalists, whose starting point was a once-independent country with its own legal and education systems, its own national poet and literature, and own long-established capital city, took decades to disseminate their ideas to a wide public and only succeeded after the 1979–90 Thatcher government introduced a series of policies that hit Scotland especially hard. Nationalist movements in Africa and elsewhere, after decolonialization, were able to use the power of the state to inculcate nationalist sentiment. Bossi’s would-be republic had no historical legacy of political unity (apart, perhaps, from the original medieval Lega Lombarda) to draw upon. It was perhaps not just Bossi’s endearing capacity to be silly that led him to celebrate Mel Gibson’s movie Braveheart and claim kinship with the Scots. The Lega, of course, also could not rely on the media to drill the message home. The entire official media of the Italian state rallied against Padania. As one leading Italian scholar of right-wing parties has argued, only failure to meet the Maastricht criteria for monetary union, which would certainly have been seen as a symbol of Italian ineptitude and would have had immense economic consequences for northern businesses, might have turned the Lega’s ambitious ‘offensive against the national, unitary state’ into a serious political proposition (Tarchi, 1998, p. 156). It is interesting to note that while Oneto and other ideologues diligently continue to research Padania’s past and culture, Padania, as a political project, has proved relatively easy to discard. The Lega’s activists have accepted ‘devolution’ without a murmur, which suggests that the concept never put down deep roots. Can Padania be written off, then, as a fallacious attempt to build a nation where no national consciousness existed? Yes. But this does not mean that the Lega’s initiative was without concrete results. Just as the Lega’s victory in the 1992 election was decisive in toppling the Christian Democrats’ system of government, so the huge swell of support to the Lega in the 1996 general election, and the Lega’s attempt to mobilize northern Italy in pursuit of secession, profoundly accelerated the evolution of the Italian state towards decentralization and greater regional autonomy. All Italy’s political parties, even the ex-fascists, call themselves federalists now. There is now a broad consensus that a substantive devolution of powers from the centre (Rome) to the periphery is needed. In an age of globalized markets and ever increasing

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competition in manufacturing, the highly industrialized economy of northern Italy can no longer afford the competitive disadvantage represented by the inefficiencies of the ultra-centralized Italian state. But what kind of devolution? The final chapter of this book discusses the challenge of globalization for the political economy of northern Italy and analyses the legislative steps taken by Italy’s politicians to meet the demand for greater local self-rule.

5 Globalization, Italian Politics and the ‘Northern Question’

Introduction In the present time, the process of globalization and its destabilizing effects upon nation states are increasingly debated by economists, sociologists and political scientists, with varying ‘solutions’ being put forward to ensure that governance can still be both effective and meaningful and politics does not become subordinated to the exigencies of the ‘market’. This chapter argues that the process of economic globalization has a direct relevance for recent socio-political developments in Italy and can contribute to explaining the rise and success of the Lega Nord, as well as its more recent electoral decline. It also argues that current debates on the role of politics in the new global environment can help us understand the positioning of the other Italian political parties vis-à-vis both the project carried out by the Lega and the needs and demands of its regionally-based electoral constituency, as identified in Chapter 3. Indeed, the political debate in Italy revolves increasingly around the issue of the loss of economic competitiveness of the country in recent years and the choices the state is faced with in its efforts to devise a new political and institutional order and to both adapt and respond to the process of globalization. It is clear that, after a period in which the prevailing attitude towards globalization among analysts and commentators corresponded to what has been termed ‘Tina’ (‘There Is No Alternative’), today’s thinking is rapidly evolving towards a more positive reappraisal of the role of politics and the emphasis is now more on the choices open to national and supranational policy-makers rather than on their impotence. As the debate around these choices gains momentum in Italy as in other countries, the Lega has been losing credibility and impact, retreating, as we saw in 139

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the previous chapter, to a sterile defence of a local culture against the perceived threats of globalization and Americanization and caught in the trap of believing its own populist myths. The Lega’s original socioeconomic constituency, however, has now learnt to make its own voice heard among the many which are claiming a stake in the new order. In this context, we should not rule out the possibility that traditional and well-trodden paths are re-established in Italy, leaving the north-eastern SMEs out in the cold and ignoring their bid for a decisive shift of politics in favour of those systems of production which are fully integrated in the global economy. Conversely, the decline of the Lega has allowed other political actors, not least the centre-left government, to open new channels of communication with the electorate of the North-East, and to put forward policies and proposals which respond to its well-known and long-standing demands, including fiscal and political federalism. Before discussing these recent developments and debates within Italy and their implications for both the Lega and its north-eastern constituency, we need to define the process of globalization itself.

The process of economic globalization and its effects on politics Globalization refers primarily to the growing internationalization of trade, production and finance. In terms of trade, there has been a constant expansion in world trade, leading to much higher levels of international competition. With regards to production, we have witnessed the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist production system. The latter is based on a core-periphery structure of production and a decomposition of the production process, so that different segments of this process can be carried out in different places. While ‘core’ and strategic operations are carried out in one of the advanced countries, all other operations can be shifted to low-cost, low-skilled, ‘developing’ countries. More importantly, productive resources can be moved from one country to another in a relatively short period of time. As for financial resources, they can be moved across the globe almost instantaneously. This means that transnational corporations have become increasingly powerful and are less subject to legal restrictions. It was noted that ‘at a world level, more than 40,000 transnational corporations of varying shapes and sizes play off their own employees (as well as different nation-states) against one another’ (Martin and Schumann, 1997, p. 7). Deregulation and liberalization have allowed flows of capital, goods and services to become substantially free of national constraints and barriers, while new technology in

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communications and transportation has compressed both time and space. Economic globalization, however, does not simply represent a process which can be described and even measured in facts and figures, that is, ‘a phase in the history of capital’. It also constitutes ‘an ideology to promote neoliberalism . . . portraying ideal conditions that have never existed, certainly not without state intervention in the economy’ (Mittelman, 1996b, pp. 230–1). It is in this context, according to Cox (1996, p. 22), that this process came to be regarded as inevitable and desirable because beneficent to all countries. In reality, globalization is an uneven process, bringing greater prosperity to some areas and social groups, but also much greater poverty for those localities and social groups which are unable to become part of the ‘global economy’ and are left behind. One prediction is for poverty to increase in both absolute and relative terms and for the so-called 20/80 society (Martin and Schumann, 1997, p. 1), with 20 per cent made up of affluent, cosmopolitan, truly mobile élites and 80 per cent made up of the unemployed and semi-employed, tied to a particular locality and fully exposed to the whims and vagaries of global capital. Economic globalization has, in the view of many commentators, considerably reduced the degree of autonomy and sovereignty enjoyed by nation states, even though there seem to be disagreements as to the extent of this process. At the very least, there is a general consensus that traditional social democratic, ‘Keynesian’ economic policies are no longer an option for any state. As Held (1995, p. 131) remarked, ‘it is much harder for individual governments to intervene and manage their economies faced with a global division of labour, the absence of capital controls and the operations of the world financial markets’. A return to state protectionism in the form of barriers to free trade also appears to be ruled out. Even the fiercest critics of globalization argue that capital controls need to be brought back at an international, not a national, level (Martin and Schumann, 1997). However, there is a whole spectrum of opinions regarding the role of the nation state in the new global environment. For some, the state has been left with very little autonomy. According to these commentators, who are sometimes labelled ‘hyperglobalizers’, ‘national governments are relegated to little more than transmission belts for global capital, or, ultimately, simple intermediate institutions sandwiched between increasingly powerful local, regional and global mechanisms of power’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 3). Specifically, Cox (1994, p. 49) claimed that the state had been converted into ‘a transmission

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belt from the global to the national economy, where heretofore it had acted as the bulwark defending domestic welfare from external disturbances’. In contrast, Panitch argued that the state has played an integral part in bringing about the internationalization of the economy. In particular, he distanced himself from Cox’s metaphor of the state as a ‘transmission belt’, arguing that ‘the role of each state is still determined by struggles among social forces always located within each social formation’ (Panitch, 1996, p. 95). However much these social forces are tied into a global economy, ‘the specific national form still prevails . . . because of uneven development and the specificity of each social formation’ (p. 96). A similar point of view was put forward by other scholars (Berger and Dore, 1996; Weiss, 1998). Weiss also rejected what she termed ‘the myth of the powerless state’ and argued that individual states are currently undergoing a process of transformation and adaptability, which is markedly different across the developed world and does not point towards a convergence of state policies or strategies. In other words, the role of each state is shaped by external forces but it is also still largely determined by internal power struggles and shifting alliances. It is also determined by the specific model of social and cultural evolution which has characterized a given country and influenced its institutional arrangements and economic system. There seems to be a general consensus, however, that political power is now contested between different bodies and entities: ‘effective power is shared, bartered and struggled over by diverse forces and agencies . . . ’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 447). Some of these agencies are supra-national entities, or ‘macro-regions’, such as the European Community, which are better placed to govern wide-ranging socio-economic processes transcending individual countries. Others are ‘micro-regions’, which find themselves increasingly exposed to world trade and competition while simultaneously losing the protection of the national state. According to Held (1995, p. 136), this situation has been accompanied by a reshaping of cultural and political identities ‘leading many local and regional groups, movements and nationalisms to question the nation-state as a representative and accountable power system’. Power is also hotly contested at the national level, with various social and political groups positioning themselves differently vis-à-vis policy-making. Some of these groups are prospering from international trade and they seek to implement greater economic liberalization and accelerate the process of change. Others are adversely affected by exposure to international competition and put pressure on the state to resist and slow down change. (Cox, 1994, p. 49; Kitschelt, 1995, p. 5).


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Each state, therefore, has to contend both with more demanding and bolder sub-national territorial movements and with competing social groups who position themselves differently in relation to the global economy. The Italian state is no exception, even though it remains unclear who is winning and who is losing in this power struggle. It is by no means certain that the forces which seek to promote change will prevail, nor can it be taken for granted that the nature of the required ‘change’ is uncontested or uncontroversial. On the contrary, ‘change’ itself is multidimensional and multidirectional and is the focus of the current political struggles. This raises the question of what kind of change is envisaged and fought for by the various social and political forces in Italy and where the Lega Nord and its territorial constituency stand in the wider struggle to reshape and transform the Italian state. In the following section we will attempt to throw some light on the Lega’s own positioning vis-à-vis the process of globalization and, in so doing, we will explore some of the reasons for the party’s recent loss of support in its own core constituency.

The politics of secession as a response to globalization The overall scenario evoked by the process of globalization resembles, for some commentators, the political order of the Middle Ages. Back in 1977 (p. 254), Hedley Bull argued that a new medievalism was emerging, where ‘no ruler or state was sovereign in the sense of being supreme over a given segment of the Christian population; each had to share authority with vassals beneath, and with the Pope and (in Germany and Italy) the Holy Roman Emperor above’. Today, various scholars agree that this is a likely scenario ( Cox, 1994; Held, 1995). However, neo-medievalism conveys not one, but at least three scenarios. The most benign is that of multi-level or multi-layered governance, in which power is shared by different levels of authority, each of which exercises regulatory powers over clear areas of competence, so that a new equilibrium is established. More worrying is the scenario in which conflicting loyalties prevail over shared governance. As it was recently stated in a popular weekly, ‘the global economy will reveal borders for what they are: mere lines in the landscape. It is cities and their hinterland . . . Kunzmann argues, that offer the rational organization for economic activity in the 21 st century. He sees Europe organized like a “bunch of grapes” – clusters of economic cross-fertilization . . . That’s not necessarily a formula for European comity; consider the fierce Renaissance rivalry between Florence and Siena. But consider too what

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heights of creative production the city-states of that era attained’ (Time, Winter 1998–99, p. 43). In this scenario, higher levels of economic activity would be traded for higher levels of political conflict. Worrying still is the scenario in which there will be a descent to the level of tribal loyalties and ethnic intolerance, which will ultimately result in chaos as opposed to a new ‘world order’. We are of the opinion that the political project of the Lega Nord can be understood best as a response to the process of globalization and specifically within the ‘neo-medievalist’ scenarios raised by various scholars and commentators, bearing in mind the trajectory experienced by this party since the early 1990s, as analysed in the previous chapter. Initially, the Lega Nord espoused the idea of a new Europe made up of city states, or, rather, region states. The party used as its main symbol a medieval warrior and constantly referred to the north-Italian city states as its ‘ideal-type’ economic and political institutions. As is well known, the city states were primarily centres of economic power unencumbered by territorial baggage. They operated – and thrived – in what was, for the times, a global economy and ‘had revenues that compared very favourably with the revenues of the most successful dynastic states of Western and North-western Europe’ (Arrighi, 1993, p. 59). The same can be said of today’s Italian industrial districts, which, as we saw, have become nodes of global networks. Just to give an example, the two north-eastern provinces of Vicenza and Treviso export more than Greece and Portugal put together (Corriere Economia, 11 August 1999). The possible breakdown of the Italian nation state was therefore viewed by the Lega as a liberation, as the coming to an end of a ‘historical accident’ which had outlived its usefulness. The Lega’s ‘vision’ was presented as functional to economic development. In simple terms, its regionalism can be summarized as follows: If a state is composed of several regions, each of which has distinct forms of economic activity, is it likely that a single state policy will benefit all of them? It might be sensible to treat the territory of the state as several regions, which should have their own governments with powers to manage economic growth. The logic of such considerations is the weakening of the centralized state and the devolution of more power to the regions. (Brown, 1995, p. 64) This position can be explained not just in the light of the process of globalization, but also in terms of the process of European integration.


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The latter has reduced the price regions have to pay if they want to acquire political autonomy, thanks to the abolition of internal customs barriers and the European single currency, as well as military security and the disappearance of the threat of war. Inevitably, the driving forces behind this type of regionalism are the ‘winning’ regions, which are tempted to go it alone and leave the losers to their fate, since they perceive the disadvantages but no longer recognize the advantages of remaining tied to the nation state. In this context, the Lega’s bold and uncompromising position seemed to find an echo in thinkers who welcomed the end of nation states in the era of globalization. According to Ohmae, ‘the current paralysis of nation-states now shows them to have been a transitional mode of organization for managing economic affairs’ (1996, p. 149). He argued that their decay was having an adverse impact upon economic development and dictated one simple remedy: ‘The only hope is to reverse the postfeudal, centralizing tendencies of the modern era and allow – or better, to encourage – the economic pendulum to swing away from nations and back toward regions’ (Ibid., p. 142). At times, however, as we argued in Chapters 1 and 4, the Lega Nord appeared to adopt a position more akin to that of ‘multi-level governance’, portraying the need to reform the Italian state (and Europe) so as to allow a ‘multiplicity of identities’ and to promote federal institutions ‘based upon the principle of subsidiarity’ (Bossi, 1992, p. 202). Bossi argued explicitly that institutional restructuring was required in view of the process of globalization: ‘Today we are witnessing a globalization of the markets and, in parallel, a reduction in the average size of firms . . . These two tendencies require appropriate institutional responses: European coordination on the one hand, macro-regions on the other’ (Bossi, 1992, p. 168). Similarly, in the party’s 1992 political programme, it was stated that globalization had created ‘a historical situation of substantial institutional resettlement, as witnessed by the delegitimation throughout the West of the party system, its function, and the moral crisis of the institutional and political structures’ (Lega Nord, 1992: Programma per il lavoro degli anni ‘90, p. 3). Federalism, in this case, was seen primarily as a means to reform the Italian state and remedy its serious deficiences in terms of democratic accountability and responsive bureaucracy. According to Formentini (2000), the Lega’s spectacular success in the early 1990s was due to its project of generalized reforms to be achieved through a new, federal articulation of the state. This placed the party closer to the influential political thinker Miglio, initially the intellectual driving-force behind the Lega Nord, who argued that, in the

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new post-industrial era, nation states were being surpassed economically by regional communities and large metropolitan areas and politically by a plurality of sovereignties (Miglio, 1990; Campi, 1994). In short, the Lega oscillated between a peripheral and regionalist perspective, fighting to weaken and even dismantle the central state, and a national perspective, proposing federalism as a means to modernize and reform the state. Both perspectives were compatible with economic development, even though the former sought to pursue the ideal of ‘pure and unrestrained capitalism’, while the latter acknowledged the need for social solidarity and integrating political projects. Even more importantly, the latter position anticipated what has now become widely argued, which is that, in the age of globalization, the nation state needs to be replaced by the post-nation state, not just in Italy but throughout the developed world. ‘Precisely how the balance between globalization and fragmentation will be adjusted depends on the new role that states are able to forge for themselves’ (Clark, 1997, p. 195). Regionalism – in the form of greater regional autonomy – and federalism can play an important role in this process, helping to modernize state institutions and make them adapt to the new global changes. They can, in other words, bring about a functional restructuring of the state. At the same time, functional restructuring and regionalism do not necessarily coincide. As Keating (1998, p. 76) remarked, ‘Political and institutional form does not necessarily follow function . . . Political responses can seek to accommodate the new functional logic, they can oppose it, or they can bend it’. There is, therefore, a non-functional dimension to regionalism, which is based primarily on the new ‘politics of identity’, celebrating local cultures, exclusive ethnic belonging, ‘authentic’ traditions. ‘A politics based upon difference, whether of race, gender, able-bodiedness, local identity, or indeed anything at all, might be appropriated for emancipatory ends, but is also capable of service in more suspect causes’ (Axford, 1995, p. 207), not least racism and/or intolerant parochialism. As we argued in the previous chapter, in 1995 the Lega Nord shifted its emphasis from a critique of the state – its centralistic nature, the southernization of state personnel, its mechanisms for redistributing resources, the inefficiencies of public administration – to a nationalist project – constructing a collective identity, re-writing history, creating a whole new repertoire of myths and symbols, establishing quasi-religious rituals. Regionalism was thus turned into full-blown nationalism. The invented nation, Padania, soon lost any resemblance to the type of region states advocated by the Lega in the early 1990s, marking, as we saw, a transition to identity politics. Today, the regionalism of the Lega Nord


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is no longer functional nor supportive of market forces, since the party recently adopted a strong anti-American, anti-EU and anti-globalization rhetoric. Specifically, as Morosini argued (La Tribuna di Treviso, 12 and 19 September 2000) the party now seems to be saying that local communities and cultures are being destroyed by globalization and that in the North-East of Italy economic growth and social cohesion are no longer in harmony, indeed the latter is breaking up due to the unsustainable pace of the former. According to the Lega, the role of politics is to ensure that, in the most developed regions such as the Veneto, economic growth slows down or even comes to a halt. Whereas in its early days the Lega subscribed to ‘neo-medieval scenarios’ which were compatible with economic development, the embrace of a far-right type of programme put the party on a collision course with both local and global capitalism. We should not dismiss the possibility that a political response to globalization based on a rejection of functionalism, an exacerbation of the already widespread fears and anxieties generated by economic and social change, and an attitude of generalized closure to the outside (seen as hostile) world, may attract the support of a considerable part of the Italian electorate. Populist parties of the extreme and radical right have made something of a breakthrough in contemporary Europe, and Italy cannot be considered an exception. The reality is, however, that the electorate of the Lega Nord became disillusioned with the party since it abandoned federalism for secessionism with the invention of Padania and later embraced a reactionary and ultra-conservative project. Following the loss of votes at the 1999 European and administrative elections, a survey carried out by Cavalera for the Corriere della Sera found that numerous mayors and local administrators of the Lega voiced the opinion that their electorates were not interested in the issue of (anti-)globalization, but wanted their party to focus on questions of autonomy, federalism (especially fiscal federalism) and administrative efficiency (Corriere della Sera, 18, 20 and 23 July 1999). Formentini himself stated that the electorate of the North-East had not the least intention of erecting barriers against globalization. Cacciari (2000) remarked that Lega’s voters, especially in Lombardy, were very pragmatic and realistic and had started to abandon the party after the Padanian adventure. Similarly, Lago referred to the Lega’s ‘great escape from the reality of its own North’ and to its taking refuge into ‘the rhetoric of the North’ (La Repubblica, 25 July 1999). In the North-East of Italy there may be strong feelings of anxiety concerning global socio-economic changes, but they do not translate into

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a request for protectionism (Fistarol, 2000). While the Lega adopted a defensive stance, industrialists from the North-East continued to press for accelerating political, economic and cultural change, in the light of the process of globalization. They argued that local entrepreneurs were used to dealing constantly with new challenges and welcomed the new opportunities opened up by ‘a world ever more open and competitive’ (Il Sole 24 Ore, 29 November 1999). In this new world, competitiveness depended increasingly upon the ability of a specific territory to form a cohesive and efficient system and local politics played an important role in promoting change and responding positively to the new opportunities. For a brief time the Lega successfully combined a functionalist project with the offer of a collective identity and a system of shared values and beliefs. It also linked the local dimension directly to the global one, boldly proclaiming the end of ‘the nineteenth-century centralistic nation-state’. Today, it seems reduced to defending the local against both the national and the global. In this context, ideology takes absolute precedence over political programmes and ‘politics as administration’: ‘the missionary attitude is not easy to translate into concrete political reforms, rendering the blueprint for a differently organised societal community more realistic’ (Schmidtke, 1996, p. 327). As the Lega abandoned any pretence to modernize the country’s political institutions and retreated behind the barriers of Padania, embracing peripheral nationalism, later replaced by an intolerant and exclusionary form of local communitarianism, the national political space became increasingly contested and policy-making highly debated. The principal issues at stake, as we shall now see, were the management of the economy and the reform of the state.

Competing responses to globalization: state and markets As was discussed earlier, various experts on globalization have hypothesized a struggle, within each nation state, between the more competitive and export-oriented sectors which would press for greater change, and the more protected, domestic-oriented sectors which would try and resist change. The situation in the Italian case is complicated by the fact that the former sector is largely made up of small- and medium-sized firms, while the latter includes most of the public sector as well as the financial sector, not to mention a few private large businesses. Furthermore, as was recently remarked, a country’s social system of production is not necessarily homogeneous in spatial terms. In some cases, there were distinctive regional


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forms of coordination following World War II which shaped the cohesiveness of industrial districts . . . In other configurations, there was the projection of national institutional forms upon regions or towns: this was apparently the case for France and to some extent the United Kingdom. (Boyer and Hollingsworth, 1997, p. 436) In other words, less economically homogeneous countries like Italy, have to contend with territorial as well as sector-specific tensions and struggles. Just to give an example, in 1999 four regions alone accounted for 67 per cent of the country’s exports: Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna. By contrast, the Lazio region, which includes the city of Rome, contributed only 4.4 per cent to the country’s exports, and the eight southern regions together accounted for 10.1 per cent (ISTAT, 1999, p. 29). Italy is not new to a dual economy. The country’s economic development was characterized traditionally by close links between the state and large-scale (especially heavy) industry. Such links were established in the late 1880s as a result of protectionism, and persisted well into the 1980s. In the same way as other latecomers, such as Germany and Japan, Italian industrialization took place with direct state intervention in the economy as well as state protection. Most transactions, mergers and acquisitions were settled behind closed doors, rather than in the market place, and were facilitated and brokered by political patronage. During the fascist period, the public sector, one of the largest in western Europe, played a key role in helping the country retain what were considered strategic sectors whose loss would have greatly weakened Italy’s standing and prestige in the world. After the Second World War, the public sector was retained, but its role gradually became one of consensus building, in socio-political as well as in electoral terms, so much so that it was economically inefficient and chronically in deficit. At the other end of the economic spectrum, the Italian state, after 1945, actively promoted small-scale industry and local and regional banks, despite the fact that this sector has traditionally been associated with weak political prestige and power, especially on the international scene. This strategy, aiming at the creation of a new large strata of middle-class, independent producers, was both in accordance with the ideals of the Catholic movement and was also devised to limit the influence of the Italian Communist and Socialist Parties. As Weiss (1988) convincingly argued, countries like France and Great Britain favoured, with their legislation, large-scale industry and financial conglomerates after the

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Second World War because these were perceived as necessary to their international standing and military capability, rather than on the basis of purely economic reasons. The threat posed by the existence of one of the largest communist parties in Western Europe prevented the Italian state from following the same route as France and the UK, and led it to prioritize domestic politics at the expense of foreign policy. In short, the Italian state after 1945 pursued a dual strategy, promoting small-scale industrialization as a means to limiting the growing influence of the left parties, and also consolidating its traditional supporting role for large-scale and heavy industry. From the late 1980s onwards, however, the strategy began to unravel. On the one hand, the smallfirm sector, in its industrial district configuration, had grown into an innovative and dynamic, as well as export-oriented, sector which was experiencing new challenges and needed new solutions, as discussed in Chapter 3. On the other hand, the process of economic globalization accompanied by deregulation and liberalization and by European Monetary Union had the effect of leaving the Italian large-business and financial sectors exposed to the competition of their stronger and more powerful European neighbours. Specific tensions have arisen between the two main sectors which make up the Italian economy. The small-business sector, notably in the north-eastern regions, clamours for greater political and fiscal autonomy, even at the risk of weakening the internal cohesion and international standing of the Italian nation state. Industrial districts are no longer content with being left to fend for themselves at local level in an increasingly competitive global economy while the state is busy in a tripartite concertation at national level with large-business and tradeunion corporations. In addition, industrial districts are exposed to a truly global market which transcends the EU. By contrast, many large firms and the financial sector are primarily concerned with their future role in a European context. They are facing the need to restructure fairly quickly but to do so necessitates continuing state protection and intervention. The twin processes of economic globalization and European integration, coupled with the Italian dual model of economic development, appear to have had somewhat contrasting effects on political thinking and policy-making, leading to two opposing tendencies (Quadrio Curzio, 1998). Paraphrasing Quadrio Curzio, it can be said that one tendency aims to re-establish the centrality of the state and state intervention in the economy, seen primarily as having a national dimension; while the other wishes to establish the centrality of the market seen predominantly


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in a European and indeed transnational context. This means that, on the one hand, the debate on a federalist restructure of the state and the needs of the market has continued to remain prominent in Italy and has started to take directly on board the demands of small- and mediumsized industry. On the other hand, a new debate has emerged which revolves around the issue of a possible threat of colonization of Italian large-scale capitalism by ‘foreign’ conglomerates, where for ‘foreign’ one should read French and German companies, rather than non-EU firms. There is a widespread fear that in the new Europe Italian firms and banks will be dwarfed by the giants now emerging in both France and Germany through a process of mergers and acquisitions, which, it is suspected, has been facilitated and promoted by the state. In Italy, too, this process is now under way, but it is clear that the country is far behind its north-European neighbours and that its banking and financial sector in particular has been overprotected by the state throughout the post-war period, making it more difficult for it to become stronger, leaner and more competitive all at the same time. As Quadrio Curzio (1998; 2000) very perceptively pointed out, the two economic tendencies outlined above do not coincide with the centre-left or centre-right political alliances, but cut across them. Thus the centre-left government currently in power appears intent in satisfying both economic sectors. It is clearly preoccupied with facilitating the emergence of a few giant business and financial companies able to compete on a par with their French and German counterparts. It has also taken various steps towards further administrative and fiscal decentralization, therefore responding to some of the needs and demands of the small-business sector. The centre-right coalition parties seem equally determined to play in both camps. Forza Italia and AN are also concerned with the national prestige and power accruing from large industrial and financial conglomerates. However, they have now resuscitated the 1994 political alliance with the Lega Nord and have consequently adopted some of its original proposals for a federal state and for promoting local and regional systems of production. The situation is further complicated by the persisting issue of high unemployment and underdevelopment in the southern regions, which for some commentators can only be tackled by promoting the formation, largely from below, of local industrial districts, while for others calls for a national strategy of intervention from above. It is proving very difficult to construct a new economic, political and institutional settlement that will be able to accommodate such diverse socio-economic constituencies, which are pulling in opposite directions.

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Until recently, the political debate in Italy revolved primarily around the need to transform the country’s institutions and electoral system, moving towards a majoritarian or even first-past-the-post system in preference to proportional representation, reshaping the role of the president of the republic, introducing some form of federalism, and ensuring the alternation of parties or coalitions of parties in government. These issues remain fundamental, but among the country’s political class they now seem to have been joined by issues related to economic policies and strategies. In many ways the two sets of issues are closely related: the type of institutional arrangements Italy will put into place will depend to a large extent on the nature of the relationship between state and market, the degree of internationalization of the economy and the favoured system(s) of production. To put it simply, if the political class decides to prioritize sub-national, localized networks of production for their capacity for wealth generation and their dynamism and competitiveness, this will translate into a greater acceptance of the internationalization of the economy and a greater emphasis on administrative decentralization and even fiscal and political federalism. Alternatively, if local systems of production will be judged to represent a declining and/or unstable sector, too exposed to external competition, while the domestic-oriented sectors are prioritized, then the prevailing scenario may turn out to be that of a return to a centralistic and dirigiste economic policy, that will lead to a greater emphasis upon national state agencies and institutions. Social considerations may play an important role, too. As Hollingsworth and Boyer (1997, p. 474) put it: If the contradictions inherent in the internationalization of the economy become too acute (mass and persisting unemployment, rising inequality, major regional inbalances, xenophobist movements, etc.), some governments may attempt to return to a so-called Golden Age by becoming increasingly nationalistic and by erecting barriers to finance, trade, and migrations of persons. At present this seems unlikely but the temptation on the part of some countries to react to globalization through ‘closure’ if the going gets tough cannot be underestimated.

Old and innovative solutions to new challenges In the light of the above, the first consideration to make is that the return to a distinctly traditional approach to economic policy cannot be


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discarded. If it proves successful, it will probably also reverberate into the institutional sphere. Such an approach sees the government becoming directly involved in the conflicts between rival business and financial groups, in the laudible but highly risky attempt to strengthen Italian capitalism and protect it from unwelcome incursions of foreign capital. The prevailing logic is defensive and even secretive, recreating a ‘latecomer’ mentality and evoking the old ghosts of a command economy. There is no doubt that this type of logic is openly advocated by some groups on the left and to an extent favoured by the trade-union corporations, which hope that jobs can be saved even at the expense of the interests of consumers. These groups favour a return to state-led economic planning in a traditional sense, in the name of national solidarity and national interests. Within the centre-left itself there was a difference between the more moderate leftist position of the former Prime Minister, Massimo D’Alema, and that of the more radical left. D’Alema seems to have been guided primarily by the wish to accelerate the transformation of Italian capitalism by facilitating the emergence of powerful conglomerates, therefore promoting a national perspective, while the radical left appeared intent on introducing measures of political ‘control’ of capitalism, thereby still favouring a classist perspective. In either perspective, there was a serious risk, as it was pointed out on various occasions by Rampini (La Repubblica, 6 and 28 September 1999), that Italian capitalism would continue to look to the state for protection, while foreign capital would be discouraged from investing in Italy, to the detriment of the Italian economy as a whole, particularly to the detriment of the modernization of business and financial practices and of employment levels. As was recently pointed out by Mauro in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, ‘the centre-left government is betting its future around the challenge to modernize’ (La Repubblica, 1 October 1999). According to Mauro, the government interpreted modernization primarily in terms of favouring the creation of at least five large industrial players (Fiat, Telecom, Eni, Enel, Benetton) and three financial conglomerates (Mediobanca-Generali-Intesa, San Paolo, Unicredito). The intention was admirable, Mauro commented, but the temptation to influence directly the course of events was not, since modernizing the economy means above all introducing clear rules to strengthen the market and cut the links between business and politics. Mauro argued that, in the best scenario, such an approach may lead to an involuntary form of dirigisme, and in the worst, to a consolidation of the old command system. In the same year, a takeover battle for Telecom Italia led the Financial

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Times (2 October 1999) to condemn the Italian government’s tendency to intervene in the equity market in no uncertain terms, defining Massimo D’Alema as ‘the prime minister who hankers after old-style power capitalism . . . he appears to have fallen for the notion that conglomerates are necessary to ensure that the big battalions of Italian industry do not fall into foreign hands’. In an article significantly entitled ‘Italian Baroque’, the same newspaper (4 October 1999) warned that ‘politicians should understand that politics should have no part in settling takeovers in a modern economy’. It also warned its readers that an old player in the Italian finance world, Mediobanca, had ‘cleverly played on the prime minister’s concerns about national champions to re-establish its grip over Italian industry’. The Financial Times may have been biased, yet the same takeover battle for Telecom Italia was judged by an impartial commentator to show ‘signs of both continuity and change’ (Woods, 2000, p. 164). On the one hand, a hostile bid for the company was openly launched, was not blocked by the government and proved successful. On the other hand, Mediobanca played a role in the takeover and the whole affair ‘was as much, if not more, about the failure of a public enterprise to make the transition from a state-owned monopoly to a private enterprise, as about the emergence of a new form of swashbuckling entrepreneurship in Italy’ (Ibid., p. 166). There were also signs that the close links between banks and politics which were typical of the Italian model of state capitalism had not been severed but were persisting despite the approval of new legislation intended to put an end to them (L’Espresso, 23 March 2000). The strategy of promoting ‘national champions’ finds its inspiration in Italy’s past practices and its model in France (and to a lesser extent Germany). Indeed Ettore Bernabei, a key protagonist of the Christian Democratic Party and a direct promoter of the party’s close links with the public sector, openly plauded D’Alema’s recent initiatives, going as far as arguing that a return to state holding companies and to a mixed economy was for Italy a necessity, particularly in view of the fact that both France and Germany were carefully safeguarding their own public companies (L’Espresso, 7 October 1999). However, according to Rampini (La Repubblica, 28 September 1999), there was at least one crucial difference between the three countries: while French and German conglomerates had been heavily investing abroad, their Italian equivalents had been intent on defending their internal market. Indeed it was recently calculated that 23 out of the 30 top Italian companies quoted on the stock exchange operated almost exclusively in the internal market: the vast majority of these were public utilities, or were in the telecommunications


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and banking sectors (Corriere della Sera, 11 September 1999). It is also a fact that Italy’s business giants are all state giants, with the exception of the Fiat group. More importantly, as was discussed above, the Italian economy is quite unlike the French, in so far that its most competitive and dynamic sector is made up of small- and medium-sized firms in an industrial district configuration. In terms of export, profits and employment creation, small- and medium-sized firms continue to perform better than large firms: 92 per cent of all employment creation in 1999– 2000 was expected to be concentrated in firms with fewer than 50 employees. In France, by contrast, industrial districts are conspicuous for their absence (Ganne, 1983; Bull, Pitt and Szarka, 1993; Fayette, 1999). Germany has, in this respect, an economic set-up which is more directly comparable to Italy’s, although its large-scale sector accounts for a much larger proportion of output and employees. In short, the Italian government may be looking to its European neighbours for successful strategies to deal with the Europeanization and globalization of the economy, without seemingly stopping to consider what type of economic policies would suit the specific systems of production the country has developed since 1945. More importantly, Italian policy-makers may be turning to their northern neighbours for inspiration at a time when external pressures are already proving too strong and irresistible for a strategy based on the protection and promotion of national champions to be successful. In this context, the outcome of the early 2000 bid by Vodafone for the German company Mannesmann may be the harbinger of things to come. Despite Mannesmann’s fierce resistance to Vodafone’s hostile bid, and despite the German government’s initial positioning in defence of one of its national champions, the market prevailed. The final decision in favour of a ‘friendly merger’, as opposed to a hostile takeover, should not let us overlook the fact that Vodafone (and the market) obtained a fairly substantial victory over Mannesmann (and national considerations). Indeed the British press quite openly called the successful bid a victory for Anglo-Saxon style capitalism over the German model and predicted that German capitalism would change quite radically as a result. Other companies in other European countries may follow, and national governments may find themselves unable to do anything about this process. The Italian government, however, appeared to signal that it would continue to defend the national dimension, with the Minister for Communications, Cardinale, stating, after the Vodafone– Mannesmann agreement, that it was important ‘to remain vigilant so as to avoid colonizations from abroad’ (La Repubblica, 31 January 2000). In

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reality, even if ‘protective’ national strategies were to succeed, their effect could prove counterproductive, as capital for investment would shun the more protected countries and leave their companies relatively isolated and marginalized (Giavazzi, 1998). Economic innovation and modernization would suffer as a result. Far from agreeing with Ettore Bernabei’s rose-tinted view of the period of state intervention in the name of national interests, Guido Rossi, ex-president of Telecom and an ex-MP for the independent left, ventured the opinion that the Italian car industry would have been much better off if the state-owned Alfa Romeo, in the 1980s, had been bought by Ford instead of Fiat [Fiat was given preference by the Italian state]. Fiat itself, in his opinion, would have gained in terms of greater competitiveness (La Repubblica, 9 March 2000, p. 17). A few days later, his words found confirmation with the formal announcement that Fiat had sold 20 per cent of its shares to General Motors, with the option of selling the remaining shares in the future. The deal was interpreted as a clear sign that the age of the stateprotected Italian family capitalism was over and that the country was paying the price for trying to safeguard its ‘national champions’ beyond their ‘sell-by’ dates. As Rampini argued (La Repubblica, 12 March 2000, p. 1), along the lines of Guido Rossi, Italy’s protectionist mentality vis-à-vis its producers established a veto to the entry of foreign capital which blocked the process of modernization of the country’s large companies. Some of the attitudes of the centre-left government (and there is no reason to believe that a centre-right government would behave much differently) appeared to stem from traditional perceptions of what constitutes ‘large firms’ or even ‘national champions’. For the large part it was the future of the public utilities – electricity, gas, telecommunications – which the government was concerned with. More ‘mature’ manufacturing sectors, such as textiles, fashion, mechanics and engineering, foodstuffs, are generally considered as declining sectors, too exposed to the competition of low-cost countries – despite the fact that Italy continues to perform well in these sectors, and that Italian firms operating in them have actually been able to pursue a successful strategy of acquisitions and mergers abroad. As far as industrial districts are concerned, they still tend to be viewed in terms of their constituent firms, rather than being the equivalent of large firms, able to act collectively and being more than simply the sum of their parts. Lastly, what seems to be missing from current economic thinking is a strategy for promoting new ‘national champions’ in new areas particularly the ‘new economy’, a strategy known as ‘picking winners’. The conglomerates of today are not


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necessarily the giants of tomorrow, as Bill Gates’s famous example clearly shows. According to the promoters of the needs of the market, therefore, it is vital that domestic competition is opened up and that new economic actors are placed in the condition to gain easy access to capital and to operate in a level-playing field guaranteed by an impartial institutional system. In this context, regions-plc such as Tuscany or Emilia or indeed the Veneto, should have at least the same weight as financial-industrial conglomerates and should be able to influence state economic policies to the same extent. Until recently, however, this did not happen, due both to the regions not yet behaving as collective actors and to a lack of suitable channels of communication with state institutions and government think-tanks. Things began to change when the centre-left government took some important steps to include local and regional actors in their policy of ‘concertation’. On 22 December 1998 the so-called ‘Christmas Pact’, or Social Pact for Development and Employment was signed by the government and 32 social partners. Compared to previous agreements based upon a concertational approach, the new Pact introduced significant changes. As Contarino (2000, pp. 169–70) remarked, negotiation of the 1998 Pact was more broadly-based than the previous agreements, as it included representatives of all the economic sectors, including large and small industry, commerce, services, artisans, and the cooperatives. Furthermore, there was a rhetorical emphasis on the need for active involvement of actors at the local, provincial and regional levels: a ‘Protocol concerning the participation of regional, provincial and municipal governments in the implementation of the Social Pact for Development and Employment’ was signed with the Pact, calling for the extension of concertation to these levels, and emphasizing the roles of governments and social partners below the national level in promoting growth and job creation. The centre-left government also took important steps to introduce a degree of flexibility in the labour market and to lower the fiscal pressure on businesses. Members of the government even made symbolic gestures to signify their understanding of the importance of territorially-based small- and medium-sized industry and their support for its demands. The former Prime Minister himself, Massimo D’Alema, travelled to the Veneto in January 2000 and announced that he had come to learn more about the local economy, judged to be vital for the country as a whole, and the ways in which it could be promoted by political institutions

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(Il Sole 24 Ore, 2 February 2000). While the trip must be seen as part of the electoral campaign of the left for the April 2000 regional elections, it also represented a significant acknowledgement of the crucial role played by an economic model which the Italian left tended in the past to regard with some suspicion and even distaste, since it was equated to weak trade-unionism, a black economy and an unfettered domination of the market. It cannot therefore be denied that the centre-left government led by Massimo D’Alema went some considerable way towards meeting the needs of the more competitive regions and industrial sectors in Italy as well as shedding traditional ideological prejudices. Clearly, however, it did not go far enough to satisfy the northern constituency, as the results of the regional elections of 16 April 2000 testify. One of the problems for the centre-left government was the weight of the trade unions in the concertation process. The trade unions represent primarily employees of large firms and public administration and pensioners, that is, those same social groups which would be disadvantaged as a result of liberalization measures (Salvati, 1998, p. 120). In addition, they continued to promote a centralist and protectionist approach to economic policy which clashed with the idea of vertical (territorial) and horizontal (from public to private) subsidiarity (Quadrio Curzio, 1998). Whenever the prime minister tried to steer to the centre (and even the right) by signalling support for an early solution to the problem of the country’s old-age pension system or indeed for a Blairist approach to the issue of unemployment, as he did when he signed a joint letter with Tony Blair addressed to the other EU leaders in March 2000, the trade unions reacted in very strong terms. In contrast, the acquiescence of the trade unions to the measures already implemented by the centre-left government testified to the credibility of the concertation process itself. Other forces within the left had been pressing for a more radical shift in favour of both vertical and horizontal subsidiarity, having become increasingly aware of the widening gap between the Lega and its hitherto strongest supporters and advocating the cause of the latter. Massimo Cacciari, until recently Mayor of Venice and a leading exponent of the centre-left, was one of the first to link the Lega Nord to the emergence of a ‘North-eastern Question’. He was also one of the first on the left to support a federalist solution to Italy’s institutional impasse, stressing the urgency of the creation of a new type of state. Cacciari was convinced that the best response to the secessionism of the Lega was to give frustrated regions such as the Veneto a high degree of autonomy within the nation state. He declared in interview (Cacciari, 2000) that


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a coherent response had to revolve around three key issues: an organic project of a functional restructuring of the Italian state along federalist lines; a ‘grand vision’ of federalism from below; and fewer taxes. Cacciari became the centre-left candidate for president of the Veneto at the 2000 regional elections – as part of his political programme he proposed to set up a new ‘Constitution of an autonomous Veneto’, thus constructing ‘federalism from below’. Cacciari lost to the centre-right candidate in the Veneto; it is also true to say, however, that, thanks to his candidature, for the first time the centre-left in this region gained almost 40 per cent of the votes. In the meantime, other political actors put forward their own responses to globalization and European integration, promoting the case for greater liberalization of the economy, bolder steps towards political federalism and even an end to the practice of concertation. Splinter groups from the Lega set up their own political parties, all of which rejected secessionism but continued to advocate much greater autonomy to the regions. Apart from these new political forces, all fairly weak and fragile, the main protagonist was the Radical Emma Bonino, who at the 1999 European elections launched her own political party – Lista Bonino – and surprised everyone by polling 8 per cent of the votes nationally. Bonino and Pannella – Italy’s veteran founder of the Radical Party in the 1970s – later promoted a whole new series of referendums (14 in total), the majority of which were quickly dubbed ‘social referendums’ because they dealt with issues such as part-time work, home work, labour market flexibility and labour dismissals. The declared intention was to inject a very substantial dose of free-market liberalism and de-regulation into Italian labour relations. The initiative was heavily criticized by the left and the trade unions in particular for seeking to put an end to concertation and favouring a return to social conflict, to the detriment of the entire country. However, the employers’ association, Confindustria, backed the referendums, and signalled its impatience with the whole method of concertation, judged to slow down change at a time when speedy decisions were needed. In early February 2000, the Italian Constitutional Court ruled that only 7 of the proposed 14 referendums were admissible: most of those deemed to be unconstitutional were on social issues. Despite this setback, the Radicals managed to emerge as the champions of neo-liberalism and indeed federalism, putting themselves forward as serious contenders for the votes of the northern, including the north-eastern, electorate. Forza Italia’s leader, Berlusconi, chose not to side for or against the referendums. However, he also took fully on board the north-eastern

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constituency by recreating the 1994 alliance with the Lega Nord. In terms of political economy, in the autumn of 2000, Berlusconi (2000) declared that his party had the following priorities: new public works and infrastructures; lower fiscal pressure and simplified tax procedures; a reform of the pension system; and greater flexibility in the labour market. Specifically for small firms, he promised to abolish the inheritance tax. In short, he promised ‘the liberal recipe of Mrs Thatcher and Reagan, applied in the last few years by Aznar in Spain with the results we know’ (ibid., p. 2). Paradoxically, however, the alliance with the Lega came at a time when the party had already developed its antiglobalization, anti-free market ideology. Berlusconi was taking a serious risk, gambling on his ability to tame the Lega and steer it back towards neo-liberalism. As Formentini (2000) put it: ‘Bossi is a time-bomb within the centre-right alliance’. Finally, Confindustria itself had to acknowledge the new role and status of the north-eastern economy when, on 9 March 2000, it elected as its leader Antonio D’Amato, a southern entrepreneur supported en bloc by small- and medium-sized owner-managers from the Veneto and other north-eastern regions, including the Benetton brothers and Nicola Tognana, president of the Veneto industrialists, in preference to Carlo Callieri, supported by traditionally influential businesspeople such as Agnelli and Pirelli. As soon as he was elected, D’Amato signalled his views that the concertation process was not working properly and that the economy needed a much greater injection of flexibility, which was interpreted as a shift towards the right and more radical neo-liberal policies. According to Pansa, ‘it is them, the industrialists from the North-East allied with southern entrepreneurs, who decided his [D’Amato’s] victory’ (L’Espresso, 10 March 2000).

Competing responses to globalization: state and regions The response of the centre-left government to the institutional dilemmas posed by globalization has reproduced the ambiguities of its response on the economic front. Since 1996, the Italian state has made more rapid strides to federalism than at any time since unification, yet this transformation in the organizational principle of the state is being carried on in an ad hoc manner. Like a high-stakes game of poker, the centre-left’s initiatives in the field of local government reform have been consistently trumped by the demands of the regions themselves, and by Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition, and have led to substantial concessions of policy-making power being made to the regions, but


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without corresponding reforms being made to strengthen the central institutions of the state. This is federalism by default, and many on the left itself are sceptical of its value. In an interview with us, Massimo Cacciari (2000) argued passionately that federalism presupposes that the central state has a clear, rational function and strong, well-organized institutions. Following Gianfranco Miglio, of whom Cacciari, despite their political differences, speaks very highly, Cacciari contended that federalism should be part and parcel of a more thorough overhaul of Italy’s institutional structure as a whole. Other leading Italian political scientists, notably Gianfranco Pasquino, emphatically concur (Pasquino 1998; 2000). The so-called Bassanini Laws, enacted in March (Law 59/97) and May 1997 (127/97), were the centre-left’s first attempt to appease sentiment in the North. The first of the two laws formed a general framework for administrative decentralization. The second introduced ‘urgent measures to cut red tape and to improve decision-making and supervisory procedures’. Neither law can be said to have introduced federalism. Rather, what the then minister for local government, the DS politician Franco Bassanini, was trying to do was to complete the process of regionalization begun in the 1970s by ensuring that sub-national tiers of government, and especially the regions, genuinely were responsible for the areas of policy reserved for them by the Constitution (Gilbert 2000). Between June 1997 and March 1998, a series of decree laws was enacted that granted local and regional governments greater autonomy and decisionmaking power over agriculture (143/97), local transport (422/97), the labour market (469/97) and the distribution of fuels (32/98). Decree 469/97 was especially interesting, in the context of the debate over industrial competitiveness, in so far as it gave the regions a determining role in professional training. The biggest single effort to put flesh on the bones of law 59/97, however, was the gigantic law 112/98 of April 1998, which was 164 articles in length and which launched important initiatives in key areas of policy for business. Public assistance for small business, as well as the power to interpret EU guidelines in this field, was, for instance, turned over to the regions by this decree law (articles 18– 19). Article 21 made a bonfire of the numerous controls and authorizations that small businesses had to obtain before opening or extending a factory; article 23 obliged municipal authorities to establish ‘one-stop shops’ where aspiring entrepreneurs could obtain all the information they needed in order to set up new businesses. The sheer size of law 112/ 98 meant implementing it was bound to be difficult. The law gave the regions little time (six months) to come up with plans for how they

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would change their existing legal framework. Emilia-Romagna was in the forefront of this task, along with Tuscany and southern regions like the Abruzzo, but there were a few interesting laggards: the Veneto, Lombardy and Piedmont among them (Baldi, 2000). Four main reservations can be levelled at the Bassanini Laws. First, in some areas, notably the schools and transport policy, fear of union reaction, and the power of entrenched bureaucracies, led the government to be too cautious in its policy of deregulation. Secondly, the simultaneous failure of the Bicameral Committee on Constitutional Reform, which was to have written the changes introduced by law 59/97 into the Constitution, meant that envisaged changes to the way that the regions were financed were lost. It was thus not clear how the regions would pay for their new responsibilities. Thirdly, the laws, though they allowed the regions and other tiers of sub-national government a say in national policy-making via the so-called ‘Unified Conference’ of the state, the regions and the municipalities, which was established with decree 281/ 97, did not address the question of regional self-government (though here, too, the draft Constitution produced by the Bicamerale would have dealt with this point had it been allowed to). Fourthly, the laws reserved to the state the right to make ‘framework laws’ in almost all areas. Italian regions can decide how they will implement a policy, not whether or why they should. Questions of broad principle continued to be decided in Rome, and this power was being interpreted rather narrowly. The government, however, proceeded to take significant steps to address the second and third of these weaknesses. A degree of fiscal federalism was introduced. From 2001, the regions will be able to keep 25.7 per cent of the national VAT revenues, as well as higher quotas from petrol taxes and local taxes. It was calculated that, as a result of these changes, only seven regions (Piedmont, Liguria, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Lazio and Marche) will be able to enjoy complete financial autonomy immediately, while the others will have to rely on temporary transfers of resources from the richer regions. All regions are supposed to achieve self-sufficiency by 2013. The regions will also be free to determine their own institutions and statutes. A constitutional law passed by parliament on 22 November 1999 altered four articles of the Constitution (articles 121, 122, 123 and 126) to permit what a perceptive Italian scholar of local government has called ‘the absolute pre-eminence’ of the regional president (Vassallo, 1999). At present, the president of the regional government is elected directly by the voters in so far as the first name on the winning party


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list automatically becomes the president of the region. But the president is vincolato (constrained) like an Italian prime minister by the necessity of satisfying all the component parts of his or her governing coalition and by the intricate procedures of the regional legislatures. The goal of the new law was to svincolare the regional presidency and to allow the institution to become the policy-making centre for the regional tier of government. Accordingly, article 1 of the new law, substituting article 121 of the existing Constitution, now explicitly states that the president of the regional government represents the region; directs the policy of the regional government and takes responsibility for it; promulgates the laws and emits regional directives; directs the administrative functions delegated by the central state to the region in accordance with the instructions of the Government of the Republic. To support him or her in these tasks, key changes have been made to articles 122 and 123 of the Constitution, and to article 126. Article 122 has been altered to give the regional president the power to hire and fire his assessori (regional ministers), a power that was formerly reserved for the party bosses of the majority coalition. Article 123 has been changed to authorize the regions to rewrite their own statutes and to lay down institutions and electoral laws of their own choice. Although there is nothing to stop a region choosing to return to a narrowly proportional and ‘parliamentary’ form of government, the barely disguised hope of many reformers is that the regions will opt for ‘presidential’ systems with the regional presidents being chosen separately. Article 126 has been changed to give regional presidents a measure of security from turbulent coalition politics. In future, if the regional president loses the confidence of the governing majority, regional politics will not be embroiled in a futile political crisis while the parties contract among themselves to find a new figurehead leader. Instead, the region will have to return at once to the polls. In this way, the political parties have been made responsible towards the electorate: if they overthrow the regional government they will have to explain why while the issue is at the forefront of the electors’ minds. As Vassallo has argued, taken together the constitutional changes have opened up the possibility of Italian regional presidents acting like German Landesprasidenten. If they want to, regional presidents will now be able to act as chief executives and to push the lethargic local administrations towards new initiatives in the areas of policy conceded to them by the Bassanini Laws (Vassallo 1999;

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Vassallo and Baldini, 2000). Whether they will take the initiative in this way is another question. But the institutional framework is now in place. Fiscal federalism, the Bassanini Laws and the revisions of articles 121–3 and 126 of the Constitution already represented a gigantic mouthful for the regions to swallow and digest. Yet the northern regions have tried to gobble down more. The Lega Nord’s adoption of ‘devolution’ instead of secession as its core policy opened the way for renewed demands for greater regional autonomy. Forza Italia’s northern leaders, including Berlusconi himself, have jumped enthusiastically on to the bandwagon and have promised to transfer healthcare, education and training, and even some aspects of policing to sub-national tiers of government (Berlusconi 2000). The regional government of the Veneto, which is controlled by Forza Italia and the Lega, has taken advantage of its new power to draw up its own statute to go even further and to propose that it should be allowed to legislate as it wishes in all areas except foreign policy and immigration, defence, the issue of money and the management of the financial markets, law and order, the legal system, and the determination of minimum standards to be attained by the social services. It would have the power to arrange its own tax regime – and the extent of its contribution to the central state would be determined, for a fixed period, by mutual agreement between the region and the state. The Veneto regional government would have all power to interpret and implement European Union regulations and directives (Consiglio regionale del Veneto, 2000, arts 6–7). If this statute was copied throughout Italy, the country would be transformed into a confederation – a kind of Switzerland writ large. Italy would become, at a stroke, one of the most decentralized (and de-centred) states in the world. Indeed, given that the European Union is expanding its influence over foreign and defence policy, and monetary policy has already been transferred to the European Central Bank, the central Italian state would be left as little more than a shell. A shell, however, that would still employ hundreds of thousands of public functionaries in by now redundant ministries. It is hard to imagine so radical a policy actually being introduced. Yet the centre-left’s competing proposals, which were presented to parliament and actually passed by the Chamber of Deputies in November 2000, are in some respects even more troublesome in their implications. The centre-left envisages the central state maintaining the exclusive right to legislate in some 16 broad areas of policy and then suggests that a further 30 or so policy areas (work and safety legislation, education,


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pensions, the regulation of banks, among many others) should be decided by so-called ‘concurrent legislation’ whereby the central state would lay down the core principles of any given law, and the regions would then enact regional variations on the centrally determined theme (Parlamento Italiano, 2000). The central state would also have the power to refer all regional legislation to the Constitutional Court for a judgement on its constitutionality and would be the arbiter of whether or not regional laws were meeting European norms. The potential for conflict between centre and periphery implicit in the centre-left’s scheme are simply enormous. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that if the Veneto regional government’s proposals were introduced on a national scale, Italy would no longer exist as a nation state, while if the centre-left’s proposals were passed into law Italy would not be governable. It is difficult to regard such proposals as a measured response to the objective challenges being posed by globalization. Rather, they smack of electoral grandstanding and self-aggrandisement equally (the president of the Veneto, under his proposed reform, would become the head of a small state comparable in economic production and population to, say, Denmark). Yet politicians from both the right-wing coalition and the centre-left parties have now committed themselves publicly to introducing sweeping reforms to the form of the Italian state.

The Northern Question and the growing territorial gap in Italian politics At the regional elections of April 2000 the Italian electorate swung to the right, particularly in the North, thus signalling its dissatisfaction with the centre-left government headed by D’Alema. All four northern regions participating in these elections (Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto and Liguria) elected the candidates of the centre-right. The four central regions, traditionally characterized by a socialist subculture, confirmed their support for the centre-left candidates. The southern regions voted less en bloc, with three electing the centre-right candidates and three favouring the candidates of the centre-left. Finally, the Lazio region where the capital, Rome, is located, swung to the right and elected the candidate of the Casa delle Libertà alliance. The centre-right alliance, which included the Lega Nord, gained control of eight regions, while the centre-left alliance gained control of seven. At the 1995 regional elections, the centre-left alliance had obtained control of nine regions, while the Polo had succeeded in only six.

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The election results were unanimously considered a triumph for the centre-right and the expression ‘electoral earthquake’ was used repeatedly by the press to indicate the extent of their possible repercussions on the current government. Indeed, they led to the resignation of Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, who was swiftly replaced by Giuliano Amato, previously Treasury Minister, as leader of a renewed centre-left coalition government. In the wake of the election results, nearly all political commentators discussed openly the existence of a ‘Northern Question’ and of a growing gap between the parties of the left and the northern electorate. In the newspaper La Repubblica, Valentini wrote that the current parliamentary majority is not able to interpret the ‘animus’ of the northern peoples . . . Since this is the most advanced part of national society, of those productive groups which were responsible for the ‘Italian miracle’ and still represents the wealthiest and most modern area in the country, it is clearly not a positive sign for president D’Alema. (La Repubblica, 20 April 2000) In an interview published in the same newspaper, Piero Fassino, Minister for Foreign Trade and member of the Left Democrats, expressed a similar opinion, stating that ‘the centre-left is not able to represent the demands and anxieties of the people who live in the North’ (La Repubblica, 20 April 2000). He added that the regional elections were comparable to the elections of D’Amato to president of Confindustria, in the sense that both represented a ‘protest of small and medium industrialists against the establishment . . . The message was clear: we want a Confindustria which speaks for us too. What happened on Sunday is the same thing: we do not feel represented by the government, we want to count too’. Indeed, according to the political commentator Panebianco, in an editorial significantly entitled ‘Divorce from the North’, the main reason for the defeat of the centre-left at the 2000 regional elections was to be found in the persisting centralist and statalist vocation typical of the ‘old left’, as well as in the Government’s close links with an ‘hyper-conservative’ trade unionism (Corriere della Sera, 18 April 2000). In the same newspaper, Galli della Loggia argued that the main weakness of the centre-left was to have safeguarded the representation of the large economic corporations and socio-political organizations, such as the trade unions, to the detriment of new social interests and groups (‘Boomerang for the left’, Corriere della Sera, 20 April 2000). His judgement seemed echoed by the sociologist and Lega Nord expert


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Diamanti, who, in an article entitled ‘Leadership crisis’, emphasized the inability of the centre-left to communicate with the ‘emerging social sectors: the young, the productive groups, the new and old economy of the North, but also civil society in the South’ (Il Sole 24 Ore, 18 April 2000). He added that the centre-left government had privileged negotiations with socio-economic organizations, the corporations and financial and professional groups, obtaining considerable results, but had failed to represent the interests and needs of the wider electorate. Diamanti (2000) also put forward the opinion that the centre-left did not recognize itself in the north-eastern socio-economic model and was not recognized by it. In a Venice left-leaning newspaper, Camon took the line that it was the government’s timid and ‘improvised’ steps towards federalism that had contributed to its defeat in the region and indeed across the North: ‘The left could and should have provided different responses to uncontrolled immigration, savage taxation, the chaos of the health system, the demand for federalism coming from below’ (La Tribuna di Treviso, 18 April 2000). Along the same lines, the president of the Foundation North-East, Bisazza, declared after the elections that the centre-right had won thanks to the strong demand for regional autonomy and lower taxes expressed by northern voters (Il Sole 24 ore, 18 April 2000). He added that a ‘Catalan-style’ devolution was now inevitable. In short, there appeared to be a general consensus of opinion, both on the left and on the right, that the regional elections of 16 April 2000 had marked a victory for the centre-right alliance determined largely by the behaviour of the northern electorate. Although the results of the elections in the southern regions were interpreted by some commentators as an indication that the territorial divide in Italian politics had decreased in importance, the majority chose to emphasize the existence of a ‘Northern Question’ whose solution was a matter of urgency for any government. In this context, the Northern Question was judged specifically to coincide with the interests and needs of a model of development based on small- and medium-sized firms and clamouring for regional autonomy and fiscal federalism. The ‘Northern Question’ continued to daunt the centre-left government after the elections. The government, now led by Amato, soon attracted unfavourable comments for the absence of any influential politician from the North-East among its ministers. Only 3 out of 78 members of the government were from that area. According to Stella, in the Corriere della Sera (4 May 2000), this represented a twenty-sixth of government posts, a serious underepresentation for an area which accounted for

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a ninth of the population, an eighth of all capital firms, a seventh of the national wealth, a sixth of bank branches, almost a sixth of manufacturing firms, a fifth of all exports, and more than half of the surplus of the balance of payments. Even more drastically, in an article entitled ‘No Venetian in the Amato government’, Lago wrote that ‘the defeat of 16 April has not taught anything. The centre-left does not see the Veneto and, by not seeing the Veneto, it does not see the North: . . . a second Berlusconi government would never make such a mistake’ (La Tribuna di Treviso, 26 April 2000). At the other end of the political spectrum, the centre-right acquired an increasingly ‘northern’ profile, with the presidents of Lombardy (Formigoni) and the Veneto (Galan) forcing their hands against the central state in the direction of much greater political and fiscal federalism. There were times when these two presidents appeared in the media more frequently and prominently than either Berlusconi or Bossi, speaking in the name of the ‘Lombard’ or the ‘Venetian’ peoples. This contrasted sharply with many representatives of the centre-left presenting the case for the southern regions and rejecting in their name any demands for ‘a leghist type of federalism’, as the statute for the Veneto region proposed by Galan was defined by the centre-left. As we saw in the previous section, the elections were preceded and followed by renewed proposals and counterproposals around the issue of federalism which to a large extent played an electoral and propagandist role rather than being conceived as an organic programme of functional reforms. The situation runs the serious risk of alienating the citizens and turning federalism into a devalued currency. There seems to be a general consensus among constitutional experts that the various federalist reforms and proposals lack coherence because there is no political actor sufficiently strong to put forward and implement a strategic design of constitutional change. The different proposals reflect the simple aggregation of different political actors and positions rather than expressing their synthesis. As a lawyer and academic remarked (Pezzini, 2000), ‘what prevails in both camps is the attempt to fight the political opponents on their own ground, as opposed to elaborating new policies within one’s own coalition. In this context, the scientific debate is strongly conditioned by the political contingencies’. In her view, institutional policy-making has been conditioned by politics since the 1980s and politics is intent in offering unrealistic and eye-catching promises of immediate solutions to thorny issues. Another lawyer and academic (Sciumè, 2000) argued that a real process of change is taking place in Italy but he, too, pointed out that in the country today an organic


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political project had great difficulty in emerging. Paradoxically, however, he judged the regions to be far more dynamic than the state in producing solutions to the need to restructure the political institutions while safeguarding national unity. Another argument put forward concerned the relationship between the different tiers of government: ‘the situation is one of competition between different institutional levels whereas federalism means a pact, collaboration. Everyone tries to pull the sheet towards their side’ (Cacciari, 2000). An academic and journalist working on federalism expressed the opinion that currently there is a scramble between the different institutional levels for acquiring new competencies, in a way which can lead to serious contradictions. Often there is also a problem of political colour, this explains why Formigoni, the centre-right president of the Lombardy region, is frontally attacking the central government. But what will happen if Berlusconi becomes the next prime minister? (Bergamini, 2000) The answer to this question was unanimous among all the politicians and academics interviewed in Autumn 2000, that is, that Formigoni and other centre-right presidents of regional governments would have to toe the political line and put an end to their revolutionary posturing. At a time when the Lega has been experiencing electoral decline, the territorialization of Italian politics appears exacerbated. It remains to be seen whether federalism can be extricated from the immediate necessities of the political struggle and respond to the growing demands of the citizens for more accountable and efficient forms of governance. Conversely, Italy may stumble into a constitutional crisis of major dimensions. The real question is whether the Italian state will be successfully re-structured and modernized, providing for a diffusion of political power, or whether it will simply be de-structured, with different socio-political and territorial groups wrestling with each other for its spoils. As we saw, these are both neo-medieval scenarios – yet they are also poles apart.

Conclusions As indicated in the literature on economic globalization, Italy is currently showing visible tensions between different socio-economic constituencies and political strategies. These tensions have specific characteristics due to the specific model(s) of economic development

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the country witnessed after the Second World War. In the 1980s and for most of the 1990s there was a mismatch between economics and politics, due primarily to the fact that the new economic actors which had emerged after 1945 and which now represent the most dynamic and competitive sectors – as well as those most exposed to the process of globalization – were not able to influence political and institutional strategic thinking. Yet clearly times had changed since centre–periphery relations could be settled through the mediation and patronage of national political parties. Admittedly, during the First Republic both the Christian Democratic and the Communist Parties had successfully represented the interests of the periphery at the level of the central state, as well as the interests of the state at the local and regional levels. However, in those days it was much more a question of the state promoting economic development (particularly the development of smallscale capitalism) largely for social and political reasons. Because of this, such a development could be directly led and managed by the state. By contrast, today’s industrial districts do not so much play a social role as they have come to form the backbone of the Italian economy. Their needs are different to what they used to be and political patronage no longer provides the answer. While it is futile to demonize the role played by Christian Democracy during the First Republic without acknowledging its more positive impact in various spheres, not least the socio-economic one, it is no less redundant to believe that all that is now required is a revival of old-style strategies of political intervention in the economy. It was thanks to the rise of the Lega Nord that established politicians were given a clear signal that the industrial district model of development, recently defined as the ‘second engine’ of Italian economic growth (Becattini, 2000), had to be accommodated for in the institutional settlement that was to emerge out of the collapse of the First Republic. Hence the widespread agreement on both sides of the political spectrum that some form of federalism had to be introduced together with other reforms of the political system and the labour market. Hence also the centre-left government’s important steps towards greater regional autonomy and fiscal ‘federalism’. However, as soon as the Lega gave signs of losing momentum and support, there was also a tentative return to more traditional and ‘centralist’ solutions to the country’s political and economic impasse. In fairness to the centre-left coalition, until recently the main political parties supported in varying degrees the idea of a government which promoted the interests of the ‘national’ industry by combining a policy of privatizations with safeguarding the


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ownership and control of the industrial and financial conglomerates emerging from such a policy. The fear of strategic groups ending under the control of foreign capital is deeply ingrained and cuts across political divisions. This basic consensus beyond other political differences at times seemed to point in the direction of a convergence of positions towards established economic strategies and institutional arrangements. This turn of events looks much less probable in the light of the results of the 2000 regional elections. Back in the autumn of 1999, Riccardo Illy, centre-left Mayor of Trieste, had remarked that: ‘The silence of the North-East represents the quiet before the storm’ (La Repubblica, 26 September 1999). Or, to borrow the words of the sociologist Ilvo Diamanti, ‘it is a silence which makes a lot of noise’ (La Repubblica, 26 September 1999). The results of the regional elections confirmed these predictions, as the northern electorate ended its silence by voting decisively for the centre-right alliance. There is now a clear need for a sustained and coherent process of political decentralization, the only course of action which can seriously fend off the risk of a political split of the country. This is now a task that will almost certainly fall upon the centre-right coalition, unless the Amato government proves able to implement a package of reforms to the satisfaction of the northern electorate before the general elections due in 2001. Whether the centralist and statalist National Alliance can reconcile itself to some form of federalism, and the Lega can bring itself to promote a restructuring, as opposed to the dismantling, of the Italian state, as well as a process of governance, as opposed to obstruction, of economic development, remains to be seen. The only alternative, should the centre-right alliance win the 2001 elections, would be renewed in-fight and squabbling between the three partners of the Casa delle Libertà. It is also the case that established approaches to political economy, equating the role of the state vis-à-vis the market with direct intervention in the economic sphere, are much less suitable in the present age. There is no denying that in every country political governance plays a fundamental role in promoting and sustaining economic competitiveness. The crucial issue, however, concerns the nature of political governance and the relationship between state and market. According to Weiss, who is herself a firm advocate of a strong state, what is now required is ‘Governed Interdependence – or GI’, in other words, ‘the state’s ability to use its autonomy to consult and to elicit consensus and cooperation from the private sector’ (1998, p. 39). For governed interdependence to be effective and promote innovative strategies, rather than a preservation of the ‘status quo’, the state needs to be receptive to new

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ideas and provide access to most, if not all, groups operating in the private sector, thus minimizing the influence of sectoral interests and the risks of both clientelism and protectionism. In Italy, in recent times, Governed Interdependence has been most effective at local and/or regional level. As Leonardi put it ‘ Changes in the activities of the regions in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere have established that regions are no longer mere administrative appendages of the nation state but in fact active partners in the regional and local development process’ (1994, p. 245). Regions are now ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ and as such, according to Leonardi, they ‘need to be taken fully into account by EU regional and sectoral policy-makers’ (p. 245). The regions-as-entrepreneurs, we would add, also need to be fully taken on board by the nation state which has to find ways of integrating them in the policy-making process. This is precisely what used to be missing in political and governmental thinking and practices in the Italian context. The mismatch between politics and economics in Italy was therefore primarily a territorial mismatch between a national politics which prioritized national social and economic actors, little exposed to foreign competition, and regional models of development which were directly affected by, and integrated into, a global economy, but had to rely on political institutions largely devoid of decisionmaking powers. If in Italy the state really does matter it needs to provide effective linkages between these two levels and devise governing capacities which encompass both. In the absence of such a strategy, the subnational, micro-regional level will link directly with the supra-national, macro-regional level (EU) and leave the nation state to contend with the future settlement of its ‘national champions’, thus exacerbating the risk of internal territorial divisions.

Conclusions

When the Lega Nord put forward its 1992 electoral programme, many of its proposals were interpreted as destabilizing, provocative and even downright dangerous. The concept of a federal reform of the Italian state seemed particularly alien to the country’s political and administrative tradition and was rejected outright by the other contenders for that election. Politicians and intellectuals stressed the selfish motives behind the Lega’s federalist project and its request for lower taxes, and reminded the Italian public of the need for social and territorial solidarity. Press articles and academic studies both in Italy and abroad reinforced this image of selfishness and greediness. As Senigallia put it in The New Leader in 1992, ‘what frightens innumerable Italians regardless of political geography is the narrow-mindedness and ignorance of the League’s cadre, as well as its apparent determination to undermine national unity in order to advance strictly regional interests’ (The New Leader, 9 March 1992). This idea was reinforced by Singer in The Nation: the League represents the richest part of Italy, it is the revolt of the Haves who, like Croats and Slovenes, refuse to subsidise their poorer compatriots. With class solidarity shaken and universal goals forgotten, the leghe are playing on the unity of kith and kin, on the alleged community of interests between the Lombard worker and his employer. (The Nation, 31 August–7 September 1992) In The New Republic, Sturz (15 February 1993) spoke of a racist and xenophobic party, whose leader strove to instill fear in his enemies. In two of the early books on the Lega, Moioli (1990; 1991), a member and officer of the left party PDS, explicitly referred to the Lega phenomenon 173

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as being racist and xenophobic, as well as the product of a sinister and wicked attempt to ensure greater margins of wealth for some areas of Italy, based on a ‘do-it-yourself’ philosophy and on a form of collective selfishness. Manconi (1990) defined the Lega as a party characterized by an ‘invasion syndrome’, with clear reference to its racist intolerance. Torpey argued that to the hard-core leghisti, northeners are good because they are wealthier and more valuable to society, while southerners are bad because they are economic losers . . . The losers in Italian social development, the League suggests, are simply no longer ‘our’ responsibility: they must learn to fend for themselves. The implications of this attitude are obviously disturbing for anyone concerned about social equality. (Torpey, 1994, p. 314) The list could continue, but it should be sufficient to give an idea of the mixture of disgust and repulsion that the Lega inspired in its opponents and in political commentators, which led them to reject any idea of federalism, be it fiscal or political. As Ruzza and Schmidtke summed up in 1993: With regard to most political actors, the opposition to the leagues has been complete and uncompromising . . . an attitude of total rejection . . . Opposition is often conducted with the weapon of irony and sarcasm. The Lega is portrayed as a group of uneducated, parochial and rough small-village dwellers. (pp. 6–7) Nine years later, the scenario has changed to such an extent that it has become unrecognizable. Federalism has now become the new buzzword in Italian politics across the whole party spectrum, from the somewhat reluctant post-fascist National Alliance to the main heir of the Communist Party, the Left Democrats. The centre-left government approved a reform which introduced moderate levels of fiscal federalism, granting the regions greater autonomy in deciding how to spend their own funds. In addition, the amount of funds available to individual regions is destined to grow from 2002 in proportion to their rate of economic growth. As the under-secretary to the Treasury declared, the new reform will make increasingly visible the difference between the best and worst performing regions, even though a solidarity fund will allow the weaker regions not to suffer as a result of falling behind in terms of economic

Conclusions

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growth. Who would have thought in 1992 that the main party of the left would actually be the promoter and implementer of such a reform? As for the centre-right alliance, following the renewal of a pact with the Lega in February 2000, it proposed setting up three offices – similar to ministries – for the North, Centre and South, introducing fiscal federalism along the German model, and devolving health, education and training, as well as police matters, to the regions. The proposal, clearly aimed at satisfying the Lega, was accepted both by Forza Italia, which in 1994 took no steps whatsoever towards federalism, and, even more surprisingly, by the National Alliance, a centralist party by tradition and vocation. Forza Italia leader, Berlusconi, justified his change of heart by declaring openly that in 1994 he had not understood the importance of federalism but was now fully convinced: ‘The future of democracy lies only in federalism. The Lega has the merit of being the first to realise this. In 1994 I was still confused, but now I am profoundly certain. We will not fail’ (La Repubblica, 20 February 2000). Roberto Formigoni, a leading exponent of Forza Italia and president of the Lombardy region, went even further and specified that ‘If the Polo wins the next elections, the state will only retain competence for justice, foreign policy and defence. Everything else will go to the regions and from there to the provinces and communes’ (Il Sole 24 ore, Dossier, 6 March 2000). The main factors behind this extraordinary turn of events are, in our view, the Lega Nord’s abandonment of federalism in favour of secessionism on the one hand, and the ability of its political opponents to occupy the political space left vacant by the Lega and proclaim themselves federalist on the other. To reconcile its change of heart with its long-standing values and beliefs, the centre-left coined the expression ‘solidary federalism’. The centre-right, in turn, reconciled patriotism, nationalism and federalism by stressing its support for ‘unitary federalism’. It was not simply a question of political expediency, however. We are of the opinion that federalism would not have become prominent in the Italian political arena were it not for two important realizations. The first realization was that the Lega Nord, for all its ambiguities and contradictions, had been quicker to grasp the need to reform and restructure the centralized state in the new global context. The second realization was that behind the Lega was a socio-economic constituency with serious grievances and with genuine and legitimate reasons for demanding a greater degree of political and financial autonomy. From this point of view, the early reactions to the emergence of the Lega, all of which stressed the crude, raw selfishness of its followers, were fully

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understandable yet also missed the point. They equated the electorate of the Lega with a Poujadiste form of protest but did not stop to consider what had caused a particularly successful and dynamic socioeconomic area to turn to an extreme regionalist party. They also labelled federalism as a dangerous and destabilizing proposal, no more than a device to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Very little was said or known about the process of globalization in those days. Italy’s political, institutional and social reforms had not yet been embarked upon, and the specific challenges experienced by the north-eastern ‘outpost’ of the country’s economy were not properly understood by the political class but only by a restricted group of economic experts and sociologists researching on industrial districts. Only later it became clear that ‘the success of SMEs and the growth of subregional economies is connected to the overall process of globalisation as they can cope better with shifting and volatile patterns of international demand through their diversified and flexible production’ (Sideri, 1997, p. 72). As Salvati remarked (1999, p. 395), in the 1970s it was generally believed in Italy that SMEs were destined to be a short-lived phenomenon, due primarily to a process of decentralization of large firms, which were contracting out part of their production. The possibility that they constituted a viable economic sector in their own right was not seriously contemplated and the links with the process of globalization were not explored. This attitude persisted in the 1980s, at a time, as we saw in Chapter 3, when industrial districts were having to face problems of scale and governance, costs and outsourcing, innovation and efficiency, and were looking for a new political interlocutor. A deaf political class allowed an extreme radical party to emerge out of the collapse of Christian Democracy, and to challenge the established consensus. It was recently pointed out by Zincone that extremist parties and movements have to find new paths, carry out tasks of exploration and avantgard. When (and if) their adventure is successful, then their paths are occupied by the convoys and camps of the mainstream parties, representing the normal desires of reasonable people. At that point the extremists have fufilled their duty. They can retire and disappear . . . (Corriere della Sera, 23 February 2000) Zincone’s opinion clearly reflected the wish that the Lega would disappear from Italian politics: nevertheless it raised an interesting point.

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Canovan’s (1999) recent re-appraisal of populism and populist parties as being able to exercise, in specific circumstances, a salutary shake-up of sclerotic and outdated democratic institutions is also pertinent to our analysis of the Lega Nord and its effects on the Italian political system. This is not to deny that the Lega phenomenon could have developed in ways which could have been highly inimical to the democratic process – not least by turning to violence, as indeed seemed possible when Bossi introduced the ‘green shirt’ uniform for his followers, a sinister reminder of the fascist blackshirts. It is also the case that the anti-immigration platform and ethnic ‘values’ promoted by the Lega continue to raise the spectre of racial intolerance and political conflict. Yet it is also true to say that the Lega has constantly held back from the brink of violent conflict and it has demonstrated restraint at times of mass rallies and protest demonstrations. What we are saying is that, while radical populist parties undoubtedly represent a threat to democracy, they also act as a reminder to the mainstream political forces that new projects and solutions need to be put forward and implemented. This function can have a positive role, provided that the main democratic parties move relatively quickly to put into effect a reforming process. In Italy, this is precisely what seems to have happened after the initial rejection, by all the other parties, of everything the Lega stood for. While racism, cultural or otherwise, rightly remains a party taboo, federalism, lower taxes, efficiency gains and other ‘neo-liberal’ policies are no longer ostracized or considered unspeakable, indeed they have been brought into the mainstream political debate, as was shown in Chapter 5. On the left, fear of the Lega provoked a serious rethinking of longstanding political beliefs. As Cacciari (2000), the independent-minded ex-Mayor of Venice, told us explicitly, ‘there is no doubt whatsoever that the left started to talk of federalism for fear of the Lega’. He added that for a long time ‘the Italian left had been totally deaf: the Constitution was considered sacred and untouchable, and so was the system of proportional representation’. A regional councillor for Lombardy and member of the Left Democrats, Benigni (2000), also spoke of the left’s slow reaction to the ‘growing demand for federalism from below’. He explained this both in terms of his party’s belief in social equality and in terms of a strong resistance to federalism from its members and cadres in the South. Today, he pointed out, these resistances had been overcome because ‘it was clear that we could not continue to defend the centralist system, we would have been wiped out’. Indeed, Cacciari himself played a crucial role in persuading the Left Democrats that federalism – or, at the very least, radical decentralization – had to be

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taken seriously and that ideological prejudices against the north-eastern economy had to be discarded. He relentlessly reminded his fellow politicians based in Rome that new ideas and innovative solutions were needed, that the old mental habits were inadequate in the new social and economic context, and that demonizing the adversary (i.e., the Lega) was morally satisfying but politically sterile. As he put it to us: ‘in the Veneto there is a firm every eight residents. We are talking of a mass phenomenon, it is not a question of capitalist bosses’. It helped that Cacciari belonged to a new strand of relatively powerful city mayors, elected on the basis of a majoritarian system, who did not refrain from being critical of those same parties to which they owed their mayoral candidature. On the right, Berlusconi was furious when the Lega left his government in 1994 and caused its downfall. Relations between the two parties seemed irreparably damaged and the two leaders resorted to trading insults and treating each other as their worst enemy. For a time it looked as if Forza Italia could absorb the electorate of the Lega, particularly when various surveys discovered that there were very few differences between the voters of the two parties in terms of their socio-economic background and value systems (Calvi and Vannucci, 1995). Indeed, some scholars boldly proclaimed the end of the Lega and its regionalism: ‘when put to the test, territorial identity as a basis for politics melted away before a national identity provided by the much more concrete consumerism and the fantasy dream-world of television’ (Brierley and Giacometti, 1996, p. 194). Despite losing votes heavily at the 1999 European elections, however, the Lega was still far from being dead. As we saw, it managed to poll 7.8 per cent in Piedmont, 11.3 per cent in Lombardy, and 10.7 per cent in Veneto. The only solution, from Berlusconi’s point of view, remained that of widening the centre-right alliance to include the Lega (and possibly the Radicals) and trading centralism for federalism, which is what happened in February 2000. In short, while on the left it was a question of opening up to the needs and demands of the north-eastern constituency of independent producers, artisans and self-employed, in the hope of appealing to new, nontraditional voters, on the right it was mainly a question of re-uniting a traditionally compact electorate by reaching a pact with the Lega. In both cases, to adopt Zincone’s metaphor, the mainstream parties have finally moved their convoys and camps and occupied the federalist paths first discovered but later discarded by the Lega. From what has been said so far, it should be clear that we disagree with Biorcio’s (1997, p. 12) opinion that the electoral success of the

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Lega was not due to variously identifiable socio-economic grievances and needs; rather, it was due to the ability of the party itself, as a dynamic and creative political actor. In this context, according to Biorcio, it is futile for the other parties to believe that they can erode the consensus for the Lega by implementing political reforms of a pragmatic type. If this were the case, it would need to be explained why voters started to desert the Lega in the late 1990s, at a time when it was swapping federalism for secessionism, and neo-liberal policies for protectionist ones, while the other parties were incorporating some of its early proposals in their programmes. As we argued in this volume, voting for the Lega did not represent an unconditional act of identification with the party, but a complex mix of practical needs and changing values and beliefs. While the Lega played a fundamental role in mobilizing voters and supporters, it also fell into the trap of believing that they would remain loyal through thick and thin, whatever policies the party decided to embrace. In the conclusion to his book, Biorcio (1997, p. 276) put forward the view, entirely in accordance with his main argument and interpretation, that the possible reforms of a federalist nature do not have any chance to absorb the protest of the Lega . . . All the measures to bring about a widening of the powers and prerogatives of the regions and local councils . . . cannot in any way erode the consensus for the Lega, which uses the principle of self-determination in a more radical logic, in line with popular imaginary. Such reforms, however, when they were taken on board by the centre-left and by Forza Italia, did succeed in eroding the consensus for the Lega, precisely because, as Biorcio himself acknowledged, they represent diffused aspirations in the North (and to a certain extent also in the Centre). In contrast, we agree entirely with Biorcio that the mainstream parties have not so far been able to put forward wide-ranging and coherent political projects. The fact that the political agenda in Italy has been set to a large extent as a response to, and for fear of, the Lega Nord, means that a comprehensive reform of Italy’s political institutions has not so far been devised, let alone implemented. A reforming process is no doubt in place but it is largely ad hoc, piecemeal and lacking vision. This is particularly in evidence in the case of the transformation of the centralized state into a federal state. From this point of view the prospects for the future are mixed and optimism would be misplaced, even though much has already been

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achieved. Italy has at last embarked on a process of modernization and fairly substantial reforms have already been introduced thanks to the efforts of successive governments, and in particular the current (at the time of writing) centre-left government. Admittedly, the results of the April 2000 regional elections seemed to indicate that the centre-left government had not been able to go far enough along the road of introducing reforms of a federalist and liberal nature which would satisfy the northern electorate. It is doubtful whether it could have done more, given the internal composition of the governing coalition and the weight of the trade unions within the left. The new centre-left government headed by Amato also adopted a reforming drive, indeed it renewed attempts to win concessions from the trade unions as regards labour market flexibility and a reform of the pension system. The recentlynominated leader of the centre-left coalition, Francesco Rutelli, Mayor of Rome, is also focusing, in the electoral campaign for the 2001 general elections, on issues of taxation, decentralization and incentives to economic development. In contrast, Forza Italia took on board the interests of the Lega’s traditional electorate to a much larger extent than in the past, with some degree of success. According to Ravelli (La Repubblica, 4 May 2000), in the Veneto the old DC electorate has now gone into the fold of Forza Italia, no longer attracted by the lures of the Lega Nord. This would explain why, at the regional elections of 16 April 2000, Forza Italia gained 30.4 per cent of the votes in the Veneto, as opposed to the Lega’s 12 per cent. From this point of view, it may not have been a wise move on the part of Berlusconi to ally with a radical-right and quasi-fundamentalist party. It is also the case that Forza Italia adopted some of the more populist and extreme attitudes of the Lega towards ‘illegal immigrants’ during the campaign for the regional elections. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether Forza Italia will succeed in steering the Lega towards the centre or indeed to absorb its electorate or whether the Lega will influence Berlusconi’s party with ‘Haider-style’ politics. According to Formentini (2000), as we saw, the Lega is a time-bomb likely to explode at any time if and when the centre-right forms a government in 2001. As for the Lega itself, the party, we have argued in this book, has ceased to be an innovative force. In 1992–94 it was able to use its regional base and regionalist collective identity for an outward-reaching critique of the national state and a national reforming project. From 1995 onwards, it fenced itself inside the boundaries of Padania and focused inwards, retaining a degree of success in mobilizing its core supporters but having to pay the price of losing voters and party cadres. A series of factors

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contributed to this turn of events. Among these, the birth of Forza Italia, a political party which drew support from different electoral constituencies in the North compared to the Lega and in so doing prevented the latter from widening its electoral base. In addition, Forza Italia adopted most of the neo-liberal policies and issues which formed part of Lega discourse, with the exception of federalism. Another factor, as we saw in Chapter 4, was Bossi’s decision to opt for secessionism and abandon federalism, a ‘winner takes all’ decision, according to Formentini, which in the long run had disastrous consequences for the party. Today, Bossi’s twists and turns appear more the result of desperation and impotence than the clever manouvrings of a political strategist. In the same way as the Lega has changed, moving much closer to farright parties, so has its original socio-economic constituency, though in the opposite direction. Some commentators strike a very positive note in terms of the likely future development of small-scale capitalism. As Sideri (1997, pp. 72–3) remarked, By allowing sub-national areas enough autonomy, the system of SMEs may develop and prosper, reducing pressures and tensions between the national level and the global one. Grafted onto the economic, political and social systems, likely through decentralisation, federalism or even the recognition of sub-national entities’ role and place, the system is ‘embedded’ in rules, norms and conventions established by trade unions, the state, political parties, religious affiliations and more informal community-based institutions. The result is a ‘social market’ which rests as much on economic forces as on solidarity. Sideri contrasts this scenario with those of ‘global neo-classicism’ and ‘feuding regional blocks’ and argues that ‘neither of these will be able to provide a stable, secure and environmentally friendly world order’ (p. 73). His views take us back to the socio-economic world of industrial districts and its merits and demerits. We argued in Chapter 3 that the ‘social market’ produced by Italy’s industrial districts has tended to go hand in hand with a political subculture. In the north-eastern districts, the dominant subcultural party throughout the post-war period was Christian Democracy, which was replaced by the Lega Nord in the late 1980s. In the districts located in the central regions, the dominant subcultural party was the Communist Party. Today, the main heir to that party, the Left Democrats, remains the most popular party. One of the main experts of industrial districts, Becattini, repeatedly argued that the ‘social market’ they generated relied

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greatly on a shared system of values and a tightly-knit community of people and firms (1987; 1989). We pointed out that the negative side of these generally ‘friendly’ features of industrial districts is a tendency to take on a defensive attitude towards and erect barriers against the outside world. All three political subcultures which have been representative of industrial districts have exhibited this tendency: political Catholicism, with its anti-statism (Messina, 1998), anti-big business rhetoric, and defence of traditional values; communism, with its anticapitalism and defence of proletarian values; and ‘Leghism’, with its anti-immigrants platform, its defence of an ‘ethnic’ culture, and, more recently, its anti-globalization crusade. Indeed localism has now acquired a ‘modern’ face, since, as we saw, globalization has given a new urgency to local economies and subcultures and put into question the long-term survival of the nation state. There is a difference, however, between the localism of Christian Democracy and that of the Lega Nord. First, Christian Democracy was in power at national level, and was able to mediate between the centre and the north-eastern periphery. Secondly, Christian Democracy represented a very wide electoral constituency, reconciling the interests of the small-business sector with those of public-sector employees, housewives, pensioners, etc. It also promoted solidary values of a universal nature. The Lega Nord, by contrast, represented almost exclusively an electorate made up of people working in the private sector and sharing strong productivist values. Solidarity extended only to the local community of producers, which was portrayed by the party in both idealized and stereotypical terms. In this respect, the Lega was indeed promoting ‘selfish’ values, specifically linked to young, mainly male, ‘angry’ voters. Today, the prevailing mood in Italy’s north-eastern regions appears to be less exclusionary and sanguine. There is greater optimism that the challenges posed by the process of globalization can be successfully met without endangering the regional model of production. The most dynamic sector of the Italian economy has also acquired considerably more self-confidence and a new awareness of the indispensable role of politics for managing and administering change, beyond (or at least alongside) its being a vehicle for putting forward collective demands and constructing shared identities. The main political parties, for their part, have started to address the issue of the country’s loss of competitiveness and the needs of small firms and industrial districts in particular. Recent initiatives promoted by regional economic think-tanks and industrial associations in the North-East have been eager to purge the devolution project of any ideological and ‘ethnic’ connotations. Such

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initiatives, in our view, point exactly in the right direction. They acknowledge the rationality of some of the demands originally put forward by the Lega Nord but also strive to eliminate the more irrational baggage the party has saddled itself with. If this strategy succeeds, the current trend towards federalism should have the effect of reducing, not heightening, regional tensions in Italy and neutralizing the impact of ideologicallyinspired localism for the foreseeable future. The next few years will determine whether Italy can develop a centreright alliance which is both responsive to the more dynamic sectors of the economy and devoid of populism and intolerance. They will also determine whether the centre-left will be able to continue to shed old prejudices and turn into a modernizing and reforming force capable of attracting the support of larger sections of the northern electorate, thus avoiding the danger of becoming entrenched in its traditional strongholds in the central regions. In either case, Italy’s political ‘transition’ from the First to the Second Republic, which began in 1992 and in which the Lega was such an important player, has clearly not been completed, nor will it be until the ‘Northern Question’ is comprehensively addressed.

Postscript on the 2001 General Elections

The Lega’s Caporetto? The strategy of allying the Lega to Berlusconi’s ‘House of Freedoms’ for the general elections of 2001 appears to have backfired in electoral terms. Italians idiomatically describe any calamitous setback as ‘una Caporetto’, the reference being to the Italian army’s near-total defeat at the hands of the Austrians and Germans in 1918. The movement’s performance in the poll held on 13 May 2001 well deserves this epithet. As Table P1 shows, the Lega’s share of the vote, measured by the number of votes cast for it in the proportional ballot, fell dramatically from the peak of over 10 per cent achieved in April 1996. To be sure, nobody was under any illusions that the Lega could repeat the success of 1996. Its shift to the far right and the increased competition for its core voters from Forza Italia was bound to reduce its share of the electorate markedly. The 1999 European elections and the 2000 regional elections had already shown that the Lega would be fortunate to reach 6 per cent of the electorate. But the final tally surpassed even the worst expectations. The Lega narrowly failed to reach the 4 per cent threshold necessary to obtain some of the 25 per cent of seats distributed by proportional representation under Italian electoral law. The success of regionalist miniparties such as the Liga Fronte Veneto, a group of ultras who reject the Lega’s compromise with Berlusconi, and which took nearly 140 000 votes in the Veneto, was decisive in this regard: the Lega missed the 4 per cent quorum by only 8000 votes. Significantly, the Lega’s poor performance was uniform across the North. It has not retained a single heartland area where its support remains at 1996 levels, but has declined sharply across the board. If one examines the votes cast for the Lega in each of the circoscrizioni (electoral colleges) used for assigning the PR seats, one sees that, in most parts of the North, the Lega’s vote at least halved, and in some areas its vote fell to just a third of its former heights. The result in the North-East was a 184

Postscript on the 2001 General Elections 185 Table P1

The Italian General Elections of 2001

Party/Coalition

Seats (Chamber) Seats (Senate)

Casa delle libertà

368

177

Ulivo

242

128

11 0 0 9

3 1 2 4

PRC L’Italia dei valori Democrazia europea Others

PR Vote (Chamber) 18 300 (49.4) FI: 10 864 (29.4) AN: 4 440 (12.0) Lega: 1 456 (3.9) CCD/CDU: 1 190 (3.2) PSI: 351 (0.9) 12 885 (35.0) DS: 6 116 (16.6) Margherita: 5 357 (14.5) Verdi: 797 (2.2) PDCI: 615 (1.7) 1 859 (5.0) 1 437 (3.9) 883 (2.4) 1 358 (4.3)

All votes rounded to nearest thousand. Figures in parentheses are percentages. La Margherita is a coalition of the PPI and the ‘Democrats for Prodi’. L’Italia dei valori is the list headed by former magistrate Antonio Di Pietro. Democrazia europea is a new list headed by the trade unionist, Sergio D’Antoni, and Giulio Andreotti.

particular debacle. In the western Veneto (the Veneto 1 college), the Lega’s vote declined from about 510 000 in 1996 (26.9 per cent) to 174 000 (9.4 per cent) in 2001; in the eastern provinces of the Veneto, the decline was from 418 000 votes (32.8 per cent) to 136 000 (11.2 per cent). In Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the Lega’s vote slumped from nearly 200 000 (23.2 per cent) in 1996 to just 66 000 (8.2 per cent) in 2001. Similar steep declines were recorded for Lombardy. In upper Lombardy (Varese, Como, Sondrio, etc.), the Lega received just over 475 000 votes (17.8 per cent), down from nearly a million (35.8 per cent) in 1996. In the electoral college containing Milan (Lombardy 1), the Lega received only 193 000 votes (7.5 per cent). Overall, the Lega had returned, in terms of votes, to where it was before its breakthrough in the 1990 local elections. A fairly substantial contingent of 31 Lega deputies and 16 senators was nevertheless elected, with the support of the other parties in the ‘House of Freedoms’, for constituencies across northern Italy. Bossi himself was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the constituency of Milano 3, with 53.1 per cent of the vote; Roberto Maroni, his right-hand man,

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was elected for Varese, with 57.8 per cent. The Lega’s parliamentary contingent, however, was not numerous enough to allow Bossi to drive a hard bargain in the formation of the government – although Berlusconi’s narrow overall majority in the Senate means that he will realistically need the support of the Lega’s senators to keep his legislative programme moving. Berlusconi must also know that he owes a large debt to the Lega: large though his victory was, he could not have won had the Lega run against him. The Lega’s support was seemingly decisive in more than 50 constituencies. It is also true, however, that the ‘House of Freedoms’ also owes its success to a surge of support in the South, especially Sicily, where Berlusconi’s coalition won every available seat. The Lega’s initial response to the electoral defeat was moderate. The movement blamed its poor performance on lack of media attention (which had personalized the election as a contest between Berlusconi and the centre-left’s choice for prime minister, Francesco Rutelli). Both Bossi and Maroni emphasized that joining the ‘House of Freedoms’ had been a strategic choice and that the Lega intended to cooperate with Berlusconi in government. There would be no repeat of 1994. They insisted, however, that the incoming Berlusconi government should maintain the ‘Pact’ signed on 5 April 2001 by all the political parties dwelling within the ‘House of Freedoms’. This ‘Pact’ is the blueprint for the chief policies that will be followed by the Berlusconi administration. It is based upon four policy ‘pillars’ – for the ‘family’, ‘development’, ‘devolution’ and ‘immigration’. From the Lega’s point of view, it is a very satisfactory document. Its language reflects, albeit in much more measured tones, the main themes of the Lega’s propaganda, and commits a Berlusconi government to a precise timetable for the introduction of new laws. Within the first 100 days, the ‘House of Freedoms’ has promised, among other things, to liberalize the hiring and firing of workers, to reduce the tax and red tape burden on business, to launch a programme of public infrastructure projects and to begin ‘devolution’ by taking the major step of transferring ‘all competence’ in the field of healthcare provision to the regions. The regions will also run the schools, within broad general guidelines laid down by the national authorities, and will assume responsibility for coordinating ‘preventative and repressive’ action against petty criminality. A ‘postscriptum’ to the Pact commits the ‘House of Freedoms’ to resist any overtures from ‘political groups that presented themselves at the 13 May elections in any coalition other than the one headed by Silvio Berlusconi’. This codicil to the Pact almost certainly reflected concern

Postscript on the 2001 General Elections 187

on the part of the Lega that Berlusconi would use the Lega’s votes to get elected and then lure centrists and conservatives from the opposing Ulivo coalition into the ‘House of Freedoms’ to ensure that he did not need the Lega’s votes to govern. The Lega’s post-electoral moderation has been designed to underline that the Lega has kept to its side of the bargain: it now expects the other members of the ‘House of Freedoms’ to keep theirs, despite the fact that the Lega’s contribution in terms of votes was less prominent than expected. After the battle of Caporetto, the Italian army fought a desperate and successful battle to stop the Germans on the Piave river near Venice. It then counter-attacked and won a victory against the invaders at Vittorio Veneto. Bossi and the hierarchy of the Lega plainly hope that the first 100 days of the Berlusconi government will be the Lega’s Piave and that the legislative achievements of the Berlusconi government will lead to a full revival of the Lega’s fortunes. If the ‘House of Freedoms’ genuinely does devolve significant powers to the regions in its first year in office, the Lega would be able to say with some truth that it had succeeded in its quest to make federalism the organizing principle of the Italian state. But the success of the ‘House of Freedoms’ in southern Italy does pose the question of whether there will be any great enthusiasm for the devolution of powers in Berlusconi’s parliamentary majority. In the immediate aftermath of the election, it was impossible to say whether this strategy would work. In the context of this book, however, it was not too early to say that Berlusconi’s victory was one more proof, if further proof was needed, of the centrality of the issues raised by the Lega since 1985 for the future of Italian politics: tax cuts, liberalized labour markets, better infrastructure, less regulation of business, greater efficiency in government and tighter controls over immigrants. Signor Brambilla wants these things, and his impatience to have them is probably the most important factor conditioning domestic politics in Italy today. The Lega Nord, whatever its future prospects, was the first political party in Italy to take heed of the Brambillas and to raise what this book has called the Northern Question in Italian politics.

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Index Abruzzo, 2, 162 Agnelli, Gianni, 107, 127, 160 Alfa Romeo, 156 Alleanza nazionale (National Alliance: AN), 33, 36, 126 electoral results, 107, 109 and federalism, 171, 174–5 and Forza Italia, 68 and the Lega, 35, 70 programme, 128, 151 Amato, Giuliano, 29, 166–8, 171, 180 Andreotti, Giulio, 26 Apulia, 2 Bank of Italy, 37 Basilicata, 2 Bassanini, Franco, 161 Bassanini Laws, 161–4 Benetton, 132, 153, 160 Bergamo, 21, 78, 131 Berlinguer, Enrico, 1 Berlusconi, Silvio, 100, 103, 110, 168, 184, 186, 187 anti-communism, 125 and Bossi, 31–7, 44, 108, 134–5, 178, 180 and federalism, 175 and Forza Italia, 5, 45, 67, 160, 164 in government, 38, 61, 105–6, 125 and the referendums, 159 Bernabei, Ettore, 154, 156 Bertinotti, Franco, 127 Bisaglia, Antonio, 88 Bocca, Giorgio, 18 Bonino, Emma, 159 Borghezio, Mario, 132–3 Bossi, Umberto, 185–6 as a barbarian, 43 and Berlusconi, 31–7, 44, 108, 134–5 biography, 11–13 electoral success, 29, 90–1, 109 in government, 35–6 opinions and views, 19–20, 126, 134

and Padania, 62, 100, 107–8, 110–12, 118 personality, 64 political legacy, 40 at Pontida, 21–2, 26 and the referendum, 27 and the Republic of the North, 22–4 role in the Lega, 60, 66, 106, 119, 121–3, 134–6, 181 against Rome, 13–15, 30, 38, 42, 60, 107–8 in Vento Dal Nord, 16, 18, 23–4, 125, 145 Brescia, 17, 21, 78, 81–2, 114, 131 business(es), small and medium, see under enterprises Cacciari, Massimo, 90–1, 147, 158–9, 161, 177–8 Calabria, 17, 24 Callieri, Carlo, 160 Camorra, 18, 26 Campania, 18, 24 Cardinale, Salvatore, 155 Casa delle Libertà (House of Freedoms), 68, 134–5, 165, 171, 184, 185, 186–7 Castellazzi, Franco, 23 Cattaneo, Carlo, 24, 116 Centre, 2, 29, 50, 92, 175, 179 Centro cristiano democratico (Christian Democratic Centre: CCD), 33 Ciampi, Carlo Azeglio, 27 clientelism, 4, 17, 18, 54, 59, 172 Comencini, Fabrizio, 118–19, 121, 134 Como, 21, 70, 76, 78, 81 concertation, 157–60, 162 Confindustria, 159–60, 166 Constitutional Court, 27, 159, 165 Constitution Italian, 5, 85, 89, 161–4, 177 Padanian, 106, 110, 117 Veneto, of the, 159 199

200

Index

Convergenza i Uniò, 45, 49, 98 corruption, 3, 4, 26, 30, 39, 40, 81, 127, 136 Cossiga, Francesco, 29 Craxi, Bettino, 14–15, 24, 26–7, 31 Cusani, Sergio, 30–1 D’Alema, Massimo, 100, 127, 135, 153–4, 157–8, 165–6 D’Amato, Antonio, 160, 166 da Giussano, Alberto, 9, 97 Dalla Chiesa, Nando, 30 De Mita, Ciriaco, 15, 24 Delors, Jacques, 35 Democrazia cristiana (Christian Democracy: DC), 8, 23–4, 27, 32–3, 176 challenged by the Lega, 20–1, 29–30, 38–9, 65, 71–2, 75–6, 137 and Forza Italia, 180 in government, 3–4, 14–15, 28, 85, 88 and small and medium enterprises, 81–2, 89–90, 102 as a subcultural party, 51–4, 71–2, 76, 80, 102, 170, 181–2 Di Pietro, Antonio, 31 Dini, Lamberto, 37 district(s), industrial and Christian Democracy, 81–2 growth of, 2, 144, 150, 156, 170 recent development of, 99–103 and the Lega, 5, 8, 65–6, 74–9, 93–5, needs of, 82–5, 151, 176 and political institutions, 89, 156, 170, 181–2 elections, 44, 80 European, 20–1, 67, 134–5, 147, 178 general, 10, 12–13, 26–9, 33–4, 40, 67, 109, 137 local, 9, 20–1, 30, 32, 106, 147 Padanian, 112 regional, 21, 68, 135, 158, 165–7, 171, 180 Emilia-Romagna, 68, 79, 157 economic strength of, 149

industrial districts in, 74, 81 in the Lega’s propaganda, 22, 106, 117, 121 regional government of, 86–9, 102, 162 votes for the Lega in, 29 enterprises, small and medium and Christian Democracy, 4 and Confindustria, 160 and Forza Italia, 134 in a global world, 108, 181 growth of, 73, 155 and the Lega, 14, 16, 35, 39, 43, 65, 90–2, 103 and national government, 140, 148–51, 157 and the Northern Question, 167 and political subcultures, 79–82 and populist parties, 46, 47, 50 and regional government, 86, 88–9, 96–8, 119, 161 as a short-lived phenomenon, 176 European Central Bank, 164 European Community, 35, 142 European Monetary Union, 7, 150 European Union (EU), 6, 19, 96, 127–8, 150, 172 in Miglio’s view, 25 in the Lega’s view, 125, 147 regulations, 161, 164 Falcone, Giovanni, 29 Fassino, Piero, 166 federalism, 152, 183 and AN, 171 and Cacciari, 90, 159, 161 fiscal, 7, 90, 101, 104, 140, 152, 170 incoherent proposals for, 168–9 as introduced by centre-left government, 140, 161–2, 167, 170 of the Lega, 5, 43–4, 61, 106, 129, 134, 145, 181 Miglio’s vision of, 25 support for, 71, 100–1, 107, 147, 170, 174–5, 177–9 Ferruzzi, 30–1 Fiat, 2, 153, 155–6

Index Fini, Gianfranco, 36 firms, small and medium, see under enterprises First Republic, 1–2, 7, 38, 44, 55, 57, 125–6, 170, 183 Formentini, Marco, 6, 20, 30, 108, 120, 132, 145, 147, 180 Formigoni, Roberto, 168–9, 175 Forza Italia, 125, 159, 164 alliance with the Lega, 33, 67–8, 103, 118–19, 135, 175, 178–81 and business, 96, 107, 151 challenging the Lega, 5, 38, 44–5 electoral results, 109 in government, 31–4 , 37 France, 149–51, 154–5 Freedom Party, 106 Freedoms, House of (Casa delle Libertà), 68, 134–5, 165, 171, 184, 185, 186–7 Friuli-Venezia Giulia, 10, 22, 74, 78, 109, 117–18, 121 regional government of, 87, 89 Front National, 20, 45, 48, 106, 133 Galan, Giancarlo, 168 Gava, Antonio, 26 Germany, 108, 126, 143, 149, 151, 154–5, 172 globalization, 66, 138 and the Italian party-state, 39 Lega’s view of, 131, 133, 143–8 and nation states, 25 political responses to, 143–8, 150, 152, 155, 160 process of, 139–41 and small business, 170, 176, 182 winners and losers of, 48, 50, 59 Gnutti, Vittorio, 35 Goria, Giovanni, 15 government(s) central, 3, 5, 17, 140, 166, 169 centre-left, 5–8, 110, 135, 140, 151, 153–70, 174, 180 centre-right, 36–8, 105–6, 178, 180 Italian, 7, 14, 19, 108 local, 123, 161–2 national, 9 regional, 118, 144, 161–5

201

Haider, Jörg, 106, 133, 180 House of Freedoms (Casa delle Libertà), 68, 134–5, 165, 171, 184, 185, 186–7 ideology, 54, 57, 79, 90, 101, 141, 160 immigrants, 4, 20, 44, 103, 129, 180, 182 immigration, 19, 164, 167 attitudes towards, 20, 96, 100 Lega’s policies on, 43, 49–50, 53, 124, 127, 177 Lega’s views of, 5, 14, 128, 130, 133 need for, 95, 100 Irpinia earthquake, 18 Italy, Third, 73–4 La Rete (The Network), 30, 33 Lazio, 149, 162, 165 Lecco, 76, 81, 84 Lega Lombarda, 9–11, 20–3, 37, 67, 72 Lega Nord, 65 alliance with Forza Italia, 33, 68, 103, 118–19, 135, 175, 179–81 challenged by Forza Italia, 5, 38, 44–5 electoral programme, 10, 43, 46–7, 60, 62, 68–9, 99, 173 electorate, 32, 40, 46, 50–1, 59, 68–71, 76–8, 90, 93, 98, 147 extremism, 6, 8, 124, 127, 130–4, 173–4, 182 general elections (2001), 184–7 and globalization, 145–7 government, part of, 35–7 greenshirts, 110, 177 and the Northern Question, 7 organization, 12–13, 119, 121–4 Republic of the North, 22, 26, 61, 106 rise, 4, 7, 11, 44 Risorgimento, view of, 24, 26, 116 and small business, 16, 90–3, 96 success, 11, 21, 30, 38, 82, 109 Tangentopoli, involvement in, 30–1 Leoni, Giuseppe, 13 Liga Veneta, 10–12, 20, 22, 117–18, 121 Liguria, 22, 29, 117, 121, 162, 165 Lista Bonino, 67, 159

202

Index

Lombardy, 18, 23, 96, 98, 106, 117, 121, 165, 177, 185 Bossi on, 24, 32, 90, 177–8 economic strength of, 149, 162 industrial districts in, 65–6, 74–5, 81 Lega’s decline in, 103, 147, 178 in the Lega’s propaganda, 10, 13, 22, 60, 108 Lega’s strength in, 12, 16, 20–1, 28, 67–73, 78–9, 82, 90, 109–10 President of, 168, 175 regional government of, 86–7, 102

North-East, 2, 99, 182 and globalization, 147–8 Lega’s strength in, 109 and political institutions, 88–90, 101, 120, 160, 167 North-West, 2, 67 Northern Question, 7, 139, 158, 165–7, 183

Maastricht, 6, 108, 125, 137 Mafia, 14, 17–18, 26, 40, 107, 111 Mannesmann, 155 Mantua, 106, 110 Marche, 74, 121, 162 Maroni, Roberto, 35, 37–8, 110, 185–6 Martelli Law, 19 Martinazzoli, Mino, 81 Mediobanca, 153–4 Miglio, Gianfranco, 24–6, 35, 112, 145, 161 Milan, 2, 11, 23, 25–6, 29, 31–2, 88, 114, 131 Lega’s electoral results in, 21, 28, 78, 110 mayoralty, 6, 9, 30, 120 Moretti, Luigi, 20 Movimento sociale italiano (Italian Social Movement: MSI), 21, 32 multiculturalism, 97

Padania, 61, 135 failure of, 137, 146–8 Lega’s creation of, 5–6, 63, 98, 100, 136, 180 reasons behind, 62, 66, 124, 127–8, 132 statute, 105–20 Pagliarini, Giancarlo, 35, 110 Pannella, Marco, 159 parliament Italian, 2, 12, 32, 34–5, 39, 105, 107, 110, 122, 135, 162, 164 North, of the, 135 Padanian, 106, 110, 117 Partito Autonomista Trentino Tirolese (Trentino-Tyrol Autonomy Party: PATT), 10–11 Partito comunista italiano (Communist Party: PCI), 2, 21, 40, 70, 119, 122, 125 and federalism, 174 in the First Republic, 14, 24, 38–9 as a subcultural party, 80, 90, 170, 181 Partito democratico della sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left: PDS), 27, 173, 181 and the centre-left coalition, 30–4, 37, 106, 110 electoral results, 76, 109 and federalism, 174, 177 and the Lega, 54, 70, 125 Partito liberale italiano (Liberal Party: PLI), 15, 21, 29 Partito popolare italiano (Popular Party: PPI), 33, 36–7, 106

nationalism, 103, 112, 120, 124, 146, 148 Negri, Luigi, 37 North, 40, 92, 96, 106–8, 147, 175 and Christian Democracy, 60 electoral results in, 28, 29, 32, 34, 165, 167 influence on politics, 7–8, 161, 179 Lega’s strength in, 71 in the Lega’s views, 16, 30, 112, 126–8 and Padania, 6, 58, 61 and South, 3–4, 14, 17, 23, 57, 116, 128

Occhetto, Achille, 27 Oneto, Gilberto, 113–16, 136–7 Orlando, Leoluca, 40

Index Partito radicale (Radical Party: PR), 21, 33 Partito repubblicano italiano (Republican Party: PRI), 15, 21, 31 Partito socialista democratico italiano (Social democratic Party: PSDI), 21, 29 Partito socialista italiano (Socialist Party: PSI), 14, 21, 24, 27–30, 39, 70 party, parties (ethno)regionalist, 41, 46, 56, 58, 68, 82, 176 extremist, 176 populist, 1, 41, 46–51, 53, 55, 59–60, 69, 147, 177 post-industrial, 48 protest, 1, 41, 45, 59, 109 subcultural, 1, 51, 53–5, 72, 79, 181 racist, 173–4 Patelli, Alessandro, 31 Piedmont, 20, 22, 29, 68, 121, 149, 162, 165, 178 Pivetti, Irene, 35, 110 Polo del Buongoverno (Good Government Pole), 32 Polo della Libertà (Liberty Pole), 32–3, 107 Pontida, 21, 22, 26 populism, 45–6, 48–9, 55–7, 177, 183 Prandini, Giovanni, 17, 81–2 privatization, 7, 35, 134, 170 Prodi, Romano, 107, 110, 127 racism, 46, 128, 130–1, 146, 174, 177 RAI, 36 referendum(s), 27, 40, 107, 111, 115, 159 regionalism, 5, 58, 83, 103, 145–6, 178 Rifondazione comunista (Communist Refoundation), 30, 33, 49, 106, 110 Rocchetta, Franco, 10, 22–3, 35, 37 Rome, 4, 7, 149, 180, 117–18, 135, 137, 162, 165 Lega’s views on, 5, 13, 33, 43, 61, 100, 107–8, 113, 120, 178 Rossi, Guido, 156 Rutelli, Francesco, 180

203

Salvadori, Bruno, 11–12 Sama, Claudio, 30–1 Savelli, Giulio, 15 Scalfaro, Oscar Luigi, 27, 29, 32, 37, 110 Scottish National Party, 45, 49, 98 secession, 26, 164 as advocated by the Lega, 6, 62, 105–8, 117–18, 137, 143 secessionism, 5, 147, 179, 181 Sicily, 17, 40, 58 society, societies communitarian, 94 local, 53 multicultural, 14, 20, 47–8, 97, 100, 127–8 national, 96 rural, 52, 80, 96 South, 20, 29, 50 and the centre-left coalition, 167, 175 elections in, 30 and federalism, 177 Lega’s views of, 4, 14, 16–17, 92, 97, 111 and North, 2–3, 14, 17, 23, 57–8, 116, 128 Speroni, Francesco Enrico, 20, 35–6, 105–6 state(s) central, 6, 22, 52–5, 58, 92, 146, 161, 163–5, 175 challenged by Padania, 54, 105–6 city, 9, 116, 144 in the First Republic, 18, 39–40 and globalization, 57, 59, 139, 141–2, 145–6, 148 Italian, 5–8, 13, 91, 108, 137–8, 143, 160 Lega’s views on, 61, 111, 113–16, 136 nation states, 52, 150, 172 reform of, 11, 22–6, 30, 91, 125, 145, 158, 169, 171, 173 and small business, 149–50 welfare, 47–8 Südtiroler Volkspartei (South Tyrolian Peoples’ Party: SVP), 10–11

204

Index

tax(es) cuts, 4, 16, 43, 92 increases, 15 local, 162 lower taxes, 49, 103, 160, 167, 173, 177 protest against, 90 Telecom Italia, 153–4 Tognana, Nicola, 160 trade unions, 153, 158–9, 166, 180 Tramarin, Achille, 10 Trentino-Alto Adige, 10, 22, 24, 74, 87, 89, 118, 121 Treviso, 78, 96, 100, 131, 144 Turco-Napolitano Law, 128 Turin, 2, 30, 96, 110 Tuscany, 22, 74, 79, 81, 105, 121, 157 regional government of, 86–7, 102 Ulivo, 106–8, 110, 136 Umbria, 74, 121 Union Valdôtaine, 10–12 Unione del centro (Union of the Centre: UC), 33 USA, 25, 126, 131, 133

Val D’Aosta, 10, 22, 89 Varese, 9, 12, 21, 78 Veneto, 112, 121, 160, 184, 185 autonomy of, 22, 88, 118–19, 158–9, 162 and the Catholic subculture, 86, 180 economy, 99–100, 147, 149, 157 electoral results in, 10, 20, 29, 67–8, 71, 78–9, 103, 109 industrial districts in, 16, 66, 72, 74, 81, 96 and the Lega, 23, 90, 106, 108, 110, 117 regional government of, 102, 164–5, 168, 178 Venice, 105, 112, 158, 167, 177 Verona, 114, 120, 128, 134 Vimercati, Daniele, 21 Vodafone, 155 war, Cold War, 39, 42, 43, 57 Second World War, 42, 52, 90, 149–50, 170 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 112

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