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The Lega Nord at a Cross Road – Reflections on Leadership, Succession and the Future of the Party

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The Lega Nord at a Cross Road – Reflections on Leadership, Succession and the Future of the Party The Lega Nord at a cross road – reflections on leadership, succession and the future of the party Antonella Seddone, University of Turin ([email protected]) Arianna Giovannini, Leeds Metropolitan University ([email protected]) THIS IS A PRELIMINARY DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHORS’ PERMISSION Paper presented at the PSA Annual Conference, Cardiff, 25th-27th March 2013 within the panel “The Party’s Over? Parties, Power and Idiosyncrasies of the Berlusconi Era and the Future Political Landscape of Italy” Introduction The Northern League (NL) is one of the most long-lived parties within the Italian political system. As Diamanti (1996) aptly underlines, the NL is the only party that survived the end if the so called First Republic without changing its identity and, crucially, its leader. However, following the collapse of the latest Berlusconi government, the party has undergone a number of critical changes within its ranks. Firstly, the wave of scandals which have recently invested the NL has undermined its public image, especially as an ‘anti- establishment’ party. Secondly, the resignation of its historical leader and founding father Umberto Bossi has prompted a systemic reconfiguration of the NL – including the selection of a new leader (Roberto Maroni) coupled with an attempt at re-establishing the (public and internal) image of the party, so as to avoid loosing ground on the political stage, and maintaining electoral consensus in view of the February 2013 general election. Ostensibly, one of the most distinctive traits of the NL lies in the key and tight relationship present between the leader and the militants/supporters of the party. This bond has long provided the main communicative resource for the NL. Hence, throwing light on such relationship can offer interesting insights on the phase of change that the NL is undergoing. This is the aim of this paper. To achieve this, we have developed a reflection on the future of the NL, based firstly on a reconstruction of the ‘history’ of the NL (so as to understand its roots), and then on an empirical analysis of the front-pages of La Padania, the party’s official newspaper. We have collected data on the last 30 days of electoral campaign in three different elections: 2006, 2008 (when Bossi was the NL leader) and 2013 (with Maroni at the helm of the party). The focus of the analysis is on two dimensions: the choice of content of the newspaper (i.e. the issues tackled in the front-pages) and the way in which the leaders are described and portrayed. In a charismatic party such as the NL, both the leader and the key issues have a symbolic value – because they are able to mobilise members, sympathisers and electoral support. Based on this argument, in this paper we seek to understand the main changes in the NL’s strategies in the crucial passage from one leadership to the other. Umberto Bossi represented a paradigmatic example of charismatic leader – his peculiar rhetoric style, the choice of issues linked to his personality and the linguistic code associated with the leader have profoundly influenced the approach of the NL in electoral mobilisation. Inevitably, the change of leadership, which took place in 2012, had a significant impact on the electoral strategies of the NL. Such change was even more momentous considering who was selected as the new leader. Maroni carved out for himself a political profile also outside the purely partisan dimension of the NL, holding important institutional roles and adopting a political style markedly different from the one of Bossi. The purpose of this paper is precisely that of understanding such differences between one leadership and the other, so as to assess what is the role of the leader now, in a party that seems to be no longer a purely charismatic one. 1 The Roots The party that we know today as the Lega Nord has to be understood as the result of a diverse set of experiences of local autonomy movements (Cedroni, 2007) which emerged in the late 1970s in the north of Italy. The territorial dimension has always been a key feature of such movements, which have their roots in the regions of Piemonte and Veneto, and that subsequently also expanded onto to Lombardia. Within this scenario, the Liga Veneta, which started to gain political relevance in the 1979 European election and then won two seats at the general election of 1985, can be seen as the forerunner of these autonomist regional movements. The resonance, as well as the territorial span, of these latter expanded with the movement Unolpa (North-West Lombardy union for autonomy) – founded by Umberto Bossi in 1980 with the aim of gaining autonomy for the provinces of Varese and Como. The Unolpa became the Lega Autonomista Lombarda in 1982, and was then reconfigured into the Lega Lombarda in 1984 under the same leadership. In 1985, the Lega Lombarda won its first seats at the local elections of Varese and Gallarate (two medium size-cities located in the northern part of Lombardia) and two years later Umberto Bossi gained a seat at the Senate in the general election. In the same period, a number of local and provincial formations (known as the Autonomist Leagues) flourished in the north of Italy, and in particular in Veneto – drawing on political void left by the crisis of consensus which invested the areas traditionally loyal to the Christian Democracy Party (DC) (Cedroni, 2007). During this phase, ethno-regionalist claims provided the backbone of the Leagues’ political proposals. However, it is towards the end of the 1980s that something started to change within these movements. More specifically, between 1987 and 1989 the territorial heartland of the Leagues started to shift from its original fulcrum (Piemonte and Veneto) towards Lombardia – where the Lega Lombarda led by Bossi consolidated its consensus and started ‘driving’ the political agenda of the autonomist movements. As Diamanti (1996) and Cedroni (2007) remind us, this was a critical conjuncture, in that it was in this phase that the autonomist movements in general, and the Lega Lombarda in particular, started to distance themselves from the initial radical ethnic themes, and set off to convey a new ‘notion of region’, which resembled more and more the traits of a community of shared interests. The years between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 90s were crucial in shaping the image and structure of the autonomist movements. This phase culminated with the creation of the Lega Nord, as a federation of the various local autonomist Leagues which had mushroomed from Tuscany northwards. The birth of the NL signalled also a crucial shift in the shared values and political themes of the movement – with a partial dismissal of the ethnic/xenophobe themes, in favour of a stronger emphasis on anti-establishment stances and political antagonism (focussed against the political system and its institutions). Hence, the NL emerged on the Italian political stage at the beginning of the 1990s as a party “di lotta” (‘fighting’; see Albertazzi, McDonnell and Newell, 2011) – embracing radical antagonism, and making its leader (Umberto Bossi) the voice of the many ‘diseases’ affecting the north of Italy. In this sense, it can be argued that the NL gained prominence drawing on the flaking of the Italian political system in general, and the end of the so-called ‘First-Republic’ in particular – intercepting the growing discontent of the north towards a political class increasingly perceived as corrupted and distant, and framing this stance 2 within the powerful metaphor of the north-south territorial cleavage. Put simply, the success of the NL in the early 1990s (but also afterwards) was linked to its ability to represent the interests of a specific, local, model of economic development at a time when the DC was not able anymore to carry out such task (Cento Bull and Gilbert, 2001). The first victories of the NL were therefore linked to its ability to intercept the political voice of the new, emerging social stratum of the north and to represent their interest by channelling their voice and protest (Cedroni, 2007). As Diamanti (1996) aptly suggests, in this way the NL managed to juxtapose the “Questione Leghista” (the NL Question) with the “Questione Settentrionale” (the Northern Question) – managing in this way to attract and reproduce the expectations of a very wide (and composite) slice of the northern society, drawing on post-ideological modalities of collective identification (Cedroni, 2007). Interestingly, after this phase of radical antagonism and of ‘fighting’, the NL shed its political skin, and joined the Berlusconi government in 1994. Between 1992 and 1994 the NL repositioned itself on the political spectrum, adopting a strategy “di lotta e di governo” (fighting and in government) (Albertazzi, McDonnell and Newell, 20011). If, on the one hand, in this period the NL strengthened its organisation and redefined its objective not only at local but also at national level (focussing on the interests of the north, and developing a critique of the centralist state and the mainstream parties), on the other the Lega also started to develop a connection with Berlusconi and his personal party Forza Italia. After the 1994 general election the NL joined the centre-right coalition government led by Berlusconi. However, the NL ‘fighting’ identity soon started to clash with that of the coalition, bringing the party to cause the sudden collapse of the government in 1996. In the subsequent years, the NL went through a phase of decline (seen its vote going from about 15% in 1992, to 7% in 1994) and, in order to avoid isolation, the party attempted a variety of political strategies, i.e.
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