The Lega Nord and the Crisis of the Italian State

Abstract

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.