TILBURG UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF

MSc Sociology

An integrated and dynamic approach to the life cycle of populist radical right parties: the case of

Supervisors:

Dr Koen Abts

Prof. Mario Diani Candidate:

Alessandra Lo Piccolo

2017/2018

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Abstract: This work aims at explaining populist radical right parties’ (PRRPs) electoral success and failure over their life-cycle by developing a dynamic and integrated approach to the study of their supply-side. For this purpose, the study of PRRPs is integrated building on concepts elaborated in the field of contentious politics: the political opportunity structure, the mobilizing structure and the framing processes. This work combines these perspectives in order to explain the fluctuating electoral fortune of the Italian Lega Nord at the national level (LN), here considered as a prototypical example of PRRPs. After the first participation in a national government (1994) and its peak in the general election of 1996 (10.1%), the LN electoral performances have been characterised by constant fluctuations. However, the party has managed to survive throughout different phases of the recent Italian political history. Scholars have often explained the party’s electoral success referring to its folkloristic appeal, its regionalist and populist discourses as well as the strong leadership of . However, most contributions adopt a static and one-sided analysis of the party performances, without integrating the interplay between political opportunities, organisational resources and framing strategies in a dynamic way. On the contrary, this work focuses on the interplay of exogenous and endogenous factors in accounting for the fluctuating electoral results of the party over three phases: regionalist phase (1990-1995), the move to (1998-2003) and the new nationalist period (2012-2018). Secondary data are used to gather evidence about the political opportunities structure and the party’s mobilizing structure, while frame changes are assessed through the investigation of party’s newspapers.

Keywords: Populist radical right, supply-side, political opportunity structure, mobilizing structure, framing processes, Lega Nord

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Index Introduction ...... 5 Theoretical framework ...... 6 Populist radical right: a minimal definition ...... 6 PRRPs: demand-side explanations ...... 8 The supply -side: explaining PRR success ...... 11 Contentious politics and institutional politics: political process ...... 17 Political opportunity structure ...... 18 Mobilizing structure ...... 20 Framing processes ...... 23 Linking PRRPs and contentious politics ...... 26 Data and methods ...... 30 Selection of the empirical case: the Lega Nord life cycle ...... 30 Data and analytical strategy ...... 33 Results ...... 38 The regionalist phase 1990-1995 ...... 38 Setting the stage: The Leagues’ phenomenon ...... 38 Political opportunity structure ...... 44 Party system: the end of the First Republic ...... 45 Electoral system: changing rules and new equilibria ...... 50 Legal system: Bribesville and Lega Nord ...... 53 Media system: look at me ...... 55 Mobilizing structure ...... 56 Formal party organisation: structuring the party ...... 56 Internal and external leadership: the Senatùr ...... 59 Grass-roots organisation: subculture and activists ...... 62 Framing processes: anti-system frame ...... 67 Diagnostic frame: shame on you (all) ...... 67 Prognostic frame: federalism, that’s it! ...... 70 Motivational frame: from the free people, for the free people ...... 72 Move to the right (1998-2003) ...... 76 The radicalisation (1996-1998) ...... 76 Political opportunity structure ...... 81 Party system: again ...... 82 Electoral system: a double-edged sword ...... 87 Legal system: prisoners of the central state ...... 89 Media system: spectacular politics ...... 90

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Mobilizing structure ...... 91 Formal party organisation: strengthening the party ...... 91 Internal and external leadership: reinforcing the hegemony ...... 93 Grass-roots organisation: subculture and activists ...... 96 Framing processes: glocalist frame ...... 100 Diagnostic frame: enemies from ...... 100 Prognostic frame: together alone ...... 103 Motivational frame: top-down and bottom-up ...... 105 The nationalist phase 2012-2018 ...... 107 The second transition (2008-2011) ...... 107 Political opportunity structure ...... 111 Party system: the crisis of the Second Republic ...... 111 Electoral system: coalition equilibria ...... 120 Legal system: the scandal ...... 123 Media system: from the leader to you ...... 124 Mobilizing structure ...... 126 Formal party organisation: everything is changing ...... 126 Internal and external leadership: the beginning of a new era ...... 130 Grass-roots organisation: subculture and activists ...... 135 Framing processes: national preference frame ...... 141 Diagnostic frame: On its way back ...... 141 Prognostic frame: rid the cause, rid the symptom ...... 144 Motivational frame: first! ...... 146 Discussion and conclusion ...... 151 Summary of the main findings ...... 151 A dynamic and integrated perspective ...... 160 Limitations and future research directions ...... 172 Appendix: ...... 176

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Introduction

The growing presence of the so-called populist radical right parties (PRRPs) all over

Europe and the progressive legitimisation of extreme rightist political realities have led scholars to focus the attention on the conditions that facilitated their emergence and electoral success (Mudde, 2013). Over time, researchers have tried to demonstrate how the “turn to the right” has changed the European politics, although sometimes overstating PRR’s role in influencing the European political scene. Moreover, the majority of these studies have been focused on demand-side explanations, looking at voters’ preferences that might account for

PRR electoral success. However, research designs that only focus on the demand-side are unable to account for cross-national and in-time national variations (Abts, van Kessel, &

Swyngedouw, 2016; Mudde, 2007; Muis & Immerzeel, 2017; Rydgren, 2005). As a consequence, it seems necessary to reintegrate the analysis of the supply-side, including contextual and party-specific factors, to develop a comparative logic able to investigate similarities and peculiarities in countries and parties’ electoral trajectories. For this purpose, the present study proposes an approach that aims at combining a supply-side explanation of

PRRPs’ success with a dynamic interpretation of paradigms of analysis elaborated in the field of collective studies, as the political opportunity structure (POS), the mobilizing structure and the framing processes. These concepts and their interplay are used as explanatory variables to investigate the electoral success and failure of PRRPs, delineating the life cycle of a party, with the aim of developing a dynamic and integrated perspective.

This work will contribute to the existing literature in two ways: (i) elaborating an integrated perspective about PRR, combining a traditional supply-side approach with paradigms coming from contentious politics studies and integrating these perspectives; (ii) developing a dynamic approach to the study of PRR, able to explain its electoral success over different phases over time (Mudde, 2013). Thus, this work is built around a twofold dynamicity, both

5 conceptual and temporal. It has to be understood as a first in-depth case study, which allows to test the proposed dynamic model across time for a specific party, while future research might enhance this perspective and set up a new comparative research agenda.

Initially, the most influential findings of the emergence, characteristics and variations of PPRPs will be presented in order to underline weak points in the existing literature.

Subsequently, this work will briefly introduce the paradigms derived from contentious politics studies, considering how this threefold and dynamic approach can be applied to the study of PPRPs, before presenting results and drawing conclusions. This contribution mainly elaborates on the approach of Abts et al. (2016) trying to apply their logic of analysis to the study of the Italian Lega Nord (Northern League, LN). The analysis focuses on three periods: the regionalist phase (1990-1995), the move to the right (1998-2003) and the nationalist phase (2012-2018). I draw on secondary data, gathering evidence about the POS and the party’s mobilizing structure, while I use primary data coming from party’s newspapers to evaluate frame changes over time.

Theoretical framework

Populist radical right: a minimal definition

The current European political scenario is characterised by the growing presence of

PRRPs that are reshaping the political space. Although the salience of this phenomenon is today stronger than ever given the fact that some of those parties are acquiring prominent positions in countries’ parliaments and political systems (Mudde, 2013), the rise of these right-wing forces is hardly a new circumstance (Betz, 1993). On the contrary, the progressive fragmentation of the political landscape and the weakening of traditional ties between voters and parties have gradually allowed the emergence of these antagonist actors, which catalysed the resentment of voters, opposing the political establishment (Ignazi, 1995).

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Before describing what have generally been considered the causes of PRR’s emergence, it is worthy to focus the attention on its definition, particularly given the plethora of existing labels created to describe changes occurred at the right of the .

Mudde (2007) elaborated a “minimal definition” (followed in this work), claiming that

PRRPs are defined by the simultaneous presence of , nativism, and authoritarianism. In Mudde’s work, nativism is a considered a necessary specification of . In fact, the latter is a political doctrine that aims at reaching a complete unity between the cultural and the political domains, striving to combine the state (as a political entity) with the nation (as a cultural unit) and achieve homogeneity within the national borders. However, nationalism does not distinguish among liberal and radical positions.

Instead, the concept of nativism refers to more radical positions, namely to the idea that only native citizens should live in their territory, while all foreigners pose a threat to the national integrity. The second aspect is populism, conceived as a thin-centred ideology that

“considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups

“the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde, 2004, p. 562).

Finally, authoritarianism is defined as the ideological preference for a strong state, based on positive attitudes towards the respect of law and order. Along with these minimal core concepts, additional characteristics of PRRPs have been alternatively defined. For example,

Betz defined the PRRPs as “radical in their rejection of the established sociocultural and socio-political system and their advocacy of individual achievement, a free marketplace, and a drastic reduction of the role of the state. They are right-wing in their rejection of individual and social equality, in their opposition to the social integration of marginalized groups, and in their appeal to xenophobia, if not overt racism. They are populist in their

7 instrumentalization of sentiments of anxiety and disenchantment and their appeal to the common man and his allegedly superior common sense“ (Betz, 1993, p. 413). These parties would be characterized by strong opposition to the established political system, developing a political discourse mainly based on the superiority of the common man and of common sense, rejecting both elitism and pluralism (Mudde, 2004). Thus, their positions share xenophobic (or racist), sometimes anti-women and anti-law ideals, combined with a predisposition towards authoritarian attitudes (Ignazi, 1995). However, these additional specifications risk to hinder the elaboration of an inclusive and clearly defined party family, sometimes excluding relevant subjects. As a consequence, this work sticks to the minimal definition approach, considering PRR as a party family that shares the core elements of nativism, populism and authoritarianism (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2013).

This general definition allows the development of a real party typology that cannot be considered given and immutable. In fact, evolutions occur both in parties’ identities as well in the general political landscape. The PRR is not considered more fluid than other party families but it seems subject to changes more than other political realities (Mudde, 2007).

Part of the PRRs can emerge as non-populist parties, or they can lose their radical attitude over time. This makes even more fundamental the development of a dynamic model, not only interested in assessing the features of a PRRP at one specific point in time, but also in evaluating its mutations and adaptations across time.

PRRPs: demand-side explanations

As mentioned above, the PPR is hardly new in Western societies (Bale, 2012; Mudde,

2013; Zaslove, 2011), but a well-known and studied party family that has gained great academic attention over the years. Zaslove (2011) described the modern phase of radical right expansion as a “third wave”, started in 1973 with the foundation of the Danish and

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Norwegian Progress parties and the subsequent emergence of parties that shared the same characteristics all over Europe. These new political forces spread between the 1980s and the

1990s, such as the National Front in , the Northern League in Italy, the British

National Party or the in (Mudde, 2013), and were in direct continuity with the second wave of radical right extremism that had characterized the

European politics since the 1950s, albeit without reaching a strong electoral success (e.g. the

Movimento Sociale Italiano or the French Poujadist).

When attempting to investigate the root causes of the increased salience of the PRR family, the first distinction that should be considered refers to a definition of the political scenario in terms of political market, in which demand and supply meet and match (Kriesi et al., 2008; Mudde, 2007; Muis & Immerzeel, 2017; Rydgren, 2005). The demand explanations, namely those approaches that explain what motivations lead voters to prefer

PRRPs, are multi-faceted and their empirical tests have often produced inconsistent results

(Golder, 2003). However, their lowest common denominator is frequently recognized in the side effects of the contemporary post-industrial and globalised society (Kriesi, 2008), mostly investigated with macro-level approaches. Losers of globalisation have been considered one of the forces responsible for the increased political competition and they would prefer parties that articulate a losers’ program as the PRR (Kriesi et al., 2006). Losers of globalisation would be characterised both by economic and cultural insecurity and would enhance the importance of ethnic-based political discourses as a reaction to the growing (or perceived growth of) immigration (Golder, 2003; Kriesi et al., 2008; Mudde, 2007). However, voting for PRRPs does not always seem to be linked to social isolation, and is not always straightforwardly expression of lower levels of education or old age typical of losers of globalisation (Muis & Immerzeel, 2017). Whereas a number of studies have found an over- representation of “losers of modernisation” (e.g. low educated, unemployed, working class)

9 among PRRPs’ voters (Arzheimer, 2012; Fetzer, 2000), others have claimed that differences in the electorate of those parties among losers and winners were not significant or existent

(Betz, 1993). Nevertheless, the economic and the cultural roots of PRR’s vote do not appear to be mutually exclusive. Instead, chances of success for those parties appear higher where there is a coexistence of higher levels of unemployment and a higher share of immigrants in the country (Golder, 2003). At the individual level, studies mainly agree on the fact that

PRR’s voters are characterised by an ideology rooted in nationalism, nativism and authoritarianism (Montgomery & Winter, 2015), but they fail to test whether these three components exist simultaneously and if these attitudes are the primary reasons that induce people to prefer PRRPs (Mudde, 2007).

The fundamental problem of research designs that only focus on the demand-side of

PRRPs leis in their incapability of explaining cross-national and in-time variations (Abts et al., 2016; Mudde, 2007; Muis & Immerzeel, 2017; Rydgren, 2005). Counties that share similar structural conditions are not equally interested by the emergence of PRRPs, as well as voters in similar structural positions are not equally likely to prefer PRR. While in some realities PRRPs might result successful, in others they reach rather poor results or are not present at all in the national political scene. Theories and explanations that rely on voters’ behaviour and preferences are certainly useful, but not enough to understand the phenomenon of PRR. In addition, structural explanations based on the demand-side are not able to account for the cross-class vote for PRR, or for the emergence of parties that share similar characteristics in countries deeply dissimilar on indicators like economic growth, employment rate, share of immigrants and so on (Norris, 2005). Therefore, it is necessary to complement demand-side explanations with supply-side analyses. In this way, it would be to explain how PRR has succeeded by combining micro and macro level explanations from the demand-side, with parties’ and contextual characteristics on the

10 supply-side. According to Mudde (2007), the success of the PRRPs can be operationalised and empirically assessed via their electoral success, even though a basic distinction between

“breakthrough” and “persistence” should be maintained. In both cases, external and internal factors produce the necessary and favourable conditions for parties to succeed. Internal factors can be synthesised in the array of characteristics directly linked to the nature of

PRRPs, while external ones refer to the broader political and societal environment and may be summarised in the concept of political opportunities. This focus on the supply-side and the following distinction between internal and external factors of success helps in linking the study of PRR with core paradigms coming from collective action studies. In next paragraphs

I briefly introduce the position of Mudde (2007) about the external and internal supply factors, before presenting the major concepts derived from social movements studies.

The supply -side: explaining PRR success

The supply-side in PRR can be approached analysing both external and internal factors. The former group is often synthesised borrowing a concept developed in the field of contentious politics studies: the political opportunity structure (POS) (Eatwell, 2000). For the sake of this study, it is possible to define the POS as the set of exogenous factors that characterise the broader political environment, able to account for the electoral performances of PRRPs (Arzheimer & Carter, 2006). Mudde (2007) identifies three main components of the POS: the institutional context, the political context, and the cultural context. The institutional context refers to the structural constraints that can ease or prevent electoral success of PRRPs. Studies in this domain have often underlined the important influence played by electoral systems on PRRPs’ performances, although empirical tests have often produced nuanced and inconsistent results (Arzheimer & Carter, 2006; Hainsworth, 2004;

Jackman & Volpert, 1996; Veugelers & Magnan, 2005). For example, proportional systems

11 have been claimed to be beneficial for those parties, but empirical studies have only partly confirmed this hypothesis, neither are confirmed the adverse effects of disproportionality

(Mudde, 2007). However, national debates have been strongly focused on the consequences of the electoral system, sometimes trying to reformate it to weaken the PRR chances of success (e.g. the Netherlands in the 1990s). At the same time, also PRRPs have taken advantages of this possibility, changing the electoral rules while in power, to strengthen their position (e.g. Croatia) (Mudde, 2007). It can be argued that the importance of the electoral system is likely to vary across parties’ life-cycle, being decisive during the first phase of emergence (i.e. proportional systems ensure high political representativeness) but becoming relative uninfluential over time. A dynamic understanding of electoral performances may help in disentangling this relationship. Another element often considered is the political system, here intended as the formal as well as the informal structures of power distribution within national contexts. Federal and decentralised systems (Arzheimer & Carter, 2006) or consociational rather than corporatist systems (Mudde, 2007) are often considered to be more favourable for PRR development. Also in this case, findings have been contradictory and, even when significant, it can be argued that these structural characteristics might be beneficial for radical and antagonist parties in general, not only for the radical right-wing ones (Mudde, 2007). However, this argument does not apply to the present study since it cannot explain within countries electoral fluctuations over time unless radical transformations have occurred.

Thus, the institutional context per se cannot be regarded as the main explanatory set of variables for the destiny of PRRPs. Although it furnishes parties with opportunities, their actual success depends upon how they exploit them, and on how other actors on the political space intervene and interfere in this process. The dynamics within PRRPs and between political actors are captured by the concept of political context, which refers to the

12 confrontation of political forces in the broader political arena (Mudde, 2007). The increased electoral volatility and the decreased salience of old political identities have provided the

PRR with chances of attracting new voters, often addressing emerging issues not already monopolised by mainstream parties (e.g. the environmental question for the green parties) and occupying empty spaces in the political space. On the one hand, the progressive polarisation of parties on the political space has been considered as one fundamental factor enhancing PRRPs opportunities for electoral success (Ignazi, 1992). The presence of political polarisation is regarded as one favourable opportunity, particularly when it occurs after a moment of political convergence and when PRRPs are part of one of the competing blocks (Mudde, 2007). On the other hand, the progressive convergence of traditional parties towards the centre of the political space has often been recognised as one of the most important factors accounting for PRRPs success (Eatwell, 2000; Kriesi et al., 2006). The emergence of new political forces requires the existence of political space that can be fruitfully exploited and occupied. Even in this case, the convergence towards the centre rather than the polarisation of mainstream parties can play a different role for PRRPs’ success over their life-cycle.

In addition, not only the PRRPs are likely to be affected by transformations of traditional parties, but their position is also likely to force well-established political forces to move further on the political space and to redefine their positions and identity. This last positional factor is strictly related to an additional factor, namely the fact that the PRR position can be strengthened by the “copying” strategies adopted by mainstream parties and thus from their movements over the political space (Eatwell, 2000; Kriesi et al., 2006;

Mudde, 2007). When moderate parties try to ride the wave of right populism, introducing its elements in their political discourse, they legitimise the PRR and increase its chances of success (Bale, 2012; Eatwell, 2000; Kriesi et al., 2006). This aspect is linked to the question

13 of “issue ownership” that make parties identifiable and more or less appealing for voters according to the salience of the issues proposed. The media over-representation that PRRPs often achieve thanks to their political strategies and the presence of charismatic leaders may contribute to their further affirmation. However, the political opportunities offered by the political context can be better exploit where the political subculture and the intellectual environment are more in favour of the emergence of radical parties. This perspective stresses the importance of the cultural context (Mudde, 2007). A hostile cultural climate and a strong stigmatisation of PRRPs can contribute to the failure of those parties, even if this kind of stigma can bring the support of the most extremist voters. Conversely, in a friendly cultural environment, it is necessary to avoid redundancy differentiating one’s political offer from other similar actors to succeed. Taken together, the political and the cultural context can generate favourable external opportunities for PRRPs’ emergence and success over time, and the weight of different elements is likely to change according to the different phases of

PRR life-cycle.

Nevertheless, the success or failure of political parties can be partly explained also looking at their internal characteristics. Mudde (2007) identifies three relevant endogenous factors: leadership, organisation and ideology. In the first phase of PRRPs’ expansion, the role of the leadership is conceived as particularly crucial. The leading capabilities do not refer uniquely to the charismatic personality of parties’ spokespersons, but to the

“charismatic bound” they can build with their followers (both voters and parties’ members) in a Weberian sense. In this sense, Eatwell (2006) distinguishes between mass and coterie charisma. While the former refers to the charismatic role a leader can play with respect to the broad national community, the latter is defined as the ability of the leader to attract a core of loyal supporters in his inner circle and at the local level, supporters who believe the leader has to accomplish a mission and is endowed with special powers. While mass charisma is

14 typical of old authoritarian leaders in totalitarian systems, the concept of coterie charisma suits the relationship that links a PRRP’s leader and his/her followers. In addition, the analysis of leadership effects on the success of PRRPs should distinguish between external and internal leadership. The former is particularly useful for the sake of attracting new voters and expanding the electoral base, whereas the latter is fundamental to ensure the resilience of the party (Ignazi, 2003). The two components have been described as (often) irreconcilable: charismatic external leaders tend to reduce the chances for parties’ institutionalisation and the democracy within the party. However, the stabilisation of PRRPs is strongly linked to a solid internal leadership. On the other hand, this stabilisation within the political arena also requires the presence of a party’s organisation (Mudde, 2007). This element provides the basis for party’s cohesion and stability, influence and bargaining power. Conversely, electoral failure can be due to fragmentation and lack of a solid organisation. PRRPs tend to develop minimalist parties’ structure, strongly hierarchical and based on strict discipline, even if the role of the leadership in those parties is likely to vary across cases. Moreover, particularly important both for the emergence and for the survival of those parties is the grass-roots nature of these parties, generally rooted in local strongholds. In conclusion, as far as ideology is concerned, the success of the third wave of

PRR has often been conceived as the result of a more nuanced and moderate ideology, when compared with the one of the “old” extreme right parties (Zaslove, 2011). Whereas the unfortunate experience of radical right-wing parties in the 1950s and later on has been associated with their strong link with fascist ideologies (e.g. the Movimento Sociale Italiano,

MSI), the renewed rightist rise would be facilitated by more moderate positions (Eatwell,

2000). Mudde (2007) observes how the ideological moderation has been particularly significant when the national political culture was vehemently hostile to extremist positions.

However, ideology per se is not a sufficient condition to gain electoral success, in fact, the

15 ways in which this ideology is conveyed are crucial in accounting for positive outcomes or electoral failure of parties. The transmission of meanings, values and ideas can be reached both through the reliance on mainstream media (which is outside the control of parties, exogenous factor) and on propaganda. The media coverage these parties receive can furnish additional legitimation since media can be act as pressure groups and set the agenda of the political debate (Eatwell, 2000). The weight of these two sources of communication tend to change over time, while the role of media is crucial to ensure the electoral breakthrough, the persistence of the party is more dependent on effective campaigns that not only reach new voters but also tie loyalty of their traditional electoral base.

This concise overview represents the basis to bridge the study of PRRPs with the one collective action dynamics. While benefiting from Mudde’s work and building on his conceptualisation of exogenous and endogenous factors of electoral success and decline of

PRRPs, this work aims at going beyond a static distinction and description of internal and external characteristics. In particular, differently from Mudde’s contribution, this work wants to articulate both the internal and external components in their subdimensions, trying to reach a more systematic understanding of the core determinants of the supply-side and of their changing weight over time. In addition, the present study stresses the importance of framing strategies, both in exploiting the opportunities offered by the external environment and in maximising the effectiveness of internal characteristics, severely underestimated in

Mudde’s elaboration and by the previous literature. In fact, the concept of ideology per se is not sufficient to account for the ways in which political actors in general, and PRRPs in this case, are able to mobilise and motivate supporters. The cultural dimension should be interpreted as the key to exploit political opportunities and organisational resources and should not be understood as a static ensemble of integrated principles (Feldman, 1988), but

16 as a dynamic set of interpretative schemes offered by political actors, which constantly redefine the “world out there” (Snow & Benford, 1992) for their electoral purposes.

In this perspective, as proposed by Abts et al. (2016), the analysis of PRRPs electoral success and failure, as well as their general political parabola, can benefit from contributions of movements scholars. While the external supply factors can be investigated using the concept of POS, the internal ones can be approached with the mobilizing structure and framing processes perspectives. The simultaneous investigation of these three paradigms and their dynamic interplay can shed light on the fluctuating performances of PRRPs, reconnecting systemic, structural and strategic elements into one integrated perspective able to overcome particular and ad hoc explanations. In this way, the present contribution develops an integrated perspective in a dynamic way.

Contentious politics and institutional politics: political process

For a long time, collective action studies have been characterized by an extreme movement-centered approach, somehow without considering the importance of the political and cultural context in shaping the actual movements’ chances of action. It was not until the

1980s that a group of scholars turn to devote the attention to the necessity of reintroducing the analysis of context into the study of contentious politics. This renewed interest led to the emergence of a threefold perspective of analysis concentrated around the structure of political opportunities, the mobilizing structure and the framing processes (McAdam,

McCarthy, & Zald, 1996). Studies on these paradigms have underlined their interrelation, which appears particularly important for the sake of avoiding ad hoc and static explanations of mobilisation phenomena. Considering the relationship between these three concepts and their reciprocal influences over time and space can furnish scholars with robust theoretical

17 and analytical tools to move forward in the investigation of SMOs dynamics and, more generally, of political actors.

Political opportunity structure

The expression “structure of political opportunities” was firstly introduced by

Eisinger, accounting for differences in riots characteristics of American cities. He defined the opportunity structure as“the degree to which groups are likely to be able to gain access to power and to manipulate the political system” (Eisinger, 1973, p. 16). In this perspective, the mobilisation of groups and individuals, together with the characteristics of this mobilisation, would depend on the configuration of the context, on its openness, on the presence of barriers or on conditions that facilitate the political behaviour (Eisinger, 1973).

Subsequently, the idea of studying collective action in relation to the broader political context became wide-spread in the field of collective action studies. While the first generation of POS studies, mainly represented by the American school of Tilly, Tarrow, and

McAdam, was concentrated on the understanding of how the structure of political opportunities influenced the emergence of traditional mass social movements, the second generation of European scholars used this logic of analysis in the field of New Social

Movements (NSMs) studies, to account for cross-national variation in the nature of their mobilisation (Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak, & Giugni, 1992).

However, during years several theorisations about the constitutive dimensions of political opportunities have been produced. All these formulations shared a basic distinction between formal institutions or legal structure and the informal structure of power relations typical of a system at one specific point in time. McAdam (McAdam et al., 1996) defines four basic dimensions that explain the concept of political opportunities. The first one is relative to the degree of openness of the political system, namely the chance of movements

18 to have an access point to institutions and to the parties’ system. The second dimension corresponds to the degree of stability of the elite apparatus, while the third one refers to the presence of potential alliances with those elites. Finally, the last underlying dimension of the

POS concerns the role of the state, and precisely its capability and willingness to repress or to react to movements’ actions. Another important specification of the POS dimension comes from the work of Tarrow (1996), who distinguished between approaches that look at the opportunity structure as static and cross-sectional, or as a dynamic and intrasystemic.

These approaches are distinguishable in a proximate and a state-centric vision of POS. The proximate POS approach conceives opportunities for groups’ collective actions as changes that occurred in the closer political environment and in the available resources, while the statist approach stresses the role of the state structural characteristics in the definition of the political opportunities. Both the proximate and the statist interpretation of the POS can be approached in static of dynamic terms (Kriesi et al., 1992; Tarrow, 1996). Dynamic approaches focus the attention on transformations occurred within states over time, while cross-national variations are investigated through static approaches. Tarrow (1996) argued that while both statist paradigms seem to be fundamental in the understanding of the nature of collective mobilization, the dynamic approach is able to overcome some of the unsolved issues generate by the cross-national comparison, e.g. the insufficient attention places on subnational or transnational influences on movements.

During time, the POS has been used as an explanatory variable in the investigation of two central themes: the timing of the collective action outbreak and the outcomes of movements’ action. The importance of timing was already proposed by Brockett (1991) as one of the distinctive aspects of political opportunity structure, and it was restated by

McAdam (McAdam et al., 1996) as one fundamental element for the understanding of movements’ trajectories. In McAdam’s point of view, the emergence of a first movement of

19 claimants significantly reshapes the political context, and consequently the set of available political opportunities. The first moment of challenging confrontation leads to what he defined as the “expanding political opportunities” (p.31), which creates new spaces for mobilisation. When there is space for the creation of new alliances with elites, and change in institutional features and in the elites’ alignments occur together with different state’s chances for repression, opportunities for a new cycle of protest arise. The concept of cycle appears to be fundamental in the study of social mobilisation and in the analysis of how POS changes over time. Tarrow (1996) argued that these cross-time variations should be investigated with a inter-national perspective, allowing scholars to set up comparisons among different movements across time and space. These approach results to be more hardly applicable to movements, given their rapid transformation, but suits perfectly the analysis of more organised realities as the political parties. In fact, the author affirmed that parties tend to change slowly and in a more predictable way. While the first phase of mobilisation seemed to be influenced by the signaling process, namely due to the signals that groups receive from the closer political environment (Tarrow, 1996), the long-term political outcomes appear to be strongly related to the structural sphere.

Mobilizing structure

The second factor able to shape collective mobilisation is the mobilizing structure, namely “those collective vehicles, informal as well as formal, through which people mobilize and engage in collective action” (McAdam et al., 1996, p. 3). While the POS creates the necessary conditions for the potential emergence of forms of collective action, the mobilizing structure ensures the passage from opportunities to actual mobilisation. In this field, two main approaches can be distinguished: the resource mobilization and the political process.

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McCarthy and Zald (1977) presented a theory of collective action insurgence based on the resource mobilization, investigating sources and resources that shape collective action and overcoming explanatory models mainly focused on psychological factors. In fact, the resource mobilization approach applies a structural interpretation to collective action emergence and change, using conceptual elements from political sociology and economics.

The first assumption is that collective action requires the presence of resources on which actors can rely. Here, the collective behaviour is conceived as dependent on costs and rewards generated by the societal structure and authorities Thus, forms of collective action vary according to the degree through which actors are able to translate resources into action, and in turn, the degree of movement action is considered a function of the resources owned.

In this perspective, social mobilisation emerges from the interaction between available resources, preferences of the organisation and the market logic of matching demand and supply. The role of media, the relationship with formal authorities or the preferred strategies are just part of the resources that actors should mobilise to pursue their goals. This has been defined an entrepreneurial approach that conceptualises social movements as fully rational actors that act according to their perceived interests and engage collective action as a consequence of a careful evaluation of costs and rewards, influenced by the presence of available resources (Della Porta & Diani, 2006). During time, several scholars have attempted to synthesise the most important resources in the field of collective mobilisation, money, facilities, labour, and legitimacy (McCarthy & Zald, 1977) or land, labour, capital, and technical expertise (Jenkins, 1983). In general, resources can derive both from the commitment of members of the movement and from external contributors and can be better exploited by formally organised actors (Jenkins, 1983). The second approach is the political process that stresses the importance of informal resources for the rise of collective mobilisation. This tradition of studies emphasises the grass-roots nature of movements,

21 highlighting how the presence of informal institutions (e.g. church organisations) ease the mobilisation of collective resources. In this perspective, micro-level interactions generated in contexts like family, workplaces, community organisations are likely to positively influence the chances of mobilisation, even if mobilisation is not their primary formal goal.

In fact, internal social structures and pre-existing networks play a fundamental role in the first phase of collective action emergence and influence the strategies adopted and exercised

(Morris, 1981). However, these two research perspectives could be reintegrated considering the time dimension. In fact, initial resources tend to derive from the pre-existing networks and informal organisations through internal contributors, while additional resources from the external context are often added during the process of institutionalisation or consolidation of collective action (Jenkins, 1983).

Summing up, research on the mobilizing structure should aim at understanding what are the informal as well as the formal structures able to facilitate or prevent mobilisation from emerging and surviving, trying to assess not only their weight in the breakthrough of the contention but also their changing role over time. Studying the mobilization structure requires scholars to be aware of the interplay between local and informal sources of mobilisation as well as of institutional investments that shape collective action, trying to understand what the consequences in terms of cross-national and cross-movements variations are. Nevertheless, to elaborate a fruitful model of mobilizing structure, both material and non-material resources should be carefully considered, evaluating how changes in those resources impact on the movement itself. The rational and strategic view of social movement actors should be integrated with emotional and cultural elements as resources that can influence the chance of emergence and persistence of SMOs. This leads to the third paradigm here considered: the framing processes.

22

Framing processes

The third fundamental mechanism underpinning collective mobilisation is represented by the framing processes. As stated by McAdam “meditating between opportunity, organization, and action are the shared meanings and definitions that people bring to their situation. At minimum people need to feel both aggrieved about some aspect of their lives and optimistic that, acting collectively, they can redress the problem. Lacking either one or both of these perceptions, it is highly unlikely that people will mobilize when afforded the opportunity to do so” (McAdam et al., 1996, pp. 4-5). Given the presence of available and favourable opportunities, actors should perceive their action as necessary and likely to succeed (Della Porta & Diani, 2006). Thus, movements are more likely to succeed when they are able to align their messages and call to action to the broader master frame present in society, namely the dominant representations on the political scene (Diani, 1996). The idea of framing stems from the well-known contribution of Goffman here applied to the interpretation that movements’ members have of their own actions, which reintroduces elements of social psychology and social construction in the study of contentious politics

(McAdam et al., 1996). This approach emerged as a sort of reaction to the materialistic view presented by the resource mobilization approach, aiming at reintegrating cultural aspects in the study of collective action.

The debate about cultural framing was addressed, among the others, by Melucci

(1985). His work started from a critique to classical approaches in the study of collective action and from the need of integrating the resource mobilization theory. He affirmed that social movements were not mere objects, but systems of action that should be analytically defined and not only empirically described. In his point of view “action has to be viewed as an interplay of aims, resources, and obstacles, as a purposive orientation which is set up

23 within a system of opportunities and constraints. Movements are action systems operating in a systemic field of possibilities and limits. That is why the organization becomes a critical point of observation, an analytical level too often underestimated or reduced to formal structures. The way the movement actors set up their action is the concrete link between orientations and systemic opportunities/constraint” (Melucci, 1985, p. 792). Movements do not only emerge as a straightforward consequence of a predetermined set of opportunities and constraints, and their nature is not merely identifiable with the formal organisation they assume. As a result, the bridge between the opportunities structure and the mobilizing structure is represented by a system of meanings, values, aims, and capabilities underpinning social relationships, which are the basis for collective action. This perspective reintroduces one of the fundamental elements of the concept of social movements, the presence of a shared collective identity (Della Porta & Diani, 2006), which is the product of interaction, negotiations, values, and exchanges.

Later on, Snow and Benford (1988) offered important bases for the understanding of framing processes. A frame is “an interpretive scheme that simplifies and condenses the

‘world out there’ by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one’s present or past environment” (Snow &

Benford, 1992, p. 137). Frames are key elements in explaining the emergence of collective forms of mobilisation as well as their maintenance over time and can be distinguished in three main core tasks (Benford & Snow, 2000); diagnostic, prognostic and motivational frames. “(D)iagnostic frames allow for the conversion of a phenomenon into a social problem, potentially the object of collective action (Snow et al. 1986); prognostic framing also involves the suggestion of future developments that could solve the identified problems, and motivational frames are needed to produce the motivations and the incentives for action”(Caiani & Della Porta, 2011, p. 2). While in the first phase movements identify and

24 present an aspect of the reality as a problem that requires collective intervention, the prognostic task of framing leads to the determination of possible solutions, in view of which action may be mobilised. This analytical perspective allows to investigate cross-national or cross-movements variations in terms of movements’ success. Given a similar set of political opportunities and a certain mobilizing structure, movements can succeed to a different extent according to their capacity of promoting participation. This variation stems partially from what Snow and Benford (2000) defined the motivational framework. Since mobilisation depends upon motivation, movements should furnish a rationale for action. Thus, the success of collective mobilisation may depend upon the salience (at least for activists) of the promoted values in the broader belief system, the ability to include new values avoiding the risk of over-extension, the credibility of movements’ claims, the adherence of the framing with members’ direct experience and the degree to which it harmonises with widespread cultural narrations also known as master frames, which are dominant political representations detectable in any specific context (Diani, 1996; Noonan, 1995; Snow &

Benford, 1992). Master frames are the interpretative key used by movements to frame their discourse and mobilisation and represent the starting point from which particularised frames can be derived and linked through the process of frame alignment (Diani, 1996).

In conclusion, it is worthy to underline that different problems exist with regard to the concept of frames. One of those is represented by the challenging task of setting boundaries and benchmarks to allow comparisons between and within movements. Cultural processes, framing of values, identities and purposes should be approached in an analytic way, trying to define a common ground for future elaboration. Moreover, as also pointed out by Benford

(1997), framing approaches often use a static point of view, interpreting frames as immobile and unchangeable, while they are the result of a dynamic process of confrontation and social construction, they are dynamic by definition.

25

Linking PRRPs and contentious politics

For the sake of this research, it is necessary to connect the study of contentious politics with the analysis of the supply-side of PRRPs. Following the contribution of Mudde (2007), it has been shown how the external factors, which can be summarised in the concept of POS, can influence parties’ chances of success and failure, as well as redefining the existing opportunities over time. Given the fact that the purpose of this contribution is to study the supply-side of the PRR, it seems necessary to investigate the degree of openness of the political and institutional context, combined with a dynamic vision of changes occurred in those structures. These systemic characteristics represent the actual chances for movements to enter the political debate and shape the forms by which this entrance can occur. The

PRRPs, in their first phase of formation and breakthrough, need congenial institutional conditions, for example, a proportional electoral system may facilitate their chances of entering national parliaments ensuring a higher level of political representativeness, or the legal system might prevent the party from running at general elections. The complex relationship between these dimensions can partly explain the emergence of new political forces, the (usual) passage from an informal mobilisation to a formal party structure and the party characteristics. PRRPs can emergence from the openining and extension of political opportunities, and their breaktrhrough can originate a subsequent reaction in the well- established political system that further reshapes the opportunities structure and the political space. In addition, the POS influences not only the emergence of a party, but also the development of the organisation. In a life cycle perspective, it is necessary to evaluate how cycles of protest, institutional transformations and changed political alignments affect the

POS and, in turn, the nature, the discourse and the repertoires of PRRPs over time. Following

Abts et al. (2016) in their analysis of Vlaams Belang over the period 1979-2015, it is possible to identify the political opportunities as formed by the institutional environment and the

26 party system. The former refers to the institutional political setting, which includes the electoral system, the legal system, and the media system. Instead, the latter considers the dynamics within PRRPs parties and between parties, observing how mainstream parties have coped with the PRRPs over time.

Turning the attention towards the internal factors, it is possible to use the concepts of mobilizing structure and framing processes to assess the components presented by Mudde

(2007). In fact, the resource mobilization approach furnishes the theoretical rationale to investigate how configurations and changes in the formal structure of PRRPs can impact their chances of success and their trajectories over time. As it has been argued by Mudde

(2007), the formal structure of a party is likely to play a crucial role in determining its persistence and electoral success over time, contributing to the socialisation of the electoral base and turning occasional voters in loyal supporters. At the same time, a great deal of importance is placed on the leader figure, which can help attracting consensus during the first phase of breakthrough. The presence of a strong external leadership can partly explain the rise of PRRPs, given the fact that their leading personalities are able to attract voters and support (or to drive them away in case of electoral failure) and are generally the key elements to obtain media attention otherwise impossible to reach (Eatwell, 2000). On the contrary, the process of progressive institutionalisation of parties and their gradual integration within the political space requires a powerful internal leadership, able to overcome personalisation and risks of fragmentation. Over here, the role of the leadership is often ambiguous since party’s institutionalisation requires a process of routinisation that substitutes the personal decisions of the leader with regularised procedures (Bolleyer, Van Spanje, & Wilson, 2012), which mainly derive from the leader’s ability and willingness to build such formal systems.

Whereas most of the times the internal and external leadership are conceived as opposed to each other, it is likely that their simultaneous presence can enhance the chances of electoral

27 success of PRRPs. In addition, the political process perspective in the study of collective action, particularly focused on the resources provided by the informal movements structure, can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of what Mudde defined the cultural context. In fact, the presence of a political subculture characterised by grass-roots origins and local strongholds is likely to affect the emergence of PRRPs and their initial success, guaranteeing long-lasting support from a specific electoral base. The presence of pre-existing networks of political mobilisation and the availability of a political subculture, here intended as a subset of shared beliefs and values concerning the relationship between citizens and government

(Feldman, 1988), based on values and ideas consistent with the PRR ideology offers a favourable ground for these parties to emerge. Moreover, the presence of grassroots strongholds can furnish a reservoir of constant consensus, necessary when facing periods of electoral setback. As highlighted by Abts et al. (2016), dynamics in PRRPs leadership, political subculture and formal organisation can explain parties’ performances and how these political actors are able to exploit the opportunities offered by the broader political and societal context.

In conclusion, the cultural context could be approached and integrated using the concept of frames. Trying to apply this perspective at the study of PRRPs one can affirm that part of the variation in their electoral success can be accounted for by their different capabilities of creating convincing frames for voters’ mobilisation. For example, as demonstrated by Diani (1996), the LN’s raise in the 1990s was not only the result of a favourable political climate and of expanding opportunities, but also a consequence of the frames conveyed by the party. In the same favourable conditions, and with the same novelty character, other parties failed in adapting to the general antisystem frame. The framing approach should focus the attention on the political discourse of PRRPs, with the aim of understanding how parties’ production of meanings and values in the broader political

28 context can account for their success and failure over time. In fact, the power of these cultural and ideological elements is not only relevant in the first phase of parties’ emergence, but during their whole trajectories. As well as the first movement of mobilisation and electoral success can be seen as the result of convincing frames, winners among competing interpretations of the political world, also the decline phase of political realities could be interpreted as the inability of parties to adapt their frames and to revitalise their messages.

This work assumes that the same goes in explaining electoral mobilisation for what concerns political parties. In fact, it is widely recognised that political entrepreneurs can transform the political space and generate new oppositions by articulating interpretative frames (Kriesi et al., 2006) able to exploit existing opportunities and to mobilise actual resources (McAdam et al., 1996). As done by Cress and Snow (2000), it is possible to hypothesise that more focused and articulated frames have more chances to appear convincing and to induce people’s mobilisation since contentious actions can appear more likely to succeed. However,

PRRPs and LN in particular are characterised by their populist style of communication, which is in turn associated with a high degree of vagueness and simplicity in the expression of political diagnoses and solutions (Canovan, 1999) but also by a clear opposition between

“we, the people” and “them” based on the structure of power within a society (Abts &

Rummens, 2007). As a consequence, frames might be considered as more successful when they clearly articulate the us versus them mentality, thus when they are more focused in their blame attribution and expression of grievances and when they align this opposition with existing and widespread societal tensions. On the contrary, being the PRRPs’ messages rooted in a populist style of communication, this work does not expect that a higher degree of articulateness of political proposal would result in more successful frames (prognostic frames). Moreover, frames are dynamic by definition (Benford, 1997) and these elements

29 are likely to be differently combined in motivational frames over time, through which parties try to adapt their messages to the resonant frames existing in society.

Trying to formalise what has been summarised until now it is possible to formulate some predictions about the electoral success and failure of PRRPs. In fact, the literature suggests PRRPs’ emergence be positively influenced by the presence of a favourable set of opportunities offered by the institutional, political and cultural context. This means that the first phase of electoral breakthrough is likely to be influenced by: a deep reorganisation of the party system, which leaves room for new actors to emerge, a favourable electoral system, a high degree of media coverage, the lack of legal constraints, the presence of a strong external leader that can motivate supporters, a friendly pre-existing grass-root subculture, and the capacity to align its own frame with the dominant one, particularly by clearly identifying political enemies. On the contrary, a long-lasting electoral success requires: a legitimation from mainstream political parties, a favourable electoral system, the development of an effective party’s propaganda to socialise and bound voters, the lack of legal constraints, the coexistence of a strong external as well as internal leadership to prevent fragmentation, a process of institutionalization and the development of a stable party structure to overcome personalism, the persistence of a core of grass-roots supporters and the capacity of revitalising existing frames and proposing more articulated solutions, while maintaining focused enemies.

Data and methods

Selection of the empirical case: the Lega Nord life cycle

The Italian Lega Nord (Northern League, LN) is a perfect case for the study of the dynamic nature of PRRPs. Since its official birth, in 1991 from of six regional leagues, the party has been through massive changes, offering the occasion to apply the life

30 cycle model on the evolution of almost thirty years. Today, Lega is the oldest political actor within the Italian political scene and has undergone a profound transformation of its nature in last years. Also, its electoral success has been characterised by strong fluctuations over time (table 1). After the first phase of expansion until 1992, the party experienced an electoral growth from 1994 to 1996, when it bounced back reaching an unexpected success.

In subsequent years, the party came back to the same fluctuating trend that characterised its performances also during the 2000s. Both periods of electoral expansion or retrenchment interested uniformly LN’s traditional strongholds (Biorcio, 2015), while the current party’s development appears to be the result of more puzzled support in geographical terms. Thus, the party furnishes the chance to test the dynamic model over a period of almost thirty years, characterised by constant fluctuations.

The first point that needs to be discussed refers to the classification of the party. As resumed by Zaslove (2011), scholars have questioned the classification of LN as a PRRP, often preferring the term or regionalist populism (McDonnell, 2006). However, given the absence of a real and separated regional identity, others have refused to place LN in the regionalist family. Zaslove tried to overcome these oppositions, arguing that the LN was able to combine its regionalist character with a populist right identity. His interesting idea is that LN became a PRRP during the time, particularly after the mid-1990s and its first participation in the national government. This partly reflects the position of Mudde (2007) that “the LN might not (always) be a perfect example of the populist radical right, but it is too similar to be excluded from the party family” (p.56). Moreover, recently the party has experienced a radical transformation of its identity and its own raison d’être, developing a truly national and nationalistic identity on the basis of traditional PRRPs as the French

National Front of Mrs Le Pen. With the beginning of the 2010s and the new charismatic leadership of Mr Salvini the Lega has lost its core regionalist identity. Moreover, in spite of

31 these typological concerns, LN has surely embodied the populist radical right more than any other political force in Italy, since the populism of Mr Berlusconi is hardly identifiable as radical right (Eatwell, 2000) while the populist character of National Alliance (MSI-AN) of

Mr Fini is questionable, and less radical particularly for what concerns the migrant issue

(Ignazi, 2004, 2005). On the contrary, Lega Nord resembles the PRR party family since it shares elements of populism (as ideology, communication style and organisation), nativism, and authoritarianism, as next sections will show (Mudde, 2007). Secondly, the party has always been characterised by fluctuating electoral results, which indicates the presence of not linear but rather cyclical electoral dynamics (Brunazzo & Roux, 2013). Under the guidance of the and of its leader Umberto Bossi, the unification of the previously independent regional leagues brought the party to reach 8.6 % in the national election (with a 17.3% in the northern regions) in 1992, while the coalition with

(FI) of Berlusconi and with Alleanza Nazionale (AN) ensured the first participation in government in 1994 (Biorcio, 2015). As claimed by Diani (1996) since this first phase of emergence, the LN case was hardly understandable using static and univariate explanations; rather it offeres the opportunity to investigate how changes in POS, mobilising structure and framing processes have influenced its subsequent evolutions.

As proposed by Abts and van Kessel, the study should not be limited to the conditions that favoured the emergence or that led to the collapse of PRRPs, but to their evolutions and adaptations over time. In this sense, I develop this work identifying three main time spans to understand the dynamic changes experienced by the party: the regionalist phase (1990-

1995), the move to the right (1998-2003) and the nationalist period (2012-2018). The first moment coincides with the progressive growth of the party at national level, including its participation in the first Berlusconi's government. Instead, the second step is characterised by a new radicalisation of the party and with its lowest peak in electoral terms, whereas the

32 third one begins with the end of Bossi’s hegemony and poor electoral results, and is then characterised by the new and revitalising leadership of who has brought the party to a historical success. I argue that the after a phase of crisis (2012-2013) the party had succeeded in readapting its messages and organisation over a new POS configuration, avoiding the collapse and rather achieving a new expansion. The new nationalistic strategy of Mr Matteo Salvini has allowed the party to become the first force within the centre-right coalition, obtaining 17.37% of votes in the Chamber of Deputies, more than quadrupling its results of 2013 (4.09%).

Tab 1. LN electoral results in general elections, 1990-2018.

1992* 1994 1996 2001 2006 2008 2013 2018 Chamber of 8.56 8.36 10.07 3.94 4.58 8.30 4.09 17.37 Deputies Senate 8.20 19.87** 10.41 42.53*** 4.48 8.06 4.34 17.62

Note: Source Ministero dell’Interno http://elezionistorico.interno.gov.it/index.php?tpel=C&dtel=27/03/1994&tpa=I&tpe=A&lev0=0&levsut0=0 &es0=S&ms=S * % refers uniquely to the Lega Lombarda, ** % refers to the Freedom pole, which contained LN and FI in the North of the country, *** % refers to the House of Freedom coalition as a whole. The years covered by the analysis are indicated in bold Data and analytical strategy

In this case study I have built on two sources of data. For the first two guiding concepts of my analysis, the political opportunities structure and the mobilizing structure, I have mainly relied on secondary data. Thus, I have collected academic publications dedicated to

LN in each of the selected time periods. I have used both and international accounts about the party and I have tried to offer a complete and interdisciplinary account. In this sense, I have drawn on sociological, political, historical as well as journalistic reports in order to evaluate the main transformations in terms of POS and mobilizing structure. The

POS concept has been operationalised following the dynamic statism proposed by Tarrow

33

(1996), thus looking at the transformation occurred in the party’s closer environment over time. The institutional environment has been operationalised investigating the electoral and the legal system, while the political context has been assessed through the study of the party system and of the media system (Mudde, 2007). On the other hand, the mobilizing structure has been approached looking at three different dimensions: the internal and external leadership, the level of party formal organization and the presence of an affiliated grass- roots subculture, unifying elements coming both from the resource mobilization and the political process approaches. For each phase (regionalist, move to the right, and nationalist)

I have underlined changes occurred in these dimensions, trying to assess how they impacted the electoral support of LN and how the party reorganised itself in response to contextual changes. In the end, roughly 90 contributions have been analysed in order to deduce information about the aforementioned dimensions, looking both at the LN case itself and at the broader political context. Also, party’s statutes have been studied in order to gather additional information about the mobilising structure transformations.

For the third part of my work, focused on framing processes, I have relied on primary data. As proposed by Caiani and Della Porta (2011), the analysis of frames should focus on

“discursive opportunities and constraints”, through which meanings and messages become visible for the general public and are accepted and legitimised. Each political actor, in this case LN, will develop messages directed towards specific targets by linking their political discourse with the dominant frames available in the broader political context trough a process of frame alignment. In order to evaluate frame transformations over time, I have used qualitative frame analysis (Johnston, 2002), which as elaborated by Snow and Benford

(1988), “zooms in on how particular ideas/ideologies are used deliberately to mobilize supporters and demobilize adversaries vis-à-vis a particular goal” (Lindekilde, 2014, p. 200).

In my work, I have used frames as independent variables, observing how they contributed

34 to the success or failure of the party over time, interpreted in electoral terms (Mudde, 2007).

Frame analysis generally relies on convenient sample of documents (Johnston, 2002) and treats frames as hierarchical structures. This analytical strategy allows the identification of key subdimensions that can be reorganized and linked in a hierarchical structure in order to identify the general frame.

For the sake of the present analysis, I have investigated party’s newspapers over the period immediately before the general elections, when parties present their issue-specific positions and their salience (Kriesi et al., 2006). Thus, I have collected two months of press for the general elections of 1994 (weekly magazine Lega Nord), 2001, 2013 (daily newspaper La Padania) and 2018 (blog Il Populista). The choice of analysing party’s official newspapers is in line with previous studies about framing strategies of political actors

(Caiani & Della Porta, 2011) and with the willingness of investigating the voluntary and controlled image the party has built in its propaganda. The official party media furnish the chance to observe the development of frames, excluding the distortive effects that can be produced by antagonist media, over which the party cannot exercise a direct control (Mudde,

2007). For the last general election (2018) it has been necessary to find an alternative solution, given the fact that the new leadership has shut down the official newspaper in 2014.

As a consequence, the last part of the analysis has been focused on articles published on the online blog Il Populista, co-directed by the party’s leader Mr Salvini. Given the fact that the communication of the party is increasingly tied to one of the leader, due to the recent hyper- personalisation of the party, and the fact that different representatives of the party co-author the blog it has seemed natural to turn the attention on this channel of communication.

However, it is worth to remind that the paper version of an official newspaper and an online blog are intended to reach a different audience, and thus it is likely that frames transformation does not uniquely mirror different party’s strategies, but also the need to talk with different

35 targets. Thus, the analytical procedure has consisted of identifying different subjects (see appendix) over each different phase and then the ways in which these objects were associated to a specific problem in need of a solution or amelioration (diagnostic), to specific plausible solutions for the problem identified (prognostic), and to visions of future achievements and ideal prospects (motivational). For what concerns the paper versions of the newspaper (both in its weekly and daily versions) a specific attention has been dedicated to the sections regarding the national political and economic landscape (on average the first 6-7 pages) while for the blog three randomly selected sections have been scrutinised: L’incazzato,

L’Invasione and Il Teatrino.

The coding procedure can be defined as simultaneously theory-driven and data-driven.

In particular, it follows two theoretically oriented principles. Firstly, codes have been used to distinguish between diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames. The diagnostic frames contain references to a specific enemy or problematic issue, a problem that needs a solution. The prognostic frames regard the proposed solution, while the motivational frames carry a specific image of a possible and ideal future. Following Caiani and Della Porta

(2011), these three distinct frames might be represented as a distinction between “is”

(diagnostic), “will” (prognostic), and “should” (motivational). Secondly, codes identify the subject of party’s claims in newspaper articles, following the idea that PRRPs are populist in their style of communication, and the assumption that populism as a communication style is a discourse that opposes the good and pure people to the evil elites and the dangerous others (Bracciale & Martella, 2017; Hawkins, 2009). Thus, statements have been codified by identifying the subjects of claims, operating a first basic distinction between Us and

Them. However, these two categories have been additionally divided into different specific subjects, distinguishing the category “Us” in claims regarding the party itself (as well as its leader, organisation and representatives) and the people, variously defined. On the contrary,

36 being populism characterised both by an upward and a downward vertical antagonism (Abts

& Rummens, 2007), the category “Them” has been additionally specified in “Others at the top” and “Others at the bottom”. At this stage, the theory-driven coding procedure has been supported by a data-drive coding procedure. Being the people, the elites and the others empty vessels (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2013), the concepts of “the people”, “others at the top” and

“others at the bottom” have acquired different meanings throughout the phases of the party’s life cycle. These empty signifiers have been defined in various ways, which have emerged from the analysis of the primary data themselves. Thus, the concept “the people” has been found to include alternatively the little people, the productive people (employers, tax-payers or more broadly hard workers), the Northern people or the North as a socio-political entity

(including sometimes a reference to the regional memberships such as the Lombardi, Veneti,

Emiliani, etc.), the Italian people, the Christian people or the Western people, just to give some examples. At the same time, the “others at the top” contain the political elites (at local, regional, national and European level), as well as the opinion formers (media and intellectuals) and economic elites. The political elites have been alternatively depicted in systemic terms (e.g. the dominant elites) or in ideological terms (e.g. the left-wing elites).

The same goes for the “others at the bottom”, which includes southern citizens or the South as a socio-political entity, the general category of migrants, the more specific category of

Muslim migrants. The analysis has led to the emergence also of a more general category of

“dangerous others”, composed “others at the bottom”, namely political antagonists that are not part of the political class (e.g. terrorist groups or social movements), and from “other at the top” that indicates mainly the Five Stars Movement in 2013 elections, which was not yet assimilable to the political elites. Thus, combining the dimension of frame and subject I have produced a detailed list of codes (see appendix) and then I have rearranged them into the respective code families following both the function criterion (diagnostic, prognostic,

37 motivational) and the subject criterion (others at the top, others at the bottom, us). In a second phase, drawing conclusions from the analysis of the materials, I have rebuilt the general and prevailing frames in each of the analysed electoral campaigns. The collected materials have been managed and analysed through the software ALTAS.ti.

Results

The regionalist phase 1990-1995

Setting the stage: The Leagues’ phenomenon

Before analysing the electoral success of LN, it is necessary to introduce a brief review of the history of the party. As mentioned above, LN was officially founded in 1991, with the first Congress of Pieve Emanuele unifying the six pre-existing regional leagues and then incorporating additional autonomist political realities from other regions (Doyle, Bjertén, &

Milante, ,2016). However, the roots of this political project should be found in the 1989

Congress of Segrate, when Umberto Bossi (leader of Lega Lombarda, LL) announced the creation of a confederation of leagues after the electoral success of “Alleanza Nord” at the

European election of June 1989. In fact, with 636.242 (1.83%) votes, the alliance between

LL, , Piemont Autonomista, Union Ligure, Alleanza Toscana, and Lega

Emiliano-Romagnola succeeded in obtaining 2 seats at the , convincing

Umberto Bossi of the necessity to create a federation of formally independent parties in order to compete on the national level (Maraffi, 1994). This initial process of unification was indisputably led by the LL and its leader Bossi (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001).

However, the first-born among these regional realities was the Liga Veneta (LV), founded in 1980 by . was one of the strongholds of the “white”

38 subculture1, where the long-lasting hegemony of the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian

Democratic, DC) was established since the beginning of the Italian Republican history. LV succeeded in obtaining 4.2% of votes in 1983 general elections in Veneto, representing the first moment of discontinuity within the regional political scene. According to Diamanti

(1993), this initial success was directly attributable to the erosion of the historical Catholic subculture, partly due to the progressive secularisation of the Veneto civil society. The decreased salience of the religious cleavage generated a downsizing of Catholic associations and a loosening of the strong relationship that linked DC, church and civil society. The reduced centrality of religious identities paved the way for the strengthening of territorial belonging as a criterion for drawing collective identities, leading to a renewed centrality of forms of localism, together with individualism and distrust in central institutions. This religious disaffection coupled with a mounting sense of relative deprivation (I. Diamanti,

1993) that started to characterised the so-called Third Italy of industrial districts (Trigilia,

1990); territories that were the productive core of the post-industrial Italian economy and that perceived a total disregard of the central political power. LV anticipated what would be successively one of the main characteristics of Lega Nord, namely the post-ideological nature of the movement, which eluded the classical opposition between left and right and instead started to acquire consensus among voters oriented towards the centre of the political spectrum. In the early 1980s, the LV presented itself as a sort of laboratory for what would have been the future Lega Nord, emphasising a diffuse sense of anti-statism, anti-centralism, anti-elitism and contraposition towards the undeserving South (I. Diamanti, 1993). “The early success of the Liga was important symbolically, demonstrating that there were latent forces within civil society that could be mobilized with the correct political message,

1 In Italy areas characterised by the predominance of the catholic subculture are defines as “white regions”, while regions with a predominant communist subculture are identified as “red regions”.

39 charismatic leadership, and adequate organization” (Zaslove, 2011). At this embryonic stage, voting for LV was perceived as a vote in favour of ethno-regionalist and localist identities and against the far politics of . However, LV was not able to broaden its electoral success during years and was quickly eclipsed by its Lombardian sister. Much of scholars’ work during years has thus been focused on the experience of Lega Lombarda (I.

Diamanti, 1993).

The Lega Lombarda (Lombardian League, LL) made its first appearance on the Italian scene2 (as Lega Autonoma Lombarda) in 1985, gaining 2.5% of votes in local elections. At first, LL was considered an unusual political movement, characterised by folkloristic aspects and genuinely different with respect to the traditional political elites. In fact, the movement was not composed of professional and skilled politicians, but from activists strictly bounded to the leader and founder of the party, the Senatùr (as he was nicknamed) Umberto Bossi. At the time of LL creation, Bossi was completely alien to politics, and he was a simple med student. However, the meeting with Bruno Salvadori in

1979 changed his plans. Salvadori was the leader of Union Valdôtain and convinced Bossi in working to build support in Varese for the Valdôtain political cause. As recalled in Vento del Nord (Bossi & Vimercati, 1992), this meeting was a real turning point for Bossi, who decided to get involved in the cause of independentism and to work actively of . The relationship between the two and the foundation of the newspaper Lombardia Autonomista (1982) led Bossi to work on a new autonomist reality in

Lombardy. As mentioned above, in the mid-1980s the LL was not the most successful autonomist party, since LV was already established reality, having reached 4% in Veneto in

1983 (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). Nevertheless, Bossi’s party was able to shorten the

2 The very first appearance of Umberto Bossi dates back to 1979, when he presented an autonomist list, l'Unione Nord Occidentale Lombarda per l'Autonomia. Lega Lombarda was officially founded in 1984.

40 distance in just a few years. As proposed by Mannheimer (Mannheimer, R. Biorcio, I.

Diamanti, & Natale, 1991) three mechanisms can explain this spectacular growth of LL: the reduced salience of political subcultures and traditional political memberships, the decreased relevance of the left/right identification on the political space, and the increased distrust towards the political class. The progressive growth of individuals’ mobility, the extension of mass media communication, the process of secularisation, and the end of the

Soviet regime contributed to the disintegration of the regional political subcultures.

Moreover, the end of the communist hegemony in Eastern Europe contributed not only to erode the so-called “red culture” but also the Catholic (white) one, which lost its first enemy and source of aggregation. This resulted in an enhanced electoral competition and the creation of empty space on the political market. (Mannheimer et al., 1991). In fact, at the same time, the traditional distinction between left and right on the political spectrum became less salient for voters, while levels of trust in traditional political parties were steadily decreasing.

As suggested by Biorcio (1991) the LL electoral appeal was particularly linked to the

“invention” of a regional identity. According to the author, in fact, during the 1960s and

1970s feelings of regional identification were not largely widespread among the population

(Biorcio, 1991), thus Lombardian activists worked in order to transform the territorial membership in a new basis of shared identity. This result was mainly reached creating an opposition between “us” and “them”, thus working on the differences between a virtuous

Lombardian people and regrettable enemies such as corrupted politicians, southern migrants and foreign immigrants (Woods, 1992). The electoral base of LL was mainly composed of middle-aged men from the petty bourgeoisie such as businessman or shopkeepers, with a medium level of education. Moreover, until the initial electoral success of the 1990s, the movement was unstructured and mainly reliant on the figure of Bossi and the work of few

41 supporters (Woods, 1992). As in the case of LV, this first phase of the movement served to lay the foundations of the future LN. However, according to I. Diamanti (1993), LV and LL were different in their interpretation of territorial membership. In fact, while LV stressed the belonging to a shared culture and historical background, the initial phase of the LL party, was more focused on interpreting the territory as a community of shared interests. The anti- southern question, and lately anti-migrant attitudes, was instrumentally used in order to strengthen the sense of regional belonging and to provide the party with a specific identity, differentiating its offer from other political actors.

At the 1987 general elections the leagues gained 1,8% of votes, and for the first time,

Umberto Bossi entered the national Parliament as a senator, while was elected at the Chamber of Deputies. This competition enshrined LL as the most successful of the regional leagues and transformed the monolithic Italian political system. In 1987 the

Pentapartito (government coalition that brought together DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI, and PLI since

19813) lost 9.3% of votes, leaving room for the emergence of protest votes, which favoured the leagues as well as the Green party (Colarizi, 2007). Between 1987 and 1989 the LL obtained 2 members of Congress, 2 provincial council members, and 46 municipal councilmen (Natale, 1991). In 1989, the leagues competed at the European Election under the cartel of “Alleanza Nord” obtaining an unexpected electoral success, reaching 8.1% of votes in Lombardy and convincing leaders of the smallest leagues that the alliance with LL was essential (Zaslove, 2011). As a consequence, in November of the same year, the leagues formed a new confederal alliance, the Lega Nord (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). The confederation was strongly reliant on the charismatic personality of Bossi that found himself in a position of absolute authority with few (or none) challengers. In May 1990, after the

3 Christian Democrats, Socialist party, Italian Social , , and .

42 results of regional elections, Lega organized the first Pontida rally, which would have become an annual appointment and one of the most important cultural symbols of leghismo:”Historically, Pontida was the site of the swearing of the oath of allegiance between the various Lombard Leagues in 1167, which joined together in order to fight

Frederick Barbarossa the conquering German Emperor (…) Pontida has become a kind of

‘political pilgrimage’ for supporters of the LN, who travel from all over to visit the site”(Giordano, 1999, p. 5). During the event, activists waved the Padanian flag and the Va, pensiero of Giuseppe Verdi was played (official anthem of Padania), while Umberto

Bossi firstly presented his project of creating the Northern Republic.

Generally speaking, the birth of the leagues was a consequence of the birth of the

“Northern question” that LN would have exploited in the following years and introduced in the political space (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). As generally done by populist parties,

LN was able to bring into politics themes normally left out from the political arena, raising legitimate questions over problems long ignored by the mainstream politics (Eatwell, 2000).

For the first time in the Italian history, there was a change of perspective. The economic crisis of the 1970s negatively affected the DC support in the “white” Northern regions, where its “soft hegemony” was previously uncontested. This, as mentioned above, resulted from the weakening of the white culture in regions such as Veneto and Lombardy, leaving room for new political forces to emerge. The progressive rise of the leagues was predominant in the North-east industrial districts. These areas became the national productive core with the progressive decline of the industrial productivity but experienced growing insecurity during the 1980s (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). During this conjuncture, political elites and traditional parties as the DC were blamed for the progressive “southernisation” of their policies (Zaslove, 2011, p. 53) that further contributed to the fragmentation of the previously hegemon Christian party. The new emphasis on the needs of the South and the increase of

43 clientelism and patronage as political strategies were partly dependent on the progressive secularisation of Italian society and the decreased salience of political ideologies. However, these approaches resulted in an increased party fragmentation (competing factions within

Christian Democrats) and a stronger opposition between the laborious North and the undeserving South. The never solved “Southern question”, which was at the centre of the public and political debate since the birth of the Republic, was perceived by leagues’ supporters as an unacceptable economic burden. This mobilisation was at least unusual for the Italian landscape, where forms of contentious traditionally had involved the mass of blue collars, the underclass, or peasants of the underdeveloped South4 (Colarizi, 2007). For the first time, the leagues gave voice to small entrepreneurs’ concerns, presenting a valid alternative to the traditional and centralistic political parties that were perceived as indifferent to the necessity of the productive North.

Political opportunity structure

During years, scholars have developed different explanations of the LN’s success in the early 1990s. These theoretical contributions have alternatively stressed one or another aspect, attempting to find out “the”primary cause of Lega’s electoral results (I. Diamanti,

1993). This has contributed to fragmenting the knowledge about the party and has increased the risk of elaborating ad hoc and particularistic explanations. In the previous section, I have presented some of the contextual characteristics that have facilitated the emergence and the progressive development of various regional leagues, trying to summarise the process of gradual convergence that has led to the foundation of LN. Having set the scene, now the attention of this work turns to the set of political opportunities that have contributed to the

4 Just with exception of the “Movimento dell’Uomo Qualunque” that between 1944-1947 was the expression of a form of dissatisfaction of the Southern petty bourgeoise.

44 growth of the party during the 1990s. As previously explained, the POS approach can shed light on the conditions that have facilitated or constrained parties’ success or failure.

Following the dynamic statism proposed by Tarrow (1996) and the work of Abts et al.

(2016), this section reviews previous studies with the aim of identifying how party system, electoral system, the legal system, and media system have contributed to the fluctuating success of LN.

Party system: the end of the First Republic

The party system concerns the dynamics that have characterised the relationship between the Lega and other political parties on the Italian scene. LN’s first electoral success at the national level has coincided with the most critical juncture of the post-war Italian political history. The political transformation that had preceded and followed the fall of the

First Republic had often been interpreted both as cause and consequence of the LN breakthrough.

During the 1980s the regional leagues started to emerge at the local level, with LV and thereafter LL as leading symbols of a new era of the Italian political life. However, at the national level, the political system of the so-called First Republic was still stable. In fact, despite the first clues of the future crisis were already visible (e.g. the DC loss of consensus in 1983 general elections), traditional political parties managed to maintain their role and to rule the country. In 1987 general elections, when for the first time the leagues succeeded in electing two deputies (Leoni and Bossi), the DC and the Socialist party obtained the necessary votes to form a new government and to reaffirm their primary role on the political scene. Both Socialists and Christian Democrats partly regained their electorate and minimised the new leagues as a temporary phenomenon. At the same time, these years marked the end of the second economic miracle of the industrial districts, during which the

45 public debt was growing, and workers and employers were increasingly concerned about the risk of Italy being excluded from the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 (Zaslove, 2011). The economic situation became a public concern in social and media debate, underlying the progressive disenchantment of citizens towards politics. In fact, the political class was not willing to reduce the levels of public expenditure and to abandon the clientelist political exchanges that guaranteed its position of power (Colarizi, 2007). The system was becoming increasingly unstable, opening empty spaces for new actors in a context of enhanced electoral competition.

Moreover, during the same election, the crisis of the Italian Communist Party5 (PCI) started to appear evidently, reducing the distance from the Socialist Party of Mr Bettino

Craxi. The internal crisis of the communists was strongly linked to the transformed international situation, particularly to changes underwent by the Soviet Union under the new leadership of Gorbačëv. The party was characterised by tensions and oppositions between internal factions and was still marginalised due to the impossibility to enter the national government. The national and international events brought Mr Occhetto, leader of the party, to face the issue of the Italian communism after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. In a world where the cold war era was at its final stage and in which the traditional ideological oppositions were losing their salience, Mr Occhetto decided to create a new party and a new identity for the . This complex conversion ended with the birth of the PdS, Left

Democratic Party, in 1990. The rapid changes occurred on the left of the political spectrum, and the dissolution of the former brought to the leagues additional consensus in the Northern regions from working-class voters (I. Diamanti, 1993). The already fragmented political landscape was further complicated by the creation of a new

5 The PCI was traditionally the second force in the country

46 political force on the Christian Democratic front when in 1991 the mayor of Palermo Mr

Orlando founded La Rete. For the first time, the political unity of Catholics was broken down, Mr Orlando was sustained by relevant actors in the Catholic landscape, aware that the clientelist strategies of the DC and its connivance with Mafia in were destroying the party. However, even though LN was not the only new political actor on the scene, it managed to grow more and to gain more preferences rather than other anti-system forces

(Diani, 1996).

In fact, Lega Nord can be considered as a political entrepreneur that capitalised on the crisis of mass political parties in the 1990s, gaining consensus thanks to the progressive opposition between political elites and civil society (I. Diamanti, 1993). Indeed, the first important success of the Lega at the national level came in 1992 general elections, when the new party guided by Umberto Bossi reached 8.6% of votes. These were considered the last elections of the First Republic, right before the complete collapse of the old political system.

The end of the first era of the Italian Republican history was marked by the greatest political scandal ever experienced by the country, the Clean Hands judicial inquiry, also known as the Bribesville scandal. In February 1992 the arrest of the socialist manager Mario Chiesa brought the judges of to discover an extensive system of organised political corruption, which rapidly involved all the major political parties. “In a couple of years, six former prime ministers, more than five hundred members of Parliament and several thousand local and public administrators had become caught up in the investigations. The scandal they produced led to a dramatic crisis of the political system: in a few months, most leading political figures had been forced to resign or go into exile; the major parties disappeared or underwent radical transformation; new parties emerged on the scene to fill the political vacuum left by the old”(Vannucci, 2009, pp. 233-234). The investigations also involved leaders of prominent parties as the socialist Mr. Craxi and the country fell into a period of

47 intense public demonstrations and strong opposition towards the political class. The public opinion perceived the judges of Milan as real heroes and media attention was completely focused on the cases of politicians involved in corruption that emerged day by day, often creating real media trials and exacerbating social tensions (Colarizi & Gervasoni, 2014). The

Lega of Bossi greatly benefited from the fall of the political system and used the opposition to a totally corrupt political class as major theme in order to mobilise voters. Bossi and his party were able to catalyse the attention of voters around their distinctiveness with respect to the ruling elites and presented themselves as the only credible alternative to a system of government based on bribes and illegal exchanges. The instability provoked by the end of the end of the URSS regime and by the PCI reorganisation, together with the progressive secularisation and the clientelism of parties of government such as DC and PSI left room for new actors to emerge. LN’s strategy proved to be particularly successful, since in 1992 the party obtained widespread support in all Northern regions.

In 1993, the transformation of the DC into the new Italian Popular Party marked the passage to the so-called Second Republic, officially started with the 1994 general elections.

The fall of the First Republic and of the political system that had ruled the country since the post-war coupled with the new electoral law introduced in 1993, increasing high political instability and electoral volatility that led to an unprecedented rate of voters’ abstention in

1994 general elections (Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, 2001). For the first time, historical parties such as DC and PSI were absent, but new political forces emerged. Probably the most influential innovation was the entrance into the political scene of Mr and of his party, Forza Italia (FI) that deeply transformed the political space. Mr Berlusconi was a successful businessman, owner of a media empire founded on his private televisions and editors. He presented himself as a self-made man, addressing a new type of media populism that contributed to the creation of his public image as a model of success (Carlo Ruzza &

48

Balbo, 2013). The impressive rise of FI was facilitated by Berlusconi’s economic and media power, which gave him the chance to build an effective party machine in just a few months and to win the general elections. With his political message based on an opposition to traditional political elites and on the necessity of preventing the possible rise of the former communists, Mr Berlusconi gained the support of employers and businessmen in Northern

Italy, partly threatening the electoral base of LN. However, the new electoral law passed in

1993 required parties to build coalitions in order to gain the majority within the Parliament.

As a consequence, Mr Berlusconi presented himself as the guide of a right-wing coalition that would have prevented the risk of a communist government by joining forces with LN and MSI-AN. For this purpose, he worked in order to rehabilitate the public image of MSI, the old post-fascist party that, as the PCI, had always been forced into the opposition by the convention ad excludendum exercised by government parties. He started this operation by openly sustaining Fini (leader of MSI-AN) in his run as and then including his party in the -wing coalition. Including the party of Fini was a strategic choice that aimed at acquiring preferences in the Southern part of the country, where the MSI had always competed with the DC, gaining electoral support every time the Christian Democrats seemed to shift towards more leftist positions. On the contrary, the new AN (Alleanza

Nazionale) had little chances to reach widespread consensus in Northern regions, where the anti-fascist tradition was more rooted and the operation of rehabilitation of the party a hard task to accomplish. Thus, Mr Berlusconi split into two components his coalition. In the North of Italy Berlusconi and Bossi presented the Freedom Pole coalition, while in the South

Berlusconi joined in the Good Government Pole. In this way, Berlusconi was able to restore MSI-AN image and to obtain votes in South of the country, where anti- centralist and efficiency-oriented claims of LN resulted suspicious. On the contrary, the anti-

49 fascist North of Italy could not converge on Fini’s position, thus here the alliance with Bossi was strategic in order to secure votes of entrepreneurs and petty bourgeoisie.

The results of 1994 registered only a slight decline in LN’s performances since the party reached 8.4% of votes on the national level. Notwithstanding the relative consensus of the party, it succeeded in obtaining key roles in the new government. However, the first

Berlusconi’s government lasted only eight months. The fall of the coalition was caused by a vote of no confidence promoted by LN that moved into the opposition. The official reason for the disagreement with FI was the pensions reform, but at the same time, the decision to break the electoral pact with FI was part of a new political strategy. As reported by Zaslove

(2011) opinion polls before and after the elections of 1994 showed that Bossi and LN were losing preferences in favour of the charismatic figure of Mr Berlusconi, which was confirmed by the European elections results of the same year (6.6%). The Carroccio (as media often label LN) risked losing its electoral base due to defections towards FI, and at the same time, its populistic identity was at stake. In fact, Bossi was concerned by the possibility of being perceived as part of the system he had always opposed, of centralist political elites that were criticised by his loyal supporters. Thanks to the multiparty bipolar system of 1994, LN decision to move into opposition led to the fall of the first executive and the creation of Dini’s government. As a consequence, LN began to vigorously attack both its former allies, Berlusconi and Fini, preferring the “go it alone” strategy (Zaslove, 2011).

Electoral system: changing rules and new equilibria

As far as the electoral system is concerned, it is necessary to distinguish between different temporal phases and levels of government. As presented by the short review of the leagues’ history, the first successes of the party came from electoral affirmation at the local level. Since the mid-1980s in fact, Liga Veneta and Lega Lombarda started to grow both in

50

Veneto and in Lombardy, gaining positions within municipal, provincial and regional governments.

In their first phase of emergence the leagues, and LN in 1992 were undoubtedly helped by the strong proportional vocation of the Italian electoral system, at all levels of government. As in the case of the Varese elections of 1985 and of the general elections in

1987, these new regional movements succeeded in obtaining political representation thanks to electoral laws that favoured small parties, and that ensured broader chances of representativeness of voters’ preferences. This was the case also of 1992 general elections when Lega Nord obtained 24.3% in Lombardy. At the national level, the systems used for the proportional assignment of seats in the Chamber of Deputies was conceived as particularly helpful for smaller parties, while it was more restrictive in Senate (Sartori,

Massari, & Di Virgilio, 2004). Thus, during the embryonic stage of Lega’s development the party was helped by a system that ensured high levels of representativeness of political interests and its growing presence at different levels of government helped the party to create the first nucleus of loyal supporters in its traditional strongholds who ensured additional success in subsequent years (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001).

However, the Italian electoral system underwent a radical transformation in 1993. In fact, with the end of the First Republic and during a situation of high political instability, municipal, provincial6 and national electoral systems were changed, with a shift from pure proportional systems to mixed electoral laws. This led to a radical transformation of the political system. In particular, at the national level, the introduction of a Mixed Member

Majoritarian system was intended to create a bipolar system to allow a government turnover

(based on the Anglo-Saxon model) that had always been prevented by DC’s soft hegemony

6 Law n. 81, 1993. The regional law underwent reforms in the same logic in 1995, with the Tattarella Law.

51 and from the conventio ad excludendum7 strategy against parties at the extremes of the political spectrum. However, the imposition of bipolarism did not transform the Italian multiparty system. Instead it enhanced the blackmail power of smaller political formations and increased the coalition potential (and governmental relevance) of formerly antagonist parties, as LN (Albertazzi, McDonnell, & Newell, 2011). The new electoral law passed in

19938 and was first tested during the general election of 1994. Contrary to the previous hyper-proportional system, the reform of 1993 introduced for the first-time a mixed system that strongly benefited a cartel of parties that competed as coalitions. The law encountered harsh criticism and was labelled as a “Minotaur”, a mythological creature half a man and half a bull. In fact, the system introduced a mix of majoritarian and pluralistic system, with

75% of seats distributed with a majoritarian logic (first-past-the-post), and a proportional redistribution of the remaining 25% of sets with different criteria for the two Chambers.

Today, this law is commonly recalled as the “Mattarellum” from the name of its principal author Sergio Mattarella. The name was first utilised by the political scientist Giovanni

Sartori, who strongly opposed this mixed logic (Sartori, 1995). In fact, the law was intended to create for the first time a pure bipolar electoral system, but according to Sartori, this goal was impossible to achieve within the Italian system. He stated that such a system was unlikely to work efficiently in the hyper-fragmented Italian political landscape and would not be created more stable majorities. In his words, in fact, an electoral reform could not transform the structure of a political system that had always been proportional in nature. The possibility to reach a real bipolar system was not dependent on the electoral law but on the kind of the competing coalitions that, in reality, were strongly heterogeneous and thus

7 This system aimed at excluding the (PCI) and the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) out of government. 8 Two electoral referenda were held, in 1991 and 1993.

52 unlikely to last. Moreover, this system massively increased the influence of the smallest parties, which were able of blackmailing their coalition partners and of threatening government’s survival. This resulted in the impossibility to have homogenous government coalitions and increased the instability of the system. Lega Nord was one of the few parties able to rely on a group of loyal supporters (Sartori, 1995), but joining a coalition was the only means to obtain a certain political weight in the future legislation. At the same time,

Bossi was forced to enter Berlusconi’s coalition in order to avoid a direct electoral competition with the new FI in the LN’s strongholds. In fact, Bossi was worried that the entrepreneurial figure of Berlusconi could lead northern voters to turn to FI. Briefly, as proposed by Mudde (2007), the polarisation of the system was actually a beneficial opportunity in terms of power but not of votes for LN, mainly due to the choice of Bossi to join Berlusconi’s coalition. Having reached 8.4% of preferences in 1994 elections, LN was able to participate in the first Berlusconi’s executive obtaining also important political positions: 5 ministers, one vice-president of the cabinet and nine state secretaries. The party was able to obtain about 150 MPs, thus having a parliamentary group comparable with the one of FI.

Legal system: Bribesville and Lega Nord

The Italian legal system did not contemplate specific norms to deal with populist parties as Lega Nord. Moreover, during the first phase of the Lega expansion, the party was not yet wholly radicalised as it would have become in its second phase when it partly changed its political strategies. However, it is worthy to mention the judicial intervention towards the party within the scandal of Bribesville. In fact, as already stated, Lega Nord success has been partly attributable to the political shock caused by “Clean Hands” investigation. LN was able to fruitfully exploit the opportunities created by the public

53 indignation, carrying out violent verbal attacks towards the partitocrazia (partitocracy).

Bossi repeatedly stated they were ready to prepare the Kalashnikovs (Colarizi & Gervasoni,

2014) and LN was the main protagonist during protests in Parliament, such as when some deputies of the party showed nooses and handcuff while screaming in the Chamber of

Deputies. Bossi and his supporters presented themselves as the only political force able to destroy the clientelist and corrupt political system, opposing the dominance of a deprecated political class. This rhetoric was one of the fundamental basis of Lega anti-system frame and was little affected when the judicial investigations turned to focus their attention on Lega local administrators. In fact, in 1993 the party was interested in a controversial trial. “The

Lega’s electoral progress was also checked by its never fully explained involvement in tangentopoli (…). 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, 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 (…) 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 (…)” (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001, p. 41). Nevertheless, even if the media system greatly amplified the investigations against LN, the party and its public image was only limitedly impacted. This was demonstrated by the party’s results in the general elections in 1994 and from the role it took in a large part of municipalities in its electoral strongholds, Veneto and Lombardy.

54

Media system: look at me

Lega Nord, as well as LL and the other regional leagues before, was not formed by skilled and professional politicians, at least not in the traditional sense. Most of its representatives were at their first political experience (Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, 2001) and they did not resemble the members of the old political class. The unusual characteristics of

LN, of its leader and party’s members, their folkloristic language, the use of dialect and often of violent protests (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001) attracted the attention of national media.

According to Diani (1996), LN’s ability to use traditional media was rather poor, but the party benefited from a free media exposure, particularly regarding television coverage. This media attention depicted LN mostly in negative terms and catalysed a lot of attention around scandals within the party as in the case of Patelli’s affaire (Colarizi & Gervasoni, 2014).

However, these harsh attacks seemed to reinforce LN’s support within the Northern strongholds, where the party was perceived as a credible force and increased voters’ awareness about LN’s programs and political positions (Diani, 1996). The party did not directly control media, but as suggested by Mudde (2007) they helped LN in its phase of emergence and consolidation. By 1995 part of the public debate focused on the progressive media attention LN was gaining at the expense of public funding. However, there were no legal reasons to limit or impede LN presence on national TV channels and newspapers.

“Despite the ‘mediatisation’ of the party after 1987, Bossi never tired of talking directly with his followers in rallies and public meetings. But like most astute politicians of the age in which most people form their political preferences in front of a television, he was soon aware that most of his followers and potential followers would not hear the hour-long speech, but would listen to a ten-second sound-bite from it.” (Tambini, 2012, p. 99). At the same time, the persistence of the party was also favoured by its intentional propaganda (Mudde, 2007).

The Lega had always made considerable investments in propaganda, in order to build and

55 spread its identity (Allievi, 1992). For this purpose and given the lack of direct control of mainstream media, the party developed its press organisms such as newspapers (Giovani del

Nord, Lombardia Autonomista), radio (Radio Padania Libera), and tv (Telepadania).

Mobilizing structure

Formal party organisation: structuring the party

LL remained a formally unstructured political force until 1991 (Woods, 1992), counting only 5 permanent members in 1989 (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016), when the growing electoral success of the party forced its leader Umberto Bossi to operate a shift from a confederation of independent regional leagues to the official birth of LN as a political reality able to compete on the national ground. The steps towards party institutionalisation were partly guided from the increase in the number of members and from the necessity to contrast the position of media and traditional political parties that were used to reduce the phenomenon of the leagues as populist marginal movements. On the contrary, the leagues were acquiring a strong support by providing activists with new elements of identification

(anti-establishment discourse, regionalist identity, cultural rituals) and promoting new forms of political mobilisation in a historical moment characterised by the fall of the whole traditional system and from growing scepticism towards political parties (Biorcio, 1999).

“(…) Support for the movement—and its consequent access to public office and resources— rapidly grew in the ensuing years. Faced with the need to create a proper organisational structure, the LN opted for a model that was strongly hierarchical” (McDonnell & Vampa,

2016, p. 111). LN succeeded in creating a party structure, with a high degree of centralisation in the hands of the leader Umberto Bossi and securing support in its electoral strongholds.

The party combined a horizontal and vertical development. While the regional leagues penetrated their territories vertically, expanding their support from the centre of the

56 organisation throughout the regions with strict control on their candidates, LN combined these different regional realities horizontally in a single federal organisation on the model of

LL (Biorcio, 1999). The party was organised in 5 levels: federal, national, provincial, district and communal (Zaslove, 2011). The vertex of the organisation was the Federal Secretary, in charge of the Federal Secretariat composed by a Federal President, the presidents of MPs’ groups, an organisation secretary, and regional presidents, while at the local level the organisation was divided into provinces and municipalities. However, this formal democratic structure was largely dominated by the Lombard political elite, appointed by

Bossi (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016).

Particularly noteworthy was the function that the party exercised in its strongholds.

According to Biorcio (2012), LN territorial rootedness may be compared with the traditional penetration of the Italian Communist party or to the DC one, even if with different roles and functions. In fact, while mass parties performed socialisation functions and relied on millions of supporters, LN created an organisation based on few soci ordinari (members with voting rights within the party) actively involved in promoting and spreading LN’s positions across regions and possible supporters. However, given the differences between LN and traditional parties scholars have developed divergent opinions about the definition of the Lega as a mass party. According to Colarizi and Gervasoni (2014), LN cannot be considered a mass party since its membership was not dependent upon class identities and because the party cannot be positioned along the classical left/right political continuum. On the contrary, ideology is here substituted by an “economic pragmatism” attracting supporters that conceive LN as the only political reality able to realise people’s interests. Conversely, Maraffi (1994) affirmed that the electoral success of LN lied exactly in its ability to combine the characteristics of a charismatic party with a mass party structure. LN was in fact organised around a formal bureaucratic structure, with control over local sections, formal procedures, hierarchies, and

57 mass rallies. However, these organisational features were directly controlled by the leader

Bossi, who wisely exploited this formal organisation to control the party directly, preventing its institutionalisation. “The party in public office has become increasingly significant, and at the local level, the party has followed the traditional mass bureaucratic party model.

However, the most important party level has been the central office. (…) that structure was only a façade for a centralised leadership.”(Vercesi, 2015, p. 10) .This centralised party was comparable to traditional mass parties for its territorial embeddedness and exercised a role of political representation, giving voice to people’s grievances and catalysing the growing political resentment (Biorcio, 1991). In this first phase, Lega Nord was similar to a mass party, with a strong capacity to mobilise supporters but a rather minimal structure. However, evidence about its actual dimensions and structure was scarce (Diani, 1996). “In 1992 Lega

Nord was advertising the party as a consolidated organisation. For example: ‘To do politics, a big organisation is required. Lega Nord, 400 sedi, 700 sections, 200,000 members’,

Lombardia Autonomista No. 6 (Anno X, March 5, 1992). In June of the same year, the journal of the party included the same advertisement, changing the number of members from

200.000 to 40.000. Later in November of the same year, the party journal claimed 200.000 members again.” (Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, 2001, p. 36). In addition, as far as the political elite of LN is concerned, it is worthy to consider that Bossi personally appointed the higher ranks of the party. In addition, most of LN’s MPs were at their first political experience (37% was at their first experience, Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, 2001). The Lega developed also parallel organisations such as the Young Padanians or the Padanian Women, and a specific trade union, which had limited influence over the party’s development but increased its territorial presence (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016).

58

Internal and external leadership: the Senatùr

Lega Nord is often described as a typical charismatic party, where charisma is intended as how leaders present themselves and perform, more than in the Weberian sense, namely how followers perceive their leaders (McDonnell, 2016). In addition, the analysis of leadership normally distinguishes between external and internal leadership, often described as irreconcilable. In this sense, the figure of Mr Bossi appears to be particularly interesting since he managed to combine both a strong internal and external leadership, succeeding in leading the party for more than twenty years. The figure of Bossi has attracted a lot of academic attention during years, emphasising his crucial role in the emergence of the party and its electoral success. As previously mentioned, Bossi’s profile was not congruent with the image of the professional politician. He entered the political scene by chance after he met Bruno Salvadori at the University when he was a med student in his thirties with a wife and artistic aspirations (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). He started to build LL investing his own money, and he went into debts after the death of Salvadori in a car accident. However, relying only on a small number of supporters he managed to develop his party, becoming a competitive electoral reality on the national ground.

As reminded by Mudde (2007) and McDonnel (2016) charisma is not a personal attribute of the leader, but instead is an attribute of the relationship established between the leader and his followers. This external leadership results to be particularly important in the first phase of movements’ emergence. In the case of Lega Nord, and before of LL, the figure of Mr Bossi was surely prominent in securing the first group of loyal supporters. According to Biorcio (1999), LN has always been characterised by a complete overlapping between the identity of the party and its leader and this feeling has even grown during time. In this perspective, since its birth, LN’s followers perceived Bossi as a leader able to embody the

59 aims of the people and to preserve and defend their values. “The relationship between the secretary and the supporter reproduces the relationship that would be ideally established between the leader and its people, as imagined and idealized in populist movements”9

(Biorcio, 1999, p. 79). He was described as a leader able to galvanise supporters and to present himself and the Lega as the only valid alternative to a totally corrupted political class

(A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001), developing a non-mediated relationship with his followers

(Caiani & Graziano, 2016). Bossi presented himself as a man of the people, using dialect, colloquial expressions, simple discourses based on the common-sense and understandable by everyone in his audience (Zaslove, 2011) with a typical populist style (Mudde, 2007).

Voters were able to identify themselves in Bossi’s image, he dressed, looked like, spoke like the people, marking his difference with respect to the corrupted elites. He built the image of a hard-working man, willing to sacrifice his personal life, his time and his family for the people of Padania (Zaslove, 2011).

However, electoral success does not stem uniquely from voters’ perception of their leader. In fact, in order to increase and maintain solid support, political parties have to rely on a developed party structure and to avoid internal oppositions through a solid discipline and internal leadership. Bossi is often recognised as a strong leader who centralised the power of the party in his hands. During the first phase of development of LN, he affirmed his predominant role by holding the leadership of LN and LL simultaneously, while part of the movement opposed this double role (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). In order to secure his position and to reduce the chance of opposition to his guide, he directly appointed to top positions within the party to his loyal followers, so-called fedelissimi (Gómez-Reino

Cachafeiro, 2001), extending the Lombardian hegemony on the LN. Bossi was considered

9 “La relazione tra il segretario e i suoi militanti di base riproduce il rapporto che dovrebbe riprodursi tra leader e popolo come è immaginato e ipotizzato dai movimenti populisti” (Biorcio, 1999, p.79)

60 the key figure of aggregation, he had the power to promote or prevent political careers within the party, and members’ chance of acquiring a position of power was dependent upon obtaining Bossi’s trust. “One way of assessing the extent to which it was only a façade is to

(…) analyse the locus of power within the party in the central office in two dimensions: the power to control and power to appoint. From this perspective, the concentration of both types of power was greatest in the hands of Bossi, who changed party policy directions and political strategies whenever he thought it necessary”(Vercesi, 2015, p. 10). His leadership was never really contested, and since the beginning, Bossi tried to avoid the party’s institutionalisation, with frequent changes and replacement at the top positions to prevent the creation of a static bureaucratic apparatus (Biorcio, 1991). As typical of charismatic parties (Vercesi, 2014), Bossi tried to avoid the sedimentation of formal rules and bureaucratic processes, keeping all the discretional power of decision-making in his hands, thus preventing the chance for the party to survive beyond his leadership.

The first steps of the LN as a political reality were characterised by the willingness of the Federal Secretary to maintain an anti-establishment attitude and to secure himself a firm control over the whole movement. With the electoral success, Bossi became increasingly aware of the necessity to build an efficient party structure while maintaining a strong presence on the territory. However, during the 1990s some crises occurred. In fact, at the beginning of LN’s history territorial divisions emerged, but they did not seriously threaten the party’s survival neither Bossi’s leading role. Between 1994 and 1995 there were defections in Veneto, , and Lombardy, notwithstanding these events served uniquely to strengthen Bossi’s position since they furnished the leader with opportunities to reinforce his direct control over the party (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). The emerging factionalism was harshly opposed by the Senatùr expelling from the party every dissident, depicting them as betrayers of the leader and the leghista cause (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert,

61

2001). The most significant crisis was marked by the defection of Franco Castellazzi, one of

Bossi’s close collaborator. At the beginning of the 1990s, Castellazzi was the spokesperson of a faction within Lega Nord asking for a conciliatory approach with the Christian

Democrats. In fact, part of the movement was convinced that, where Lega Nord had not sufficient votes to govern on its own, it was necessary to build alliances with DC in order to reach positions of power in provinces and municipalities. Bossi strongly opposed this proposal since he was interested in clearly differentiating the Lega from the traditional political class, and in maintaining Lega’s anti-system identity during a moment of electoral growth (Woods, 1992). Factionalism also emerged in the aftermath of the fall of Berlusconi’s government. Bossi’s decision to exit the government was not accepted by all MPs, and this further exacerbated the opposition between the more radical and the more moderate members. Part of MPs left the parliamentary group of LN. The disagreement between the two different souls of the movement appeared clearly when in the following years Bossi decided to radicalise the party. While the represented for example by the President of the Chamber of Deputies Ms Pivetti were suspicious about the new secessionist turn, the radical members such as rejected the previous federalist ideas calling for more extreme solutions (Woods, 1992). However, the strong internal leadership of Bossi prevented severe schisms and guided the party through a process of further radicalisation.

Grass-roots organisation: subculture and activists

In order to better explain the fluctuating political fortune of Lega Nord during its first phase of emergence, it is necessary to focus the attention also on the political subculture that has facilitated its steep rise during the 1990s. In fact, the political opportunities presented above, as well as the party structure and the leader’s abilities needed a favourable cultural context for Lega to succeed. Here, I offer the idea that the party’s positive trajectory in its

62 early days resulted from the creation of a friendly political subculture forged on the combination of material and identity incentives. In fact, LN’s raise was favoured by the combination of economic concerns and the fall of traditional cleavages on which identity was defined. Where the overlapping of these two phenomena reached its highest peak, LN flourished.

As previously introduced, the initial breakthrough of the party is apparently identifiable in the widespread support that regional leagues obtained in the industrial district of Northern Italy, traditional strongholds of the DC and characterised by the so-called white subculture. In the aftermath of 1992 general elections, it was clear that LN was acquiring preferences among voters from the centre (Passarelli & Tuorto, 2012a). Among these voters, the leagues found favourable ground thanks to the widespread economic concerns that started to arise from the mid-1970s onwards. The post-war economic boom changed the

Italian situation drastically, bringing the country among the most productive economies in just a few years. However, the international crisis of the 1970s and the stagnation of the economy shifted the productive core of the country from the industrial triangle formed by

Milan, Genova, and to the so-called Third Italy. Here, a second economic miracle occurred when in the mid-1980s Italy began the fifth economy in the world (Zaslove, 2011).

Third Italy extended in North-east and Centre regions and was characterised by the widespread presence of small firms that tended to cluster together in industrial districts that were “integrated territorial systems with varying degrees of sectoral specialisation” (Trigilia,

1990, p. 160). Internally, industrial districts were distinguishable based on the predominant political subculture, with a distinction between the “white” and the “red” areas. As already proposed, LN electoral success was mainly developed within the “white areas”. LN received different levels of consensus across Northern regions, and even within regions. In fact, it was more attractive for voters of out the metropolitan areas, in realities characterised by the

63 presence of small-scale industry and white subculture. According to Biorcio (2012), the support for LN increased and decreased homogenously in each region during the different phases of LN’s development, demonstrating the stability of Lega’s localism. The sustained success of LN in white areas was mainly due to the progressive secularisation of those territories, in which the religious cleavage was losing its power as a source of identification, eroding the relationship with the Christian Democrats. Moreover, this change had stronger electoral consequences where the progressive secularisation coupled with a feeling of economic deprivation, as in industrial districts. Here, workers were increasingly worried about the growing economic instability, which generated concerns even during a phase of economic growth also due to the interaction with the increased social instability (Zaslove,

2011). This mounting dissatisfaction was exploited by LN, which presented itself as the only political reality able to give voice to the unrepresented self-employed and small entrepreneurs victims of the central state (A. Cento Bull, 2003). Diamanti (1993) observed how these transformations created favourable conditions for the Lega in white areas, while at the same prevented its success in the “red areas”. In fact, areas dominated by the communist political subculture were less permeable to LN’s values. Here, the erosion of the political subculture was not so pronounced and in particular the anti-centralist and anti- establishment political message of LN was not successful. In fact, while DC was clearly and totally in juxtaposition with the idea of central power and political elitism, the PCI was considered as the party of municipal government, since the conventio ad excludendum always prevented it from taking part in national government (Colarizi, 2007). On the contrary, in white regions, the LN’s antipolitical discourse was welcoming and was interpreted simultaneously as a refusal of the public inferences in private affairs and of the corrupted political elites. At the same time, Lega furnished a new source of identity: the ethno-regionalism. The territorial belonging was understood as an identity based on shared

64 interests rather than on historical and cultural belonging (I. Diamanti, 1993) promoting the economic interests of the laborious North.

However, LN did not only furnished material incentives. This is exemplified by looking at its supporters. LN’s activists were characterised by a strong anti-system attitude, they placed themselves at the centre of the political spectrum and refused the traditional opposition between left and right. They saw the commitment towards the party not only as a chance but as a real duty, participating in spreading the directives received by the central organisation and demonstrating their loyalty through a prolonged commitment on the territory (Biorcio, 1999). In turn, as a reward for their extensive support, the party ensured two types of incentives. LN was a source of material incentives, for instance ensuring possibilities of a political career to its loyal supporters (Biorcio, 1999), but most notably it provided its activists and supporters with collective incentives. In fact, the party ensured them sources of identification and shared values. LN worked in order to create and develop a clear-cut political identity, in which voters could identify themselves during a historical period marked by progressive disaffection towards politics and political elites. At the same time, LN was able to replace previously determinant cleavages as religion and class, introducing new elements of identity building as the opposition between North and South, common virtuous people and corrupted elites, or public and private, market and state (I.

Diamanti, 1993). This occurred through a gradual development. In the early phase of regional leagues, the process started with the success of LV that stressed the importance of shared culture and language in order to affirm a robust territorial identity. However, this strategy was not successful in Lombardy, where Umberto Bossi rapidly understood that ethno-regionalism alone was not sufficient in order to gain electoral preferences. In fact,

Lombardy was a far less homogenous reality if compared with Veneto. Here, dialects and shared culture and history were not perceived as convincing cleavages (I. Diamanti, 1993)

65 and levels of regional identification were low (Mannheimer et al., 1991). As a consequence,

LL (and thereafter Lega Nord) shifted its strategy and moved to a defensive identity, building on the opposition between the North and the South, the virtuous people and the corrupted elites, the natives and the outsiders (I. Diamanti, 1993). LN was able to invent the Padana identity (Biorcio, 19991) by developing an enemy politics that appeared to be the most efficient tool to build a shared collective (regionalist) identity (C. Ruzza & Schmidtke,

1996). In just a few years LL and then LN changed their targeted enemies in order to reinforce their message and to adapt it to the political subculture they wanted to attract.

“Anti-southerner and anti-immigrant feelings were especially integral parts of the Lega’s effort to furnish a territorially conceived identity in its formative stage. (…) Being rooted in popular culture, this hostility was taken for granted, and its free expression was positively encouraged. The cultural and socioeconomic divide between the northern and southern regions of Italy provided an easy starting point for defining a regional identity which already held broad acknowledgement in Italian society” (C. Ruzza & Schmidtke, 1996, pp. 182-

183). With this strategy Lega Nord was able to enlarge its first reservoir of consensus, acquiring the support of small entrepreneurs, petty bourgeoise, but also working-class voters.

However, these transformations did not impact the main core of supporters that were bound to the party through a “clan identity” (Giordano, 1999) and a strong sense of belonging. The party strongly relied on its activists: “Like the characterizations of Communist membership in the cold-war period, Lega Nord’s activists are portrayed as fanatic and irrational creatures.

Lega Nord borrows from traditional models of mass party organizations- -the Italian

Communist party as a source of inspiration--as well as radically departing from them. Lega

Nord is closer to a social movement in that direct mobilisation is essential for the party”

(Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, 2001, p. 35). The number of members raised in the first half of the 1990s, reaching a peak after 1994 general elections. However, it started to decrease in

66

1996, when the party obtained the highest electoral result since its birth and radicalised its positions (Passarelli & Tuorto, 2012a), and then it grew again in the 2000s (Albertazzi &

McDonnell, 2010).

Framing processes: anti-system frame

At this stage, it is necessary to introduce the third element of the present analysis, namely the framing processes. In fact, given a set of political opportunities and specific organisational resources, parties are more or less likely to succeed in mobilising voters according to the strategies they use to identify societal and political problems and in presenting possible solutions while framing their appeal to the people as likely to succeed.

Over the next paragraphs, I discuss the diagnostic, prognostic and motivational frames developed by LN before 1994 general elections, presenting just a restricted number of newspapers’ excerpts to sustain my claims.

Diagnostic frame: shame on you (all)

Firstly, it is worthy to start trying to understand how the party has worked during its first phase to frame the issues around which mobilise voters and militants. The analysis of the newspapers leads to the conclusion that two main problems are presented and stressed by the party, clearly focusing its critiques and showing their interconnectedness: the corruption of the old political class and the centralistic nature of the state.

The first issue has to do with the endemic corruption that the LN has extended as characterising the whole political class. In fact, over the entire period preceding the general elections the party’s newspaper has constantly referred to the scandal of Clean Hands. The

Lega has denounced the old political system, while presenting itself as the only pure political party, with the merit of having triggered judicial investigations over the widespread system

67 of political corruption. However, in 1994, the main problem was represented by the chance of old politicians to run again under a new party or a new coalition, trying to hide their corrupt identity (“old wreckage, very old skeletons who are still floating after having change symbols and names”, ed. after Clean Hands, Lega Nord, February 5th, 1994). Thus, LN’s framed competitors as part of old corrupt elites, which were trying to maintain their power over the country to obtain personal rewards (“in favour of their pockets and apparatus” Lega

Nord, February 9th, 1994). Here, political elites were identified with the political system as a whole, without distinguishing between political ideologies and subcultures. All the existing parties were considered part of the same criminal system, and thus the political system was rejected as a whole (“parties of welfarism and partitocracy from the DC, today Partito

Popolare, plus Patto di Segni, to PSO, today Alleanza Democratica, Riformisti, etc…to the

PCI, today PdS plus Rifondazione and others, those that in the last 20 years have been part of a consociational system (..)”, Lega Nord, March 16th, 1994). In this way, the traditional left/right opposition was overcome (“the traditional and fictitious contraposition between left and right, where both are centralist and statist”, Lega Nord, March 9th, 1994), while the

LN’s frame generated a new political division by opposing the corrupt in power with the emerging and pure political forces (LN, FI). Old politicians were responsible for the perpetuation of the corrupt order and the backwardness of some areas of the country. In fact, the corruption of political class was strictly linked to the Southern question. Over this phase, the party underlined differences with the south (institutional, political, economic) but describing those oppositions as caused by the immoral actions of a corrupt political class

(“The well-known dualism between the rich North and the poor South is the consequence of the old elites’ power games”, Lega Nord, February 9th, 1994). Thus, LN built an image of

Southern backwardness and welfarism, where votes were bought in turn of political power.

The problem lied in the fact that the productive North could not bear the costs of the Southern

68 part of the country, where resources were distributed by the elites also to undeserving people to maintain a clientelist system that ensured the protection of the status quo. According to

LN, the South was used by politicians as a source of votes and loyal support. Thus, this created a vicious cycle in which the Southern question was continuously feed by political elites. Southern voters maintained their support to centralist elites since they needed state subventions (“25 millions of people in the Centre-South who ask more state to have more welfarism”, Lega Nord, January 19th, 1994). Along with cultural and traditional backgrounds, North and South were mainly divided by strong economic differences (“the secession is not officially political, but is de facto economic”, Lega Nord, January 26th,

1994). possibility to catch up the Northern development was prevented by centralist elites’ interests. The only way to stop this mechanism was to transform the constitutional setting of the country in federalist terms.

In fact, according to LN, the second major issue lied in the Italian constitutional setting. The centralist structure of the Republic was responsible for the widespread corruption among politicians. The concentration of powers within central institutions and the presence of rules that prevented the redistribution of those powers or a system of rotation in apical positions were responsible for the emergence of elites (politicians, bureaucrats…) just interested in obtaining personal rewards (“statistically there are more crimes where the bureaucrats work for a long time in the same position, acquiring power over the apparatus”,

Lega Nord, February 2nd, 1994). The centralist structure of the state represented a threat to the Northern economic development because the productive North needed federalism and economic to remain competitive on the market. On the contrary, the centralist structure of the state damaged the productivity and exploited workers and employers, maintaining political elites in power. Moreover, this centralistic structure of power contributed to shifting the locus of power, reducing or even eliminating the sovereign power

69 of the people (“it is a political line that (…) has passed through fascism, communism and

Nazism to remain equal today under the image of centralism”, Lega Nord, February 19th,

1994). In the central Italian state, political institutions were too far to understand the real needs of the people, and they did not represent its general will. In such a system there was not a real democracy since those in power did not hear citizens' voices. On the contrary, this system allowed the reproduction of monopolies in all fields: from the economy, where there were strong national interventions, to culture and media. The people were not represented, while social problems linked to migration and the need for defence and security were increasing. For the North of Italy, federalism was a matter of life or death (“(…) for the

North this is a problem of freedom. Namely, life or death”, Lega Nord, February 19th, 1994).

Prognostic frame: federalism, that’s it!

The prognostic part of LN’s frames over the first phase is undoubtedly the most nebulous and vague. While enemies and problems are well targeted in the diagnostic frame, the resulting solutions are far less articulated and explained. As typical of populist parties, the proposals of amelioration or radical changes are simplistic and sometimes extreme. The lack of articulateness is common to all the solutions identified for issues in the diagnostic frame. For instance, one of the main problems identified by LN in the pars destruens of its call for action in 1994 lied in the corrupt nature of political elites. The leading solution was merely to destroy the partitocracy by eliminating the old political class (“meant to disappear with the passage from the First to the Second Republic”, Lega Nord, February 9th, 1994).

Generally, there was no reference to how old parties and politicians should be defeated, or alternatively, the only solutions were identified in the revolution that LN was bringing to the political scene or in the sovereign power of the people that with its vote was in charge of

70 transforming politics (“(...)the only court that can conquer freedom is the people, through ballots”, Lega Nord, January 19th, 1994).

However, no liberation could occur without a radical transformation of the constitutional asset of the state. Shortly, federalism was the only solution to every problem

(“Federalism is the only chance to save the country”, Lega Nord, February 2nd, 1994). In fact, discourses and political messages rotated around the necessity of overcoming the centralist form of the state to free the people by a political class who was using this central power to perpetuate clientelism and corruption. At the same time, federalism was the only way to avoid the outbreak of a social crisis (“The South must accept the idea of federalism, otherwise we will have a division of the state”, Lega Nord, January 19th, 1994). In fact, since the country was living a political crisis in the aftermath of the Bribseville scandal and the economic inequality was dividing the country along the North/South line, federalism was the only way to prevent the state to be definitively divided through secession. The idea of the South as an unbearable weight for Northern citizens was stressed, and the solution was to move towards federalism so that each territory could have the chance to grow autonomously and to cooperate on a voluntary basis. Moreover, federalism was intended to solve the national question by introducing a market economy (“The Lega is the most prominent guardian of the freedom principle, which needs to be implemented firstly in institutions and then in the economy”, Lega Nord, February 9th, 1994). However, only the

Lega with the new pole formed with Mr Berlusconi might open to this process. Thus, the party and its alliance with the Cavaliere was presented as the only solution to cope with the

Italian situation and to prevent the dissolution of the Italian state, since the government of the old political class would inevitably lead to the Northern secession. LN’s frame was built around the idea that the only solution for the country was to count on new forces, which were not compromised with the old political system. In particular, Forza Italia was

71 interpreted as a necessary ally since it was the key to solve the southern question by preventing the rise in those backward territories of statist and centralist forces as the former neo-fascist AN, which would maintain the welfarism logic. On the contrary, FI was a “no more centralist force and a not yet federalist force” (Lega Nord, March 9th, 1994) that might unify southern voters and form a sort of league of the south for a federalist future. It was represented as the perfect candidate because it gave people who are not brave enough to vote for LN a not-statist alternative, in light of the future federalism. Federalism was meant to be the solution to policy problems (productive, environmental, cultural, ethic, bureaucratic, etc) and it was depicted as the only way to maintain social order and to reach well-being and freedom (“Either the old centralist parties will win and thus a war for the independence of the North will start, or the Lega will win, and it will be possible to exit the impasse through federalism”, Lega Nord, January 19th, 1994).

Motivational frame: from the free people, for the free people

The motivational frame is here interpreted as the form of the ideal society the party tries to present to its supporters, appealing the people with a rationale for action. In this perspective, the strongest claims have to do with the same concept of democracy and organisation of a democratic state. Firstly, in line with its strongly populistic nature, LN stressed the importance of reaching a new democratic regime founded on the will of “the people”, not better specified, in which the constitutional right of citizens to be involved in the process of decision-making and to exercise their sovereign power would be respected

(“Democracy means a way of producing laws characterised by the presence of citizens in the process of decision-making”, Lega Nord, January 19th, 1994). In the new society, the old system of partitocracy would be destroyed and overcome, ending the system of clientelism and corruption through which the centralist elites tried to maintain their power and to

72 subjugate the honest people. It would be the starting point of a Second Republic, finally genuinely democratic. In this new order, old elites would be finally exposed, without any chance to come back in power (“What is old and has not been renovated is meant to be ruined by the time, and corrupt and old are linked”, Lega Nord, March 9th, 1994). However, this modern society was not merely described in antagonistic terms (i.e. the government of the pure people over the corrupt elites) but also in constructive, even though simplistic, terms.

The new order proposed by the Lega to mobilise supporters described a society based on the liberal concept of freedom and opposed to the idea of equality offered by the socialist/communist ideals (“It is necessary to implement freedom both at the institutional level with federalism and at the economic level with liberalism, so that the basic principle of the Italian Constitution will be freedom”, Lega Nord, February 9th, 1994). In this sense, the party suggested the idea of a society based on the prescripts of the neo-liberal economy, where everyone might have and obtain proportionally to his/her merit, guaranteeing the same starting conditions but without any form of welfarism. It was indicated as a passage from the welfare state to the welfare society, where the freedom of each citizen would generate equality through private actions towards a collective good (“From a welfare state to a welfare society that recognises the rights of those communities able to organise and to govern themselves”, Lega Nord, February 2nd, 1994). Here, the principle of the liberal market was essential in allowing citizens to satisfy their general will and to give them back the power the central state had subtracted over the years. However, the neoliberal economy could be realised uniquely within a federalist nation, where decisions were taken within territories, closer to citizens and their needs. Federalism, as already stated, was understood as the only means by which reaching a new society based on respecting individuals’ freedom and identity, since it allowed communities to live in peace and valorised their peculiarities. As a consequence, a federal state based on liberal ideas would have solved the contraposition

73 between North and South of the country, preventing the dissolution of the nation-state.

Federalism was the recipe to realise the coexistence and cooperation of different peoples, and particularly, to give the South the chance to provide its own needs in a more competitive landscape. The Lega was the only party able to enact those changes and to give voice to people’s grievances and needs (“The Lega is the expression of the Gens Italica (…) is the expression of the new federal Italy of today and tomorrow, in Europe and in the world”,

Lega Nord, February 16th, 1994).

As far as the 1994 general elections are concerned, some conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, in this phase, LN was trying to downsize its folkloristic aspects for motivating supporters in rallies and electoral meetings while using official media channels to depict itself more as a force of government (“The Lega is ready to become a force of government and implement the change”, Lega Nord, March 16th, 1994). This is understandable given the fact that the participation within the newly formed centre-right coalition was giving to LN real hopes to enter the future cabinet. As a consequence, I interpret the present phase as an embryonic stage of what would have become a typical strategy of the part once in office, namely the attempt to keep one foot in and one foot out (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2010) combining its populist character with a more institutional profile. Secondly, the party succeeded in combining the already developed anti-system frame, with neoliberal economic prospects.

Thus, in the phase near to the 1994 general elections, LN’s motivational frame mainly focused on depicting a modern economically functional society, based on the idea of productivity and free market economy. Here, references to the ethnic roots of the Northern people or their endemic differences concerning Southern people or migrants were reduced to the minimum. The enemy politics over this phase was mainly focused on the enemies at the top, with an upward antagonism that negatively framed the elites. This partly reflects what has already emerged from the analysis of secondary data, namely the idea that in this

74

phase LN was mainly concerned in drawing the boundaries of “we, the people” in economic

terms, stressing the shared interests that unite pure citizens oppressed by corrupt elites, rather

than their ethnic roots. On the contrary, economic freedom and political federalism were

intended to improve the cooperation between different communities valorising their

differences. The core ideas expressed by the parties concerned the necessity to overcome the

old and corrupt political system to reach a new and idealised society. The people were in

need of a civic revolution that should be fought in polling booths. However, in 1994, both

the anti-system and the neoliberal frames were contented by the media tycoon Mr Berlusconi

and his FI. LN was no more the only pure force on an increasingly unstable political

landscape and was not the only actor (neither the most successful) interested in developing

a liberal and modern economy.

Tab 2. Summary of the main findings: regionalist phase (1990-1994)

1992 1994 POS Party System Available space/non-credible Emergence of a new competitor(FI) competitors (+) Electoral System Proportional (+) Coalition building with FI (-) Legal System No measure/scandal (n.e.) (n.e.) Media System Free exposure/propaganda (+) Free exposure/propaganda (+) Mobilising structure Formal party structure Underdeveloped (-) Underdeveloped (-) Internal and external Strong (+) Strong (+) leadership Grass-root Catholic (white) subculture, enemy Catholic (white) subculture, enemy organisation politics (+) politics (+) Frame Diagnostic frame Focused-total rejection (+) Focused-total rejection, vertical antagonism: enemies at the top (+) Prognostic frame Simplistic, direct, federalism (+) Motivational frame Anti-system and liberalism (+/-)

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Move to the right (1998-2003)

The radicalisation (1996-1998)

The radicalisation of LN’s identity and political project was the result of progressive transformation and polarisation on the political continuum, mainly guided by the fluctuating electoral success of the party. As explained in the previous section, in 1994 Bossi decided to compete at the general elections within the centre-right coalition of Mr Berlusconi, trying to capitalise his widespread consensus in Northern regions and to gain a heavier weight in government, exploiting the opportunities opened by a new electoral law that rewarded large coalitions. However, the first Berlusconi’s government had a very short life, threatened and then destroyed by internal conflicts and fights for power. Since the beginning of the twelfth legislature (1994-1996), Bossi understood that FI was becoming a dangerous competitor and a potential enemy. According to the opinion polls, Mr Berlusconi was acquiring preferences even within the LN’s electoral base, provoking severe defections towards FI (Zaslove, 2011).

FI grew in the metropolitan areas that LN had gained during the 1990s, and this brought back the party in less urbanised areas, reaccentuating its localist character (I. Diamanti, 1996).

The chance of a progressive shift of leghisti towards Mr Berlusconi’s party was a severe danger, since the Cavaliere (as national media labelled Berlusconi) represented the image of a successful businessman, able to attract consensus among the petite bourgeoisie of the productive North of Italy, until then tied to the figure of Umberto Bossi. Despite a large number of parliamentary seats gained (180 MPs) and the fact that LN was the largest force in Parliament, the project of creating a federalist state was hardly realisable within the existing majority. In fact, the centralist and nationalist vocation of AN and the national vision of FI constituted an insurmountable constraint for the realisation of a constitutional reform of the state in federalist terms. Having understood the impossibility of implementing a

76 macro-regions solution, Bossi was worried by the possibility of compromising the image of his party and of losing his anti-system character. The chance of being perceived as part of the corrupt political élite and as a supporter of the controversial figure of Mr Berlusconi influenced LN’s exit from the cabinet (Zaslove, 2011). The necessity for LN to change its political strategy emerged in the aftermath of the European elections of 1994, when the party reached nearly 6.5% of preferences, losing ground compared to its national performance. As a consequence, just a few months after the 1994 elections, Bossi started to attack his allies fiercely and further exacerbated his opposition towards the former post-fascist party of Mr

Fini (Zaslove, 2011). The fall of the first Berlusconi’s cabinet was recalled one year after in

“Tutta la verità”(Bossi, 1995), where the Senatur affirmed that his choice to move into the opposition was mainly determined by the necessity to contrast the personalistic guide of Mr

Berlusconi, depicted as a friend of criminals and a man only interested in expanding his power. The split had important organisational consequences within the party since over 50

MPs migrated in the FI’s parliamentary group and several other members were expelled or decided to exit the party (Bolleyer et al., 2012). Nevertheless, this moment represented an important turning point for LN’s identity; Bossi opened a new phase starting to radicalise his messages and his political proposal for the sake of differentiating Lega’s profile from other forces at the right of the political spectrum and reacquiring the preferences of his

Northern supporters (Zaslove, 2011). The new strategy consisted of a shift from federalist to secessionist positions.

With the end of the first Berlusconi’s government and the “go-it-alone” strategy, LN opened to a new political goal, advocating the necessary secession of Northern Italy, given the sharp and irreconcilable difference between Padania and the rest of the country (A. Cento

Bull, 2009). The idea of transforming the Italian state in federalist terms, with a distinction between three main macro-regions as confederate states, was no more a determinant element

77 of LN’s identity. In fact, during the time and particularly alongside the 1994 general elections, this theme was variously represented by different political forces as FI and later also the newly created Ulivo of Mr Prodi, depriving the Lega of its issue ownership

(Tambini, 2012). As a reaction, LN was forced to radicalise its central political goal.

According to I. Diamanti (1996) the shift towards the idea of an independent state of Padania and the introduction of the secessionist discourse were strategic choices that aimed at differentiating the identity of the party from every other political actor and at reacquiring the media attention, while defining the centrality of a new imagined community built around the idea of ethnic identity. In addition, Bossi was convinced that Italy would not be able to meet the European criteria to enter the monetary union and that, at that point, Northern voters would have been more prone to accept independentist ideas in order to join the Eurozone

(Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2005).

For the first time, the party moved from opposition to Italy as a state, supported by the former ideologue Mr Miglio, to an attack to Italy as a nation (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert,

2001). During this process, the previous idea of the North as a community of shared interest was once again substituted by the notion of Padania as a shared heartland (Ignazi, 2005), reintroducing the ethnocultural elements that characterised the phase of regional leagues (I.

Diamanti, 1993). This shift was marked by a series of symbolic transformations and initiatives. In June 1995 Lega Nord proclaimed in Mantua the birth of the so-called

Parliament of the North, an initiative that served to furnish the secessionist idea with an institutional image (Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, 2001), with the aim to draw up a Constitution for the Northern Republic and to represent the people of Padania. During the annual meeting of Pontida, in 1996, a committee for the liberation of Padania was created, together with the so-called Camicie Verdi (green shirts), a sort of paramilitary group that was at the centre of the judicial investigations in subsequent years (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). In the same

78 year, during the Festa del Po, Bossi declared the independence of the North from the rest of the country, starting to use the term Padania to identify a homogeneous territory and evoking for the first time the shared Celtic heritage of Northern communities (Tambini, 2012).

During the Federal Congress of 1997, the party was renamed ‘League for the Independence of Padania’. In the same year, the party held a referendum asking whether Padania should become an independent state and citizens firstly voted for the Parliament of Padania.

Therefore, with the beginning of a new phase of transformation, the party tried to incorporate and juxtapose the cultural (shared identity) and the economic (shared utility) dimensions in the project of creating a Republic of Padania, granting the North of the country with the chance to defend its productive interest and safeguarding its autonomous cultural identity.

However, during this period of transition, LN changed also in its relationship with the other political forces. In 1995, after the fall of the centre-right government, the Lega supported the new majority of Mr Dini and started to interact with the left-wing coalition.

Mr D’Alema, one of the most relevant figures of the centre-left landscape, was used to define

LN as a rib of the left, even if LN never joined the Ulivo coalition (Colarizi & Gervasoni,

2012). In fact, even though the left-wing alliance was interested in cooperating on themes such as the decentralisation of the state, the radical identity of Lega prevented the chance to set up a real coalition. Thus, Bossi’s party presented itself as the third pole between two forces that were presented as centralist and corrupt (Colarizi & Gervasoni, 2014). The 1996 general elections, won by the centre-left coalition, marked a substantial success for LN and its new electoral strategy, reaffirming its predominant role in the North of the country. Bossi presented the elections as a referendum for the independence of Padania and had the first chance to test his new line (Giordano, 2003). However, the renewed electoral victory of 1996 came primarily from the traditional strongholds in Veneto and Lombardy and small and medium centres with high levels of industrialisation and low development of the service

79 economy(I. Diamanti & Donaldson, 1997). Briefly, the new and unexpected wave of electoral support came mainly from the same areas that had enshrined the first breakthrough of the regional leagues, finding support among similar strata of the population and in areas previously dominated by the Christian Democrats. At the same time, it was difficult to acquire consensus in urban and metropolitan areas, and where the previous influence of the

Communist party -and after that of its offspring- was the highest (I. Diamanti & Donaldson,

1997). This electoral round “serves to show that Bossi's project for representing northern

Italy, to "liberate Padania" by presenting the Lega as an independence movement, faced some evident difficulties: "Padania" simply did not exist, and politically the Lega represented an important but bounded part of the North. Paradoxically these limitations emerged more visibly and acutely thanks to the electoral success of April 1996. It was to conceal and overcome these problems, to go beyond the foothills and accentuate the cohesion and identity of his electoral base, that Bossi further accelerated the independence strategy immediately after the election, transforming "secession" from a tactical threat into a strategic objective” (I. Diamanti & Donaldson, 1997, p. 75). Thus, the unexpected electoral results of 1996 came at the price of a double constraint. On the one hand, the strategy of LN was clearly not effective in order to gain new preferences among territories and social strata traditionally hostile to Bossi’s positions, generating a further radicalisation and marginalisation of the party. On the other hand, the “go-it-alone” strategy somehow reversed the previous balance of power within the Parliament. Bossi’s strategy was sustained by the idea that the elections would not have generated a solid majority, thus increasing the Lega’s bargaining power. On the contrary, the victory of the Ulivo coalition and its capability to form a government reduced these chances and the party’s influence (I. Diamanti &

Donaldson, 1997). While, with a thinner success, in 1994 LN was able to obtain strategic positions in government thanks to favourable pre-election agreements (Albertazzi,

80

McDonnell, & Newell, 2007), the higher electoral support in 1996 did not correspond to success in terms of parliamentary seats and political weight. In fact, the isolation of the party from the centre-right coalition reduced its bargaining power within the opposition and decreased Bossi’s chances to produce that radical changes he promised during the electoral campaign (I. Diamanti & Donaldson, 1997). Moreover, this isolation risked being a double- edged sword even at the regional and local level, where the new majoritarian electoral law strongly favoured a bipolar competition (Albertazzi et al., 2011). This was a threat for the party, particularly for its presence in traditional strongholds as in Lombardy and Veneto and led the party to reconsider its presence in coalitions since the end of the 1990s (Zaslove,

2011).

Political opportunity structure

As previously mentioned, the phase of LN’s radicalisation started with the fall of the first Berlusconi’s government and was magnified between 1996 and 1998, with a progressive shift from the idea of federalism to the project of secession (Albertazzi et al., 2007). The

“go-it-alone” strategy proved to be unexpectedly successful in 1996 general elections, regaining support in the Northern regions, but marginalising the party and preventing the actualisation of its political goals (I. Diamanti & Donaldson, 1997). For these reasons, the period here analysed constituted more a phase of new adaptation. This phase represents a fundamental moment in the history of the party; in fact, over this period LN had been through massive changes in its identity, becoming a populist radical right party. According to Zaslove

(2011), in its first phase of emergence, the Lega was classifiable as a regionalist populism or as a neo-liberal populism (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001), but it became a PRRP in the second half of the 1990s. The creation of Padania in 1996 can be considered as the turning point that marked the entrance of the LN within the radical right party’s family (A. Cento

81

Bull & Gilbert, 2001). In addition, from 1998 onwards the party restructured its alliance with

Mr Berlusconi, managing to become a party of government without losing its radical right populist identity.

Party system: together again

The 1996 elections furnished the Lega with crucial electoral support, which however was not mirrored in the political weight obtained by the party. Within the Parliament, the leghisti found themselves isolated and without the chance to promote a radical transformation of the Italian state, gaining independence for Padania. “Having spent almost three years all dressed up but with nowhere to go, on 14 September 1998 Bossi addressed a gathering of party militants at the now traditional end of- summer appointment in and candidly admitted that the isolationist strategy had not paid off (…) It was the beginning of a process of slow and yet inevitable rapprochement with the centre-right”(Albertazzi et al., 2007, p. 7). This strategic rapprochement started with the regional and local elections in

1999 and 2000, culminating in a new electoral pact for the general elections of 2001.

However, mindful of the defections occurred after 1994 general elections, Bossi entered the alliance differentiating the identity of his party from competitors. Firstly, the new secessionist position changed the nature of the party and its positioning within the left-right political continuum dramatically. In fact, in the early days of the party, Lega Nord was characterised by its lack of an ideological connotation and thus from the impossibility to define the party as part of the right-wing or the left-wing pole of the political spectrum but rather a form of centre-extremism (Ignazi, 2004). The political discourses and aims of the party were characterised by a mixture of left-wing, conservative, and liberal elements and this was reflected also in its electoral base, composed both by working-class voters and entrepreneurs of the North. However, the shift from federalist positions towards secessionist

82 ideas went hand in hand with a progressive extremization of the party’s identity and with its definitive move to the right of the Italian political landscape.

Even though elements of opposition towards external enemies (e.g. people from the south) were part of Lega’s rhetoric since its foundation, from 1996 onwards, it intensified its anti-immigrant and xenophobic discourses exploiting the opportunities presented from

Italy becoming a receiving country for international migrants. The theme of immigration, and how it was framed contributed to the creation of a new image for the Lega and to change the relationships within the radical right-wing Italian landscape. In fact, until this moment, the Italian radical right was represented by the former neo-fascist party of Mr Fini (AN).

However, as pointed out by Ignazi (2004), AN was not capable or interested in politicising the problem of migration, thus it left the Lega the chance to exploit this opportunity and to impose its issue ownership over the theme. This was mirrored by the composition of the party’s supporters that displayed higher levels of xenophobia and resentment towards immigrants if compared with AN’s voters (Ignazi, 2004). Combined with its secessionist goals and to the harsh attacks towards the Italian nation, the profile of Lega Nord was now far more extreme and competed with AN to gain the support of the most radical part of the electorate. As reminded by Mudde (2007) the radicalisation of PRRPs, and in this case, the ideological repositioning of the party, contributed to their electoral success among specific strata of the population while alienating the more moderate part of its supporters. With its ideological repositioning (Ignazi, 2005), which differentiated the Lega from the liberal FI and competed with AN on a unexploited ground, Bossi was able to reacquire the vote of his more radical supporters, at the price of pulling away the ones who held more centralist orientations, both in the electorate and within the party’s elites (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert,

2001).

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Although the new radical strategy proved to be successful in its early days- as in the case of 1996 general elections (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2010)- during time the party started to suffer from the profound isolation within the , becoming conscious that its new position was relegated in a total opposition, without any chance to reach its political goals. In addition, the success of Mr Prodi (leader of the Ulivo coalition) in guiding Italy within the monetary union prevented the Lega form exploiting this occasion as an opportunity to accelerate the independence process (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2005). As a consequence, since 1998 the party started to reconsider the chance to enter a new alliance within the centre-right coalition, which was set up in the occasion of 2000 regional elections

(Colarizi, 2007). The electoral setback of the party at 1999 European polls contributed the final decision to cooperate again with Mr Berlusconi in order to reacquire a government potential (I. Diamanti, 2010). This new phase was accompanied by a further shift in party’s political goal, which passed from secessionist ideas to the new concept of devolution, and forced Mr Berlusconi to work for enforcing regional autonomy in the North (A. Cento Bull

& Gilbert, 2001). Therefore, with a new alliance between LN, FI, AN and the neo-catholic party UDC, the 2001 general elections signed the return of the right-wing coalition in office.

As Berlusconi learned in 1996, winning without the Lega Nord’s support was a hard task for his coalition. In fact, AN of Mr Fini was still opposed in the North of the country, given the impossibility to forget its fascist heritage. Moreover, the other members of the coalition, the

Christian Democrats of UDC, were a centralist party mainly rooted in the south of the country and scarcely attractive for northern workers and entrepreneurs (Colarizi &

Gervasoni, 2012). Thus, including LN was necessary to gain votes in the North. While the lack of support from Bossi had been the reason for the electoral defeat of 1996, in 2001 the participation of the Carroccio was decisive for reaching a new victory.

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At the same time, this coincided with the heaviest electoral defeat of Bossi’s party

(3.9%) that lost about 6% of votes if compared to 1996 and elected only 43 MPs. Most notably, the party faced a robust setback in its electoral strongholds, losing its position as the first party of the North (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2005). The decision to enter the coalition again was justified to supporters as the only means by which obtaining actual political changes for the North and gained credibility since Bossi obtained Berlusconi’s commitment in working towards the goal of devolution. However, as demonstrated by the electoral results, the loyal supporters of the party opposed this solution. In addition, to abandon the isolation meant to leave the secessionist ideas. This contributed to reducing the distinctive character of the party that in 1996 was decisive for its success (Giordano, 2003).

The electoral defeat of the Lega can be partly explained referring to a narrowed set of opportunities for what concerns the party system. In fact, differently from the first phase of emergence, the 2001 electoral competition was played by political actors already familiar with the Italian political scene. This meant that, for example, FI lost its character of political novelty and was widely recognised as a party of government. The progressive institutionalisation of Mr Berlusconi’s party and its economic and media opportunities helped the party in reaching a new predominant role, also in the North, somehow interpreting the role of interests’ aggregation once played by the DC and then intercepted by the Lega

(Giordano, 2003). Moreover, the poor electoral performance of 2001 was also favoured by the emergence of a constellation of alternative independentist movements outside the Lega.

Since the first years of LN’s creation, and even more during the phase of progressive realignment within the centre-right coalition, opponents within the party were excluded from

LN and founded their movements (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). Most of the times these new realities had very little support, however their presence contributed to fragmenting the

85 supply on the autonomist front and provoked a loss of consensus among northern voters

(Giordano, 2003).

However, this time, Lega Nord acquired a prominent role in the newly formed government, succeeding in balancing its negative electoral performance with a renewed central role within the executive (Giordano, 2003). As in 1996, the centre-right coalition was characterised by a high degree of heterogeneity, and this worked as a favourable opportunity for the Lega. In fact, given the sharp differences of the political actors that were part of the

House of Freedoms, LN was able to act as an internal enemy and to differentiate its identity from others within the coalition. Before the elections, Bossi succeeded in securing the creation of a privileged relationship with Mr Berlusconi that, once in government, allowed the leader of the Carroccio to oppose his coalition partners such as AN and UDC fiercely, without any political consequence (Zaslove, 2011). This coincided with the elaboration of a new strategy that became a distinctive trait of the party, namely its capacity to alternate between a party of protest and a party of government (I. Diamanti, 2010). Moreover, the process of differentiation of LN and AN continued during the second and the third

Berlusconi’s government (2001-2006), completing the ideological shift of the two parties.

This new experience in government marked the complete reaffirmation of AN as a moderate right-wing party, placed within the landscape of the European democratic right, and focused on securing the vote of centrist electors. As a consequence, given the constant demand for extreme political positions (Ignazi, 2004), LN found room for being recognised as the only right-wing in the “New Right” European family (Albertazzi & McDonnell,

2005). The polarisation of the two parties was quite visible on the issue of immigration, specifically after the new migration law was passed in 2002 (Bossi-Fini law, from the names of the two leaders). While AN started to change its rhetoric accepting migration and controlled integration of migrants within Italian society as inevitable and necessary in

86 economic terms, LN remained alone in fostering a total rejection of newcomers and in claiming to protect the rights of natives (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2005). These progressive transformations brought the party to new growth in 2004 European elections (5%) even though it was still far from the success of the mid-1990s.

Electoral system: a double-edged sword

This second phase of party’s development was not marked by relevant transformations regarding the electoral law. The general elections of 1996, as well as the one of 2001, and then 2006 were run under the same mixed system that had characterised the national, regional and local levels of government since 1994-1995. At the national level, this system proved to produce fluctuating results, both favouring and penalising LN. This seems to confirm that, as proposed by Mudde (2007), electoral laws alone are not able to explain the performances of PRRPs or, at least, they are likely to play different roles across parties’ phases of their life-cycle. In fact, while the proportional system was essential for the breakthrough of the Lega (1992), the majoritarian reform forced the party to form an unstable alliance with Mr Berlusconi in 1994. However, the most substantial success of LN came when the party decided to run alone under a mainly majoritarian system. In this case, as reminded by Albertazzi et al. (2007), the majoritarian rule for assigning the seat resulted particularly favourable for parties such as Lega Nord. The “first-past-the-post” rule applied for allocating seats in the majoritarian part of the system rewarded parties with strong support highly concentrated in specific geographical areas, thus winning seats in several constituencies. This was the case of Lega Nord that won several seats in the North, reconfirming its prevalence in electoral strongholds in Veneto and Lombardy in 1996.

However, this success was limited over a short period, since the impossibility to impact the

87 decisions of the cabinet and to exercise a bargaining power within the opposition soon marginalised the party.

As the party had benefited from the polarisation of the political system in 1994 being part of the centre-right coalition, as proposed by Mudde (2007), the 1996 decision to run alone was positive in terms of electoral support but had adverse effects on the effective weight of the party. “(I)t realised that, within the bipolar system of competition, to remain in opposition outside the two main groupings was to risk becoming irrelevant in the eyes of voters both due to the lesser media visibility it attracted and because of its obvious inability to affect change at government level. While bipolarisation in Italy may not have significantly reduced the number of parties competing, it has made life far more difficult for those who do not wish to link themselves in some way to either the centre-left or centre-right coalition.”(Albertazzi et al., 2007, p. 20). LN was not able to play as a third pole, and the electoral success of 1996 itself set in motion a process of progressive disenchantment towards the party. In fact, the marginal position at the national level had consequences on the following electoral competitions at regional and local levels (Giordano, 2003), bringing

Bossi to abandon the isolation strategy in 1998. From 1998 Bossi started to reopen a dialogue with his former ally Mr Berlusconi, trying to normalise the new radical identity developed by the party. Nevertheless, also this strategical choice proved to be inefficient and did not stop the electoral decline of the party, which reached its lowest result (3.9%) in 2001 general elections. This time, the choice to join the coalition was unsuccessful in electoral terms but furnished the party with essential positions within the newly created centre-right executive.

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Legal system: prisoners of the central state

As mentioned in the previous section, the Italian legal system has not developed specific tools to cope with parties such as the Lega, for the simple reason that LN was not an anti-democratic party and had never explicitly attempted the democratic order of the country. However, during the phase of radicalisation, both Umberto Bossi and some of the

LN’ activists were subject to judicial intervention due to their independentist claims.

Between 1995 and 1996, after the birth of the Mantua Parliament, Bossi was investigated

“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)” (A.

Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001, p. 106). In addition, members of the so-called green shirts, a group composed of LN’s activists with surveillance functions, were arrested for having created a paramilitary force with the aim of overthrowing the Italian state. Despite the great media attention generated by this case, the process took 20 years to be concluded, and it ended with the acquittal of all accuses. The process did not impact the party, but on the contrary, this contributed positively to its secessionist rhetoric. Influential personalities of the party as Mr started to refer to the investigated green shirts as prisoners of the Italian state.

At the same time, LN’s representatives were prosecuted and also condemned for hate speech, in force of the Mancino Law (1993), which regulated “acts of incitement to racial violence and the propagation of ideas based on racial superiority or racial or ethnic hatred.

It is also a crime to facilitate the activity of organisations, associations, movements, or groups that have this purpose among their objectives” (Longo, 2016, p. 25). In the phase of radicalisation and progressive intensification of LN’s xenophobic and anti-immigrant

89 rhetoric, six representatives were accused of racial hate speech against the Sinti community in 2001 and later condemned. However, in this case, the party was not negatively affected by the episode. On the contrary, after asking for the abolition of the Mancino Law, LN obtained a substantial weakening of the norm in 2006 (Longo, 2016).

Media system: spectacular politics

The political goal of the Lega, namely the necessity to tie its supporters creating a new shared identity and reshaping their interests, required the development of intense and effective propaganda. Given the lack of powerful media, unlike other competitors such as

FI, the party tried to exploit a free exposure on national media and to attract their attention by means of impressive actions. Tambini (2012) defined this strategy as a form of

“spectacular politics: proving editors with colourful news in exchange for a constant, however negative, media presence in the League” (p.98). By the mid-1990s, after the radical transformation underwent by the party, the most important newspapers dedicated attention to the party news, which contributed to selling more copies and at the same time to institutionalise the image and the claims of the party (Eatwell, 2000). The nationalistic identity developed by LN after 1996 contributed to regaining disproportionate attention by the media (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2005; I. Diamanti & Donaldson, 1997; Tambini, 2012), feeding people’s mobilisation for this new claim. “The parliament of the North was the most systematic attempt by the party to use symbolic action to manipulate the media and public opinion. Mantova became an obliged stop for Italian journalists. Threats of secession and independence, a language of insult and provocation attracted the attention of the media (that) rewards political controversy, novelty and extra-institutional means of action. The use of medieval myths, the dramatic enactment of loyalty, the flags and the self-representations of the party as a solidarity unit have attracted the Italian media and the international press. Thus,

90 these are the resources the party can activate in mobilising and sustaining political controversy.” (Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, 2001, p. 45). As far as the propaganda of the party is concerned, also its media channels were transformed in this phase of renewal. In 1995 the weekly magazine Lega Nord was renamed La Padania, becoming the official newspaper of the party (Tambini, 2012) while in 1997 Radio Varese-Lega Lombarda changed its name in

Radio Padania Libera (free Padania).

Mobilizing structure

Formal party organisation: strengthening the party

One of the main problem faced by LN during its second participation in a national government stem from the necessity of balancing its populistic and grass-roots image of a party of the people and for the people, with its institutional image of a party of government.

As mentioned earlier, the 2001 general elections reaffirmed the schizophrenia typical of the

Italian political system since the introduction of the mixed electoral law, namely the unbalanced relation between the actual electoral weight and the political weight of parties.

Having reached less than 4% of preferences, LN was able to bring just a few MPs in the

Parliament, but its special relationship with Mr Berlusconi secured to the party a primary role in the new cabinet. The main problem for Bossi and his inner circle was to prevent the transformation of LN in a member of the partitocracy, which would have alienated the most extremist supporters.

As a consequence, together with the internal oppositions and factions, the 2000s were characterised by increased tension between the grass-roots activists of the party and the party of the blue cars10 (Partito delle auto blu, Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2005). During the last

10 The blue cars are the official transportation used by MPs and state authorities and often used as a symbol of the political privilege enjoyed by a corrupt political elite.

91 phase in opposition and with the entrance in the new House of Freedoms coalition, LN’s members started to professionalise their political profile and to acquire experiences as national administrators (Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, 2001). The leadership of Bossi, just partially put into question after the failure of the first Berlusconi’s government and reaffirmed with the radicalisation of the party, was solid but the other representatives were blamed for drawing away the widespread support of the Northern voters. For the first time, the party was facing the difficulty of maintaining its image of protector of Northern interests against Rome, being simultaneously part of that system. The problem was tackled by adapting a strategy based on the idea of maintaining one foot in the government and one foot out of it (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2005, 2010). The ministers and high representatives of the party tried to adapt their languages and messages in order to maintain their image of a party of opposition (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2005). Over this period, the routinisation of the party, namely the degree of formalisation of its procedures, increased and generated strong relationships between the Lega of government and the extra-parliamentary movement. In this way, referring continuously to its base and supporters about the progress made through their action in Rome, MPs were able to maintain and feed their grass-roots support (Bolleyer et al., 2012). This contributed to a partial party’s institutionalisation, which combined this horizontal model of integration, between national representatives and local administrators and supporters, with a vertical integration that nourished the hierarchical nature of the party.

The party statute of 1998 increased, even more, the secretary inclination of the party.

“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

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Lega in between congresses: the ‘Federal Council’ and the ‘Federal Assembly’ (…) 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” (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001, p. 121). The party organised primaries giving to the ordinary members of the different nations (as the regional sections were defined) the chance to express their voice and their willingness in the choice of their representatives. However, this instrument of internal democracy appeared more to be only a façade, since the lists of candidates to be promoted and voted on these occasions were always selected after the approval of the Federal Secretary (Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, 2001).

Nevertheless, independently from the democratic nature of the primaries, they served with the goal of bounding even more party’s members, particularly at the local level (Gómez-

Reino Cachafeiro, 2001).

Internal and external leadership: reinforcing the hegemony

The second phase of development of the party and its various changes in terms of political goal did not affect one of the typical traits of LN, namely the strong and charismatic leadership of the founder-father Mr Bossi. In fact, his role remained stable and inviolable, despite the internal factionalism and different attempts to challenge his almost totalitarian power. Infightings had always been solved by expelling the “traitors” and removing those personalities guilty of achieving too much visibility without the leader’s approval

(Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2005). On the contrary, the party elite was formed by a “magic circle” of loyal supporters coming from the former Lombard section, often recruited among

Bossi’s relatives and closest friends (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). The shift of the political goal to secessionist positions contributed to further alienate the more moderate members of the party, as the former President of the Chamber of Deputies Irene Pivetti (A. Cento Bull

93

& Gilbert, 2001). The strongest opposition within the party emerged in 1998, when a group of members of the former Liga Veneta, guided by Mr Comencini (Giordano, 2003), tried to oppose the political line dictated by the party. Comencini, as well as other members of LN, was increasingly dissatisfied with the “go-it-alone” strategy and was worried about the political isolation in which the party was stuck since 1994. For the party to reobtain a higher political weight, he proposed the possibility to reconsider an alliance with the centre-right coalition of Mr Berlusconi at the regional level and to enter the majority in the regional government in Veneto to obtain the special status for the region. “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’. (…) 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.”(A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001, p. 88). The episode of Mr

Comencini well-exemplifies the intolerance of the party towards any form of political dissent against the willingness of the leader and demonstrates how the ideological radicalisation of the party was mirrored in a subsequent strengthening of the internal discipline. Opposers were seen as traitors of the national cause of Padania’s freedom. With new stress on the national identity of Padania, schisms become more frequent, and former members became targets of harsh attacks, as in the case of Mr Comino that in Piedmont decided to oppose the

LN by forming an electoral alliance with FI at 1999 regional elections (Giordano, 2003).

Bossi’s control over the party was strengthened officially with the 1998 statute, which reaffirmed his predominant role at each level of the party organisation. Most notably, being the Federal Secretary, he had the power to organise and direct the overall activity of the Lega and to dissolve any attempt made by party’s members of opposing his political or ideological

94 line. He also had the last word over any single candidate of the party, at each level of government. Moreover, the ideological and political commitment of each administrator was controlled through the “Office of political secretariat”, referring directly to the leader, in charge of ensuring the correct application of the national guidelines at different levels (A.

Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). This centralisation was visible also after the approval of the new statute in 2002. Here, the rules stated that a Federal Congress must be held every three years, to elect the Federal Secretary. Nevertheless, between 2002 and 2012 the party had no secretary elections (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). However, once Bossi abandoned his secessionist stance and entered the coalition of Mr Berlusconi, the party benefited of a new phase of strong internal cohesion, preventing the risk of further divisions that could have undermined its strength balkanising the vote (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). No divisions occurred during the period as a coalition partner in the 2000s (Albertazzi & McDonnell,

2010). According to Bolleyer et al. (2012), LN became the most central political organisation in the Italian landscape because of Bossi’s success both in suppressing internal factionalism and in creating an image of moral authority and inspiration among the party’s members.

To conclude this section, it is worthy to mention one of the problems of the present analysis. In fact, as already mentioned for the previous phase, also over this period the external leadership of Mr Bossi lacked any systematic attempt of being investigated. Even if the figure of the leader is always and quickly labelled as charismatic, very few studies

(McDonnell, 2016; Passarelli & Tuorto, 2012a) have tried to assess Bossi’s charisma in a

Weberian sense, namely not studying what the populist leader was or did, but how his followers saw and perceived him. As a consequence, rather than an accurate analysis of the external leadership of Mr Bossi, it is possible to draw here just some informed deductions that can furnish suggestions about the role that his leadership have played. In this sense, in spite of the lack of studies about the mass charisma exercised by Bossi, it is possible to

95 sustain he developed a strong coterie charisma (Maraffi, 1994), able to attract and to secure loyalty in the Lega’s cause. With the shift to secession, Mr Bossi was invested in the mission of gaining independence for the oppressed people of Padania, which increased the mystic power of his figure. Moreover, the complex route to becoming ordinary militants and the duties attached to this status demonstrate the degree of conviction required to supporters (A.

Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001), even if this is not informative about to what extent these convictions were linked to the figure of Bossi or the political claims of the party in general terms. However, since the radicalisation of the party coincided with the strengthening of the internal leadership of Bossi; it is possible to suppose that this translated in a growing coterie charisma, since supporters and party members were prone to react strongly against each form of dissent and traitors in the name of their leader (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001).

Grass-roots organisation: subculture and activists

To understand the electoral performances of the party over this phase, it is necessary to have a closer look at the grass-roots subculture that it targeted in this second period of development. Firstly, it can be argued that the radicalisation of LN both eroded and developed its widespread support. The substantial success of 1996 reconfirmed the prominent presence of LN in its traditional electoral strongholds, but at the same time signed the setback in metropolitan areas and among people in the business. During the peak of party’s radicalisation, its electoral base returned to include blue collars and artisans in industrial areas, making LN the largest working-class party of the North (Beirich & Woods,

2000). On the contrary, over this second phase, the medium-entrepreneurs’ and businessmen’s support was primarily catalysed by FI.

The shift from the idea of the North as a federal state within the Italian Republic with the notion of Padania as an independent state had different consequences on the appeal of

96 the party. It is safe to say that the move towards the concept of independence and the harsh attacks towards Italy as a nation and not only as a state (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001), contributed to change the nature of the party drastically and also impacted on its electoral base. In this second moment, in fact, the united people of the North to which the LN was referring to was substituted by an appeal to our people (Canovan, 1999) defined in ethno- regionalist terms (Spektorowski, 2003). Although the reference to ethnic elements had always been present (I. Diamanti, 1993, 1996; Spektorowski, 2003; Wilkoń, 2016), from

1996 onwards, these ethnic features had been stressed and manipulated to create a new identity for the people of Padania. “The leadership of the League returned, repeatedly, to the idea of self-determination, and to the justification of self-determination in terms of historical, cultural/linguistic, broadly what we understand as ‘ethnic’ identity. The League referred to

‘ethnic’ nationalism not only during one phase of the movement, but repeatedly during its career, and mainly at times of crisis. Clearly, the nationalism of the League should be analysed as a strategy” (Tambini, 2012, p. 14)

This constituted a return to the first phase of regional leagues when the stress of the various independentist parties was focused on the ethnocultural identities of their territories.

The ethnocultural model was proper of the LV’s rhetoric and was firstly borrowed also by the LL. However, after having reached the first group of loyal supporters, the ethno- nationalistic discourse became a constraint for the further development of the party (Wilkoń,

2016). As a consequence, Mr Bossi transformed the identity of his LL by focusing on

Lombardy- and subsequently on the North- as a community of shared interests, where ethnic elements were maintained with reference to socio-economic interests (I. Diamanti, 1993; C.

Ruzza & Schmidtke, 1996; Wilkoń, 2016). As recalled by Biorcio and Vitale (2011) “under the direction of Bossi, the ethno-regionalist protest was turned into a popular battle against roman party-power” (p.174) in which the opposition of the pure and laborious people of the

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North to the corrupt political elites served as a tool of collective identification. However, the entrance of Mr Berlusconi within the party system increased the political competition around economic issues and deprived LN of the monopoly over the protection of Northern productive interests. As a consequence, the party was forced to readapt and differentiate its identity by recurring to a new ethno-cultural differentiation. The return to ethno-regionalist positions and the new idea of independence brought the party the support of the working class, who felt increasingly threatened by the cultural and economic globalisation and who seek shelter in new ethnic identity while alienating the support of the middle-class more oriented towards protection of its economic interests.

The idea of a free Padania served to several political goals as for unifying the interests of Lega’s supporters who had the different social background, for politicising groups and people normally left out of the political space, and for revitalising LN’s strongest supporters

(A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). This nationalistic development turned out to be particularly successful in a context in which workers and small-scale employers started to perceive the adverse effects of globalisation, to which LN answered through a new closure in the regional community (Biorcio & Vitale, 2011). By overlapping the concept of the pure people with the one of the ethnos, the party developed an attractive profile for those increasingly worried about the societal and economic transformations, translating the economic threat to the cultural threat. “In a nutshell, the League has linked control over external forces to the need for increased regional autonomy or outright northern independence. Without this control,

League supporters fear being overwhelmed by the forces of globalisation” (Beirich &

Woods, 2000, p. 142). In order to mobilise voters, the party restructured a sense of collective identity around the idea of an independent North and thus redefined the boundaries and the opposition between “us” and “them” in exclusive terms (A. Cento Bull, 2003). In this second phase, the Lega’s fight was no more uniquely perceived as a means to protect economic

98 interests, but to defend a specific way of life, a system of beliefs and values shared by a community of people who faced the same threats. In this context, LN was successful in politicising the concept of ethnicity and exploiting the opportunities given by the increased fears towards the immigration phenomenon. The previous opposition towards Southern citizens and corrupt politicians was partly overcome, while new enemies were found in immigrants and the European Union (Biorcio & Vitale, 2011; C. Ruzza & Schmidtke, 1996).

However, after the first moment of extraordinary success, the secessionist strategy turned out to be a disastrous line for the party. The impossibility to proceed concretely in the implementation of an independent state of Padania and the isolation of the party within the political stage negatively impacted on the way in which voters perceived the party. The nationalist appeal was losing its mobilising potential. As a consequence, the leader tried to recover and strengthen LN’s presence on territories and to rebuild a direct connection with the Northern people. “(I)n 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 (…) 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. (…) 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.” (A.

Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001, p. 119). This strategy of territorial penetration gave positive results in terms of members’ affiliation. Over this period, the classical distinction between

99 ordinary militant and supporter was maintained, with a complex process of promotion that followed a prolonged activity (Wilkoń, 2016). Each supporter started with at least a six- month period of activism before having the chance to ask the municipal section to become an ordinary militant. Moreover, as a further control, the request for promotion was publicly exhibited for 20 days before being accepted or denied, in order to give other members the chance to formulate eventual objections to the candidature. However, the final decision was made by the provincial section, after having received a report about the personal commitment of the applicant by the municipal section (Wilkoń, 2016). Ordinary militants had to accomplish several duties, most notably mandatory active participation at the life of the party and the absolute ban of being part of other political organisation or civic list, in order to avoid the expulsion or retrocession at the supporter state (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert,

2001). The party’s statistics show an increase in membership form 121,777 units in 1998 to

131,423 in 2003 (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2010), maintaining a certain degree of stability even during the period of electoral set back (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). Moreover, the party’s militants were characterised by a high degree of internal cohesion, mainly developed as a response to the growth of out-group hostility in the phase of radicalisation (Biorcio,

1999).

Framing processes: glocalist frame

Over this phase, the analysis of framing processes is focused on the electoral campaign of

2001. Even in this case, few excerpts of the analysed newspapers are reported in order to sustain the present claims.

Diagnostic frame: enemies from the left

The second phase has also coincided with a transformation of party’s frames. In 2001,

LN abandoned its anti-system frame (and character) realigning its message along the

100 traditional left/right political continuum. This meant that political messages and party’s propaganda were no targeted to oppose the political class as a whole, but to anchor LN within the centre-right coalition and against the centre-left one. However, the target appears paradoxically less clear-cut since the party operated a frequent overlapping between the national and the European level, partly contributing in blurring the profile of the political enemies. Over this new stage of the party’s life cycle, its post-ideological nature was entirely eclipsed and substituted by a new dialectic opposition between the red and Stalinist forces of the Ulivo coalition (centre-left) and the democratic pole of the centre-right (“The left wants to cancel the people’s (…) they are the electoral Red Brigades”, ed. former communist terrorist group, La Padania, April 26th, 2001). A new ideological backbone was supporting the opposition between centralist and federalist forces, as well as the one between statist and anti-statist forces. The left-wing coalition, guided by Mr Rutelli, was blamed for the critical situation faced by the country, both from an economic and a social point of view.

In fact, critics were not limited to the economic consequences, due to the introduction of the

European single currency, but also included the state of progressive moral and ethical degradation the country was experiencing. However, the sins of the Italian centre-left should be understood within a European landscape dominated by left-wing parties, which were destroying the Christian roots of the continent with their liberal ideas about drugs, homosexuality, multiculturalism and so on (“Those who are forcing a globalist project of a multiracial society, which only serves the interests of a few well-defined economic forces and which aims at the total destruction of our cultural identity ”, La Padania, March 31st,

2001). The real enemy was in the communist roots of the European left, which manifested its antidemocratic attitudes in the European institutions, libertarian ideas and globalist projects (“We are for Europe, but not their Europe of technocrats without faces, of free drugs and homosexual families”, La Padania, March 9th, 2001). In fact, real risks came from the

101 leftist project of creating a European super-state, where national sovereignties would have been overcome to exploit the power from citizens in favour of technocratic and non-elected bureaucratic elites (“A golpe to give the democratic sovereignty of a free nation to the

European super-state (…) to external technocrats”, La Padania, March 8th, 2001). Thus, the critique towards the European left and its antidemocratic character was often juxtaposed to the one towards the European Union per se. However, from the analysis of party’s newspaper, it is safe to say that over this phase the opposition towards the European Union has remained particularly vague and contradictory. In fact, the party and its leader were not opposing the idea of Europe as a community, but rather the ideological connotation of its authorities and functionaries. On the contrary, the judgment about its practices and outcomes have been far less considered. Briefly, the European Union was criticised because it was dominated and guided by the European Left and by technocrats, which were trying to melt the various national identities into a single corpus that may be easily governed by a unique power as in the model of the Soviet Republics (“A European super-state, the Soviet Union of the West”, La Padania, March 1st, 2001). In turn, the Italian centre-left was considered responsible for the national state of social and economic insecurity. In particular, it was depicted as the least democratic political force, the enemy of the people and regional autonomies, just interested in maintaining its control over the country (“The left is assigning all the competencies to the central state. Stalin is coming”, La Padania, March 3rd, 2001).

This image was enhanced by the querelle opened a couple of months before the general elections on the Lombardy referendum about the devolution, meant to oppose the centralist character of the Italian state and the leftist federal reform. This was framed as a fake form of federalism, undermining the sovereign power of the people. At the same time, the left was responsible for the increased level of political violence preceding the elections and of the perpetuation of the backwardness of the south part of the county. In addition, citizens from

102 the south were no more considered as the primary enemies since migrants posed a further threat. Despite the concept of “us” still identified northern citizens, the concept of “them” in cultural terms was reinterpreted exasperating the opposition against newcomers from other countries. Migrants, who had invaded the country because of the criminal policies of the left- right government, represented a new source of concern, particularly in cultural terms. In fact, for what concerned the economic dimension, migrants could not steal jobs since they were too unqualified to fulfil the demand of the Italian labour market, and they were represented as a burden for the welfare state. On the other hand, the cultural threat was perceived as real, because these individuals came from cultures which were too distant for the Western ones and thus could not be successfully integrated. This was particularly true for migrants coming from Muslim countries, due to the growing Islamophobia (“There is no chance (…) that the

Islam wants to integrate with the Catholic religion. (…). In history the Islam has never accepted to be governed by others”, La Padania, March 2nd, 2001). The impossibility of migrants to enter the Italian labour market and their inability to homogenise themselves to the Italian culture would generate a necessary equation between migration and criminality.

The Italian society was risking succumbing to the pressures of these ethnic groups, losing its identity and authenticity in favour of a mixed community where Italians, and most notably people from Padania, would have lost their roots.

Prognostic frame: together alone

As typical of populist parties, the solutions proposed by LN are always radical and straightforward. As stated in the previous paragraphs, the same raison d’être of LN had always been the chance to gain a sort of autonomy or special status for Northern regions, in one way or another. In 2001, the devolution was considered the softest form of autonomy that Italian regions might grant, and it was presented a necessary step that must be undertaken

103 before the realisation of real federalism. In contrast to the regionalist reform introduced by the centre-left government, LN devolution consisted of providing regions with power over fields such as education, health system and migration policies. This was considered as the only solution to ensure people direct control of the political power since closer levels of government were more accountable for citizens and might be better controlled by those who owned the sovereign power, the people. The devolution also represented the chance to provide the South of the country with the necessary conditions to valorise its potential and reach the level of development of the North. It was the political means by which communities could have achieved complete freedom, within a framework of national solidarity and unity.

Moreover, with the introduction of a real devolution, it would be easier to solve social issues such as the flow of migrants, letting each region decides how many newcomers it could accept and successfully integrate. In addition, the migration issue should be solved merely by closing the national borders and by resending people in their country of origin, without any reference to the specific ways in which these actions should be articulated (“Those who are against the basic rules of the civil life should stay in jail forever and be expelled from our homeland”, La Padania, April 21st, 2001). Migrants should be allowed to enter the national borders just when they already held a job position in the country, and thus without letting any illegal migrant enter. However, these policies might be implemented by strong regional governments, which had the necessary knowledge of their territories and their potentialities to establish how many migrants could be integrated and where they could be employed (“Migration flows must be programmed by regions”, May 12th, 2001). The devolution of power towards regions and the subsequent regulation of migration were also considered as the only solution to answer people’s demand for security and order in Italian cities, enhancing police powers and presence on the territory. This was the only way to

104 rebuild social cohesion and avoid the disintegration of local communities set in motion by the process of economic globalisation and perpetuated by the globalist political elites.

However, all these successes could be achieved only by passing through the sovereign people. Politics and politicians must mirror people’s general will, which would be expressed through tools of direct democracy. This theme had been stressed during the months preceding 2001 general elections, when the attention of the official party’s newspaper had been entirely focused on regional calls for popular referenda on the issue of devolution (“It is a decisive vote, as in 1948”, La Padania, May 12th, 2001). These direct instruments, together with the vote (a vote for the centre-right) were the necessary means to return power to the ordinary people.

Motivational frame: top-down and bottom-up

Over this phase, the so-called motivational frame has undergone a massive transformation if compared with the previous stage. The first trait that should be underlined is the negative connotation of LN’s previsions of a future society. While in the first phase the party had stressed the willingness to build a society based on federalism and liberalism, on freedom and auto-determination, using vague tones but evoking a precise idea of an ideal organisation, this aspect was lacking over the second phase. The purpose of a future society was here presented mainly regarding defence and of what the northern community should not become. The official press of the party continuously referred to the necessity of protecting people’s traditional way of life, religion, habits, culture and identity. The primary objective should be the defence of the North from the drawbacks of the new globalised society, as the growing illegal migration that would undermine culture and traditions and from the anti-democratic globalist left. The ideal society was built around the distribution of powers from the central states towards the bottom and the top, delegating the majority of its

105 competences to regional governments and part of them to the European Union (“With the devolution the nation-state does not lose its sovereignty, but it is reformed, it just transfers part of its competences towards the bottom and part towards the top”, La Padania, March

3rd, 2001). The most desirable society was the union of homogenous regional or local communities within national borders, where the central state would have acted just as guardian of the inter-regional solidarity. In this way, prosperous local communities would have harmonised within the nation-state that, in turn, as part of a Europe of the people, where national communities could coexist and cooperate maintaining their sovereignty and cultural peculiarities (“We want a confederate European Union, where every country can maintain its sovereignty. We do not want a not-elected European government to take decisions over the people”, La Padania, May 11st, 2001). In such a context, a liberal economy would have displayed its benefits, avoiding the degenerations caused by a model of the global economy where local identities were destroyed and melted together. Thus, the final stage would have been the development of a federal national asset and a federalist European Union, to guarantee the respect of the people’s general willingness and of their cultural roots.

However, over this phase, the relationship between the economic aspect and the cultural one is often confused, with one of those alternative prevailing on the other and vice versa.

Briefly, in this phase the party seems to oppose the globalisation process and the resulting political order that it identifies in the European left, fighting it with a glocalist frame. People are mobilised against the idea of a new socio-economic reality, where identities represent the key to increase wealth creation and participate in its redistribution, around the vision of a global world where local and regional identities of homogenous communities will coexist and cooperate, guaranteeing freedom and people’s sovereignty.

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Tab 3. Summary of the main findings: move to the right phase (1998-2003) 2001 POS Party System Previous isolation, Bipolarism (-) Electoral System Coalition decisions, the House of Freedoms, PdL (-) Legal System Secessionist/racist accuses (+) Media System Free exposure/Official media (+) Mobilising structure Formal party structure Personal, incomplete institutionalisation (-) Internal and external leadership Schisms, strong (-/+) Grass-root organisation Shared identity (-) Frame Diagnostic frame Unfocused- Blurred enemies (-) Prognostic frame Simplistic, Devolution (+) Motivational frame Glocalist (-) The nationalist phase 2012-2018

The second transition (2008-2011)

The general elections of 2008 were characterised by a new centrality of the figure of

Mr Berlusconi, who was intended to come back and lead the country after the end of Prodi’s cabinet and the progressive weakening of the centre-left coalition. In this new climate and with opinion polls showing a growth of Berlusconi’s consensus, his minor partner on the right, Mr Fini (AN) was almost forced to enter not only the coalition but a newly created cartel party formed by Mr Berlusconi11 The People of Freedoms (Popolo delle Libertà, PdL).

On the contrary, the loyal Lega was rewarded with the opportunity to take part in the coalition alongside PdL, without merging itself in the new political entity (McDonnell,

2013). On the other side of the political continuum, also the left-wing forces decided to melt into a single political entity, unifying all the progressists under the Democratic Party (Partito

Democratico, PD) flag in 2007. The new creature contained former socialists, communists and Christian Democrats, who suddenly started to divide into several factions and to arise leadership issues (Colarizi & Gervasoni, 2012). These internal tensions were an onward

11 The PdL became officially a unified party in 2009.

107 characteristic of the centre-left coalition, which when in office between 2006-2008 was continuously threatened by its allies. Nevertheless, the birth of the PD and after that of the

PdL were intended to strengthen the bipolar nature of the Italian political system and to reach an alternate in office, while limiting the bargaining power of the smallest parties (Colarizi &

Gervasoni, 2012).

The 2008 general elections brought a new victory of the centre-right coalition of Mr

Berlusconi. This time the pools gave a clear result and generated a quite simplified political space at the right of the political spectrum with the alliance between PdL and Lega. However, compared to 2001 elections, the position of the Lega was significantly improved, since the party doubled its result obtaining around 8% of preferences. For the third time, Berlusconi and Bossi unified their forces and gained the guide of the country, managing to set up a clear definition of roles and tasks within the government (Tarchi, 2018). Some of the key ministers were assigned to Lega’s MPs and thanks to its bargaining power the party tried to guide the legislative work of the cabinet, prioritising themes such as federalism and anti-immigration policies. During the time in office, Lega Nord benefited by the fusion of the former FI and

AN in the PdL, since the new political formation contributed to blurring the political positions of the party. On the contrary, the strong stress of the Lega on themes such as immigration contributed to determine the identity of the party clearly and to subtract voters to the other forces in the centre-right coalition (Tarchi, 2018). This generated a further gain in term of electoral consensus during the European election of 2009. On the other hand, the net victory opened to one of the most critical periods in the Second Republic political history.

The close relationship with Mr Berlusconi started to appear potentially negative, since the scandals regarding the PM multiplied, and the government was focused on producing ad hoc legislation to favour him, while it was unable to pass decisive reforms to fix the country’s economic situation (Albertazzi, 2013).

108

The fourth Berlusconi’s government was immediately shaken by several scandals that involved the Cavaliere and other key personalities within the PdL. These events contributed to change the internal equilibria of the coalition, where Mr Fini was gaining prominent centrality. In fact, the former leader of the post-fascist AN, now dissolved within the PdL, continued his progressive shift towards the centre of the political stage. With his new role as

President of the Chamber he became an influential voice for the Italian right, who refused to assume the populist terms used by Mr Berlusconi and Mr Bossi and who avoided to assume radical positions for what concerned the issues of justice and migration, unlike the other leaders (Colarizi & Gervasoni, 2012). Thus, while Fini openly contrasted Berlusconi’s leadership, Mr Bossi turned to be the most loyal ally for the Cavaliere. However, the obsessive media coverage on Berlusconi’s scandals and the mounting economic crisis led the country on the brink of a social crisis and of bankruptcy (Colarizi & Gervasoni, 2012) forcing the PM to resign. Under the direction of the President of the Republic Mr Napolitano,

Mr Monti was appointed as PM with the aim of creating a new technocratic government able to lead the country out of the crisis. The end of the fourth Berlusconi’s government in

November 2011, also coincided with the end of the centre-right alliance. In fact, the leadership of the Lega decided to keep the party firmly in the opposition benches and out of the government of Mr Mario Monti, de facto declaring the end of the House of Freedoms’ alliance (Albertazzi, 2013). This critical juncture was probably not comparable with the earthquake that destroyed the First Republic at the beginning of the 1990s, but it certainly signed a new moment of high instability for the Italian political system. The answer of the traditional political parties was to give their support to a new unity government that aimed at surviving the economic crisis and implementing austerity measures. The major parties such as the PdL of Mr Berlusconi, the PD and other junior partners supported and joined the technocratic cabinet. Thus, in the middle of the legislature, LN was again isolated in the

109 opposition benches. This constituted a favourable opportunity for LN, now able to exploit its anti-system rhetoric again and to attack a government imposed by the European elites that were not an expression of the people’s general will. The cooperation between PD and PdL gave the party the chance to blame both of them as partners in crime against the Italians, part of a corrupt consociational system (Tarchi, 2018). However, just a few months later, the fortune of the party changed again, due to the scandal that involved the higher ranks of the

Lega in 2012. Bossi and his closers collaborators were accused of political corruption, misuse of public funds, and money laundry (A. Cento Bull, 2013).

After the financial scandal of 2012 and the election to the federal secretary of Mr

Maroni, LN underwent the first moment of transformation aiming at recovering after the dramatic losses of the local elections and the increased levels of distrust of its electoral base.

The party was losing its image of a party of protest, and it was perceived as wholly embedded in the corrupt system it had always opposed. Briefly, it needed to reacquire a balance between being a party of government and being a party of struggle (A. Cento Bull, 2013).

The new goal of the part shifted to the idea of the Euroregion of the North, which consisted in allowing regions to retain 75% of fiscal revenue while giving to the central state the remaining 25%. The “Lega 2.0” of Mr Maroni still presented itself as the only protector of the northern interests and continued to develop its political program around the idea of “First the North”(A. Cento Bull, 2013). In this way, he remained into the opposition, refusing any chance of support to the austerity policies pursued by Monti’s cabinet nevertheless his rhetoric appeared weak, and the levels of trust in the party were still decreasing. However, after one year of support to Monti’s majority, the PdL of Mr Berlusconi decided to withdraw its support to the government and to move into the opposition, starting to criticise the economic solutions implemented by the technocratic cabinet. At the end of 2012, just a few months before the natural end of the legislature, Mr Monti resigned as PM.

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Political opportunity structure

Party system: the crisis of the Second Republic

After the end of the Monti’s cabinet, the Italian economic situation was partly rehabilitated, but political parties were strongly affected by the electoral consequences of the economic solutions implemented. The 2-year period (2011-2012) of technocratic government contributed to reshaping the Italian political space. It was the beginning of the

Second Republic crisis, which signed the end of the alternation between centre-right and centre-left cabinets established for the first time with the 1994 general elections. During this new phase of instability, each party appealed to a sense of collective responsibility in justifying the necessity of working together with the long-term enemies of the opposite political faction. However, their cooperation and the necessity to vote austerity measures in accordance to the European Union directives further fostered the convergence of the existing political parties towards the centre of the political space and marked their distance from their electoral base. As a consequence, the traditional polarisation between left and right weakened and left room for the emergence of new actors at the extreme of the political space

(Eatwell, 2000; Mudde, 2007). Unlike the beginning of the 1990s, this time the Lega did not exploit this opportunity. Its participation within the last disastrous centre-right government, the rejection of its federalist reform, the financial scandal that involved the higher ranks of the party, the change of leadership, and the isolation in opposition eroded Lega’s image as a party of struggle (Colarizi & Gervasoni, 2012). Although the party had always tried to maintain its anti-system features once in government, the privileged relationship with Mr

Berlusconi and the ambivalent position of Bossi with respect to Berlusconi’s judicial scandals contributed to destroying the strategy of one foot in and one foot out (Albertazzi &

McDonnell, 2005, 2010). On the contrary, this new wave of system instability was

111 successfully exploited by a new party of protest: the Five Stars Movement (Movimento 5

Stelle, M5S).

The Five Stars Movement, founded by the comedian Mr Beppe Grillo in 2009, may be considered as a new wave of populism that erupted in the Italian political scene. While the role of protest and aggregation of people’s grievances in the 1990s was interpreted mainly by the LN, La Rete of Mr Orlando or from the , the new wave of public indignation was collected by the M5S (Bouillaud, 2016). This contribution does not aim at explaining the breakthrough and the success of the movement formed by Mr Grillo, however in order to better understand the current transformation of the Lega something on the M5S should be said. Unlike the Lega, developed by the union of pre-existing independent and regionally rooted leagues, the M5S has emerged as a non-structured political reality, initially born as a form of online mobilisation catalysed around the blog of Mr Grillo. During time, the online mobilisation has started to go hand in hand with a progressive offline presence in local realities (Bordignon & Ceccarini, 2013), even though without applying that model of mass party penetration for which LN opted in its early days. Similarly, the parties share the presence of a strong and charismatic leadership, with centralised processes of decision- making, and define themselves as post-ideological realities. As Umberto Bossi in the 1980s,

Mr Grillo is not a professional politician and he does not correspond to the image of a political leader (Bordignon & Ceccarini, 2013). The same goes for its representatives, generally characterised by their lack of any previous political experience. In the same way, initially, this new political actor has been belittled by politicians as an expression of protest, anger, and public resentment against an untrustworthy political class, while media dedicated attention increasingly to the grillini12 (Biorcio, 2015). Briefly, the analogies between the

12 As the followers of Mr Grillo are defined.

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M5S and the LN in its first phase of emergence are multiple and interesting. In particular, it is safe to say that the electoral success of the M5S13 has emerged from an analogue period of system instability and similar anti-system and anti-elite political discourses (Brunazzo,

2018). While LN has lost its anti-system credibility, the M5S has established new issue ownership over the theme of anti-elitism and direct democracy (Bordignon & Ceccarini,

2013). Moreover, the national character of the M5S, its post-ideological nature and its vagueness about sensitive themes as the immigration policies have helped the movement in succeeding more than LN in the 1990s. In 2013 general elections, the troubles experienced by LN in itself and the emergence of a new competitor that was far more credible since it had never been in office, prevented the Lega of Maroni to exploit the opportunities opened by the new crisis and from its new role in opposition. On the contrary, under the leadership of Mr Salvini, this new competitor has contributed to further accelerate the transformation within the Lega, particularly for what concerns its communication style and organisation.

At the same time, the PdL of Mr Berlusconi was weakened by several scandals that interested its leader and his collaborators and by internal schisms. In 2012, after he presented himself as the leader of the centre-right coalition, a group of MPs (mainly former AN members) advocating for party’s primaries left the party and founded Fratelli d’Italia

(, FdI), guided by Mrs Giorgia Meloni. The coalition was more fragmented than ever, but the parties at the right side of the political continuum decided to present themselves together at the 2013 general elections. “The electoral law – characterised by the allocation of a majority bonus to the coalition with the larger number of votes – effectively forced the re-establishment of a formal alliance, even though the participant parties were divided on many issues as well as over the strategy to be adopted were they to return to

13 The M5S pooled around 25% of votes in the Chamber of Deputies in 2013, becoming the first party at its first electoral competition.

113 government” (Tarchi, 2018, p. 153). Despite the critical situation of PdL and the fragmented nature of the coalition, the Lega did not succeed in obtaining the leadership within the centre- right coalition. On the contrary, LN was further damaged by the crisis going on in the centre- right spectrum of the political scene. In fact, the party was still paying for its privileged relationship with Mr Berlusconi and its shy opposition during the last government (2008-

2011) and more importantly it was profoundly damaged by its financial scandal (Colarizi &

Gervasoni, 2012).

The 2013 general elections proved to be one of the worse electoral performance for the party, which polled just 4.1% of votes14 and narrowed its electoral base to its usual core of loyal supporters (Vercesi, 2015). However, the political instability generated by the elections subsequently worked as a favourable opportunity. The centre-left coalition guided by Mr Bersani obtained the majority only in the Chamber of Deputies, and there was no chance to form alliances in a political space transformed into a triplarismo imperfetto

(imperfect three-poles system) due to the emergence of the third pole of Mr Grillo. To exit the government impasse, the President of the Republic Mr Napolitano guided the formation of a new cabinet led by Mr Letta, an MP of the Democratic Party (PD). It was the first real

Grand Coalition government in the Italian republican history, with support and ministers coming primarily by the two main forces PdL and PD. The Lega, as well as the M5S and

FdI, decided to remain into the opposition and to attack the new majority. The need of political stability in a progressively unstable system further contributed to a transformation of the political space, also in parties’ rhetoric. While those supporting Mr Letta’s cabinet stressed the need of a collective form of commitment towards the institutions to secure the country a stable government during a period of international crisis, the parties in opposition

14 The worst performance at the national level was in 2001, when the party gained 3.9% of votes.

114 blamed the cooperation between the major parties and the presidential nature of a government that was not directly voted by the people15. After few months, the government was further shaken by Mr Berlusconi’s personal troubles, since his conviction for fiscal fraud led MPs to vote for his expulsion from the Senate. As a consequence, the leader decided to move the PdL into the opposition and to retransform the party in Forza Italia, provoking an additional schism within the centre-right landscape (Tarchi, 2018). Opposing this decision, part of the MPs members of PdL guided by the home secretary Mr Alfano, decided to remain and sustain the government splitting the party into two components: the reborn Forza Italia and the Nuovo Centro Destra (the New Centre-Right, NCD). After this event, the Italian centre-right seemed to be into an unsolvable crisis. Its main leader Mr Berlusconi was out of the Parliament and no more eligible for public offices, part of his previous party was committed with a grand coalition government and perceived as the junior partner of a centre- left majority, and LN was undergoing a process of leadership change. In fact, the election of

Mr Maroni to the government of Lombardy forced the party to identify a new guide and to enter a new moment of profound reorganisation. The transition started with the election of

Mr Salvini as new Federal Secretary in 2013, a young Lombardian MEP who was preferred over the old leader Mr Bossi (Tarchi, 2018).

Nevertheless, according to Tarchi (2018), the fortune of the LN and the centre-right in this phase was due not by their internal events but also by an external force, the progressive rise of Mr as leader of the centre-left. Since this work does not aim at explaining the complex process of transformation and the internal fight for power within the

PD, it is sufficient to summarise here just a few key points. In 2014 Mr Renzi succeeded in obtaining the chance of forming a new government after the general congress of the party

15 In accordance with the Italian Constitution.

115 voted a document asking the resignation of Mr Enrico Letta as PM. The new cabinet was sustained by the same majority of Mr Letta but also obtained external support by Mr

Berlusconi, who found in Renzi a chance to partly rehabilitate his image and have a word in the decisions of the new government. Even if the relationship between the two leaders was brief, it was enough to catch additional accuses both on the PD and on FI. On the contrary, this worked as a favourable opportunity for the rightist parties in opposition such as FdI and

LN that started to rebuild their image as parties of struggle against the corrupt elites.

Moreover, the personalistic and strong leadership of Matteo Renzi brought the centre-left coalition to suffer important losses over the years. After his overwhelming victory at the

2014 European elections, Mr Renzi and the PD started to lose ground progressively. The rejection with a referendum of the constitutional reform passed by the PD in 2016 contributed to the further erosion of the party and the end of Mr Renzi honeymoon (Tarchi,

2018).The main political consequence was the creation of a new grand coalition executive, guided by Mr Gentiloni of the PD, which fostered the narration of anti-democratic and non- elected governments proposed by parties in opposition, and particularly by LN.

For the Lega, this phase also coincided with genetic modification of its own nature.

Under the new guide of Salvini, the party started to lose its Northern connotation and to gradually transform itself into a nationalist populist radical right party, on the model of the

National Front of Ms Marine Le Pen. This progressive shift was clearly visible in the 2014

European Elections when the party gained more than 6% of votes starting its progressive ascent. “LN, which, under the leadership of Salvini, made the souverainiste and populist themes their new Pole star, to such an extent that the historical objectives of the party – federalism and, in particular, the secession of the Northern regions – were overshadowed.

By emphasising their antiestablishment attitude and focusing on criticising the European

Union (…), Salvini sought to achieve two goals: on the one hand, liberating the LN from the

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Northern enclave in which it had been enclosed since its origins, to reach other regions; and, on the other, attuning its message to that of other populist (…) it allowed the LN (…) to recover an autonomous identity from the centre-right, without completely breaking relationships with its former allies”(Tarchi, 2018, p. 156). Thus, in order to rebuild a convincing identity for the party and to differentiate LN from other parties on the Italian political landscape, Salvini totally transformed the face of the party. Being out of government for years, LN could blame the majority parties without repercussion and proposed an alternative solution to give voice “to the people”.

However, this time, the populist appeal of the Lega was partly obscured by the young

M5S. In fact, the movement of Mr Grillo presented itself as a real and winning competitor over the ownership of the anti-elitist discourse (Brunazzo, 2018), being favoured by its total lack of previous political experiences and by developing sharp attacks against the so-called

“caste”. Following the traditional populist style, the M5S was strongly opposed both to the corrupt political elites and to the corrupt opinion-formers in media, advocating an attack towards the political powers and against their values that were damaging a society made of pure and honest people. In its early days in Parliament, the M5S was able to maintain absolute ownership over this issue, since the LN was still strictly associated to the financial scandals of 2012. As a consequence, Mr Salvini decided to intensify his anti-European discourse, already well-developed since the second phase of LN expansion, and to identify his enemies in supranational forces. The enemy is no longer located in Rome, but in Brussels; the new corrupt elites are working for the European Parliament and the European Banks

(Brunazzo & Gilbert, 2017). Bossi’s and Maroni’s ideas of reforming the EU are now substituted by Salvini’s project of dismantling the Union (Brunazzo, 2018). National politicians are guilty of their subjugation to EU dictates. The has proved to be a convincing element to start with, in order to recreate a collective identity for the Lega.

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In fact, even if the opposition to the European Union has been a theme shared by the same

M5S, the latter has developed fluctuating and often contradictory positions on the EU and the Euro. Being the M5S a populist party without a specific ideological connotation rather than populist, and being populism a thin-centred ideology (Mudde, 2004), the movement has often been characterised by the difficulty to express unique and definitive positions upon divisive political themes. On the contrary, being the LN a populist party that support its thin ideology with a radical right identity based on nativism and authoritarianism (Mudde, 2007),

Mr Salvini has succeeded in extending his ownership over the theme of Euroscepticism and presenting EU as “Evil”. At the same time, the alliances he has formed within the European

Parliament have contributed to building the new image of the Lega as a nationalist party, totally embedded in the radical right European scenario (Albertazzi, 2017). The same goes for the second leading theme of LN, the anti-immigrant attitudes. Also, in this case, LN has established its ownership over the issue, while the M5S has proved to display more fluctuating opinions, using immigration as an instrumental theme over the last five years

(Bulli & Soare, 2018). The anti-European and anti-immigration themes have helped Mr

Salvini in exacerbating the “us vs them” opposition while transforming the “us” identity. In fact, the homogenous people nowadays is no more formed just by northern citizens but by the Italians, as a whole body. With the creation of “Noi con Salvini” as a parallel political subject in the South, Salvini has started his operation of extension over the entire country

(Vercesi, 2015).

These transformations, together with the additional modifications occurred in the

Italian political scene, contributed to the historical success Mr Salvini has obtained at the last general elections. Signs in this sense have been already visible in previous years, with a first expansion of the Lega in the previously impenetrable “red regions” (Passarelli &

Tuorto, 2012b) and with the first presence in the south. The Lega, which has removed the

118 term North in occasion of the last elections, has presented itself together with FI of Mr

Berlusconi and FdI of Mrs Meloni. This time the results have been striking, in fact, Mr

Salvini has succeeded in transforming the Lega in the first centre-right Italian party, winning over its internal competitor FI. (Brunazzo, 2018) Moreover, the party is today the third political force in Parliament, with just few votes of distance from the second force (PD). It has demonstrated to be the real winner of this electoral competition, together with the M5S, even though the new national identity of the party seems to be hardly accepted in the south of the country. In fact, the electoral pools have recently shown the sharp opposition existing within the country, which has been divided along the themes of economic and cultural

(in)security. The opposition between a Northern Italy dominated by the Lega, and a South in the M5S’ hands can raise new questions about the new role of the Northern/Southern question. The long-lasting opposition between the Lega and the south of the country has prevented its exploit in those areas, even if its percentages are incredibly grown if compared to the ones obtained during Bossi’s leadership. On the contrary, the impossibility to elect Mr

Berlusconi as party leader for FI, and the residual role of the divided FdI of Mrs Meloni

(former AN) have furnished Salvini with the opportunity to establish its primacy over the

Italian centre-right. The Lega has no competitors at the right of the political continuum, since

FdI is hardly identifiable with its MSI past, and in addition the Lega has partly radicalised its position by opening at neo-fascist extra-parliamentary forces such as Casa Pound

(Albertazzi, 2017). In 2018, the growth of the Lega has been complementary feed by the unprecedented result obtained by the M5S in the South of the country and by the total defeat of the centre-left coalition, which has left a lot of its traditional strongholds in the hand of

Salvini’s coalition. In a general landscape of progressive instability, the Lega has capitalised its thirty years of political history and has paved the way for its future by investing in a new identity. Its nationalist turn, the deep reorganisation operated by the new leader and his

119 capacity to mobilise supporters are transforming the Lega in the new winning model for the

European populist radical right (G. Diamanti, 2018).

Electoral system: coalition equilibria

The electoral laws passed at the end of the 1990s were intended to modify the Italian political scene through a majoritarian system and to pursue a bipolar model of parliamentary politics based on the Anglo-Saxon system. However, the complexity and the instability of the party system prevented the complete realisation of a polarised transition. Italy remained characterised by a high number of political parties, mainly structured around influential leaders (Vercesi, 2014) where small political actors were provided with bargaining and blackmailing power on governments’ formation and survival (Albertazzi et al., 2011). In

2005, the second centre-right government of Mr Berlusconi passed a new electoral law for general elections, which marked a partial throwback to a proportional system. The main proponent of the Law was Mr Calderoli, a LN’s MP and Minister for Institutional Reforms since 2004, who defined the law as a porcata (crap) few months after its approval. Based on this label, the political scientist Sartori (2006) coined the name “Porcellum”, which was greatly used by media and political commenters in subsequent years. This electoral law was in force until 2013, when after the general elections it was judged partly unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court. The Porcellum consisted in a primarily proportional law, with a high majority premium and different criteria of seat repartition between the two Chambers.

While in the Chamber of Deputies the system was “majority-assuring”, guaranteeing 54% of seats to the party that polled more votes, in the Senate this bonus was assigned on a regional basis, thus making a hard task to reach an absolute majority (Paparo, 2013). The main problems of this reform lay in the impossibility for citizens to express their preferences about specific candidates, thus reinforcing the role of parties’ elites in the selection of MPs,

120 and in the large size of constituencies. The new law was intended to strengthen the centre- right coalition and to avoid the electoral success of the centre-left, but it actually resulted in an increased instability of the political system (Pasquino, 2006).

However, for the sake of the present analysis, it is safe to say that the introduction of the Porcellum, used in 2006, 2008, and 2013 general elections, had no significant consequences on LN’s electoral results but reconfirmed an ongoing trend. After the positive effects produced by the proportional system in 1992, the introduction of a mainly majoritarian system in 1994 generated ambivalent results for the party. In 1994, 1996, and

2001 general elections, the party experienced fluctuating results as well as it was after the introduction of the new proportionally-oriented system. Under the same electoral law, in fact, the party suffered fluctuating results, scoring 4.6% in 2006, 8.3% in 2008, and 4.3% in

2013. Therefore, observing the general scores over an almost 30-year period, it is safe to say that the electoral systems per se were not the main responsible of the Lega’s performances, but rather that the capacity of the party to exploit the opportunities generated by those systems were crucial to extend its support. In fact, around a core of “frozen ideological voters” that constituted the permanent electoral base of the party (approximately around 4%), in specific periods the party succeeded in broadening its electoral support by carefully evaluating alliances and strategies to enter those alliances (Vercesi, 2015, p. 404). Moreover, since its first appearance on the national scene, the party successfully manage to balance its electoral and political weight, a capacity that was downsized after the 2013 general elections when LN presented itself within the heterogeneous centre-right coalition of Mr Berlusconi.

The party elected 19 deputies and 18 senators, winning a regional representation only in

Veneto, Lombardy, Piedmont and Trentino Alto-Adige (De Lucia, 2013). The political instability generated by the results of those elections led to the emergence of a governo di larghe intese, which unified the PD and the PdL (plus junior partners) under the guidance of

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Mr Letta. In the aftermath of the elections, the LN’s decision to stay in opposition without supporting the Grand Coalition government prevented the party from obtaining cabinet roles and from joining an organised opposition. However, this worked as a favourable opportunity to transform its image again from a party of government to a party of protest (Brunazzo,

2018).

These changed equilibria, already discussed in the party system section, have contributed to a shift of the locus of power within the centre-right coalition in recent years.

After the result of the 2016 constitutional referendum and the declaration of unconstitutionality of the electoral reform drawn by Mr Renzi’s government (Italicum), a new electoral law was passed. The new system, called Rosatellum from the name of its main proponent Mr Rosato, distributes 64% of seats through a proportional rule, while the remaining 36% are assigned thanks to the first-past-the-post rule in single constituencies.

This law has been judged by many political commenters as designed to produce ungovernability and political instability since parties or coalitions need to obtain 40% of votes in order to secure the absolute majority in both the Chambers. As a consequence, and as shown by the results of the 4th of March, such an electoral system is unlikely to produce a stable and clear majority in a political system today characterised by an imperfect tripolar scenario (Chiaramonte & Emanuele, 2013; Pregliasco, Borghese, & Magni, 2018).

However, as in the past, the electoral law privileges parties in large coalitions since a cartel of parties has more chances to reach the 40% threshold. This has led the centre-right to reunify the long-lasting alliance in a deeply transformed political scenario. With the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, the Lega has firstly presented itself removing the word North from its name and symbols, Mr Berlusconi has re-founded Forza Italia without the chance of being elected, and Mrs Meloni has acquired a more prominent role in the centre-right scenario as the leader of FdI. The pre-electoral agreement among the coalition partners has

122 established that the party reaching the highest share of popular votes is in charge of expressing the Prime Minister name. This stratagem has mainly served to avoid a loss of eventual consensus that a declared leadership of Mr Berlusconi or Mr Salvini would have caused in their respective electorates (G. Diamanti, 2018). Moreover, the alliance and the lack of a pre-established leadership might have favoured the Lega in electoral terms over FI, since voters have coupled the chance to vote for a party that has renewed its anti-system stances but that has also had real opportunities to enter the national government and to guide it for the first time (Pritoni & Tuorto, 2018 ).

Legal system: the scandal

One of the further elements that can help in explaining the LN’s 2013 electoral defeat is undoubtedly the judicial scandal that overwhelmed the party in 2012. In fact, it is possible to hypothesise that the subsequent electoral performances were influenced by the investigations that involved the party, even though it is necessary to understand this factor in a framework of already poor results in previous years. “The matters came to a head in early April when a financial scandal, involving illegitimate payments from party funds to

Bossi’s children and other members of the Magic Circle as well as corrupt dealings with the

Calabrian Mafia, was widely reported in the press. It would be difficult to underestimate the severity of the blow dealt to the League by this scandal. The very party that in 1992 had been the forefront in the protest against systematic corrupt deals between business and politics, often involving criminal organizations, now found itself under investigation for corruption, misuse of public funds, fraud against the state, and money laundering, in connivance with

Calabrian criminals” (A. Cento Bull, 2013, p. 98). Thus, while in the previous phase the party was subject to interventions of the legal system against its secessionist and racist stances (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001; Tambini, 2012), in this phase the legal intervention

123 was intended to sanction leaders and key figures for their illicit behaviour, not the party per se. This was particularly harmful to LN at least for two reasons. Firstly, the contested crimes involved the misuse of public funds, fraud against the state, political corruption, and connivance with the Calabrian organised crime, thus everything the Lega had opposed since its birth. Secondly, the scandal directly involved the leader and the Magic Circle of his closest collaborators, sources of support and party’s identification. Despite the attempts to protect Bossi’s image, the scandal severely affected the party. The investigations were showing that LN had lost any anti-system traits and that it was firmly part of that system of corruption and connivance that it had opposed in the 1990s. The disastrous results of the

2012 local elections demonstrated that the LN scandal partly contributed to the success of the Five Stars Movement, nowadays the main advocate of anti-elitist and anti-system feelings, which gained voters from the outflows of LN (A. Cento Bull, 2013). The image of a party of protest was damaged, and one of the goals of the new leadership of Mr Salvini was to reacquire that role and people’s trust.

Media system: from the leader to you

As previously examined, during its history LN has broadly benefited of a free media exposure (Diani, 1996), capitalising on media coverage and trying to obtain that attention by means of a spectacular politics (Tambini, 2012) made of folkloristic, aggressive and extreme discourses and political actions. In turn, the party received high and constant media coverage, which contributed to strengthen and to institutionalise its narratives particularly in its phase of radicalisation and making of the Padania identity (Albertazzi, 2013; A. Cento

Bull & Gilbert, 2001; Tambini, 2001). At the same time, these elements contributed to the breakthrough of the party in the early 1990s and its survival over more than two decades.

However, the own party propaganda served to secure a direct relationship with its followers

124 through official media as La Padania newspaper, Radio Padania and TelePadania. In the aftermath of the 2012 financial scandals and during the difficult economic situation the party went through, the new secretary Mr Salvini decided to close some of these communication channels in order to cut the costs and to lighten the party’s structure (McDonnell & Vampa,

2016). Nevertheless, these cuts did not constitute a loss of visibility or direct contact between the party and its followers. On the contrary, Mr Salvini and his usage of old and new social media have strengthened more than ever the link between the leader and his followers. The new communication style of the party might be considered as a necessary answer to the emergence of the M5S and to the new forms of political activism and involvement they have promoted through the Internet (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). As a consequence, the leader has exasperated his presence in TV shows and has operated a total juxtaposition between his channels of communication and those of the party (Vampa, 2017). As primarily done by populist leaders, he has exploited the opportunities offered by media trying to catch their attention (both of old media and on the Internet) with spectacular and straightforward statements and actions (Albertazzi, 2017) and capitalising on fears, controversial events, and emotions (G. Diamanti, 2018).

New social media are particularly crucial for sharing Salvini’s rhetoric and political message, to the point that he is often expressing opinions against every chance to strengthen providers’ and governments’ controls over the Internet to avoid the diffusion of the so-called fake news. A study on his Facebook “likeability” (Bobba, 2018) had shown that in 2015 the positive reactions to the leader’s posts were highest when messages contained populist key elements such as the anti-elitist discourse, while references to the general “others” were lower. An analysis of his Twitter activity in 2017 (Bracciale & Martella, 2017) has demonstrated that although Salvini was not the most popular political leader, he was the most productive one in terms of tweets and displayed an actor-centered approach, which

125 unified stylistic elements of vulgarism, oversimplification, aggressive language, taboo- breaking and populist discourses (Bracciale & Martella, 2017). The electoral campaign of

2018 has seen Salvini simultaneously committed to visiting territories, TV studios, and social media homepages. The leader has the ability to shift among different media effectively and to build a personal relationship with his followers. For example, during the last campaign, he has used a new format called Vinci Salvini (Win Salvini) that has given to the more active followers the chance to meet the leader. The Captain (as his supporters have labelled Salvini) has created an unmediated form of communication with the electoral base, obtaining in turn trust and growing preferences. Moreover, his usage of social media is strongly concerned about micro-targeting strategies to reach specific categories and to personalise the political struggle against other political actors, depicted as enemies of the

Italian people and the “good sense” (Cavallaro, Diamanti, & Pregliasco, 2018). He has often been able to use social media to set the political agenda on favourable themes and to reinforce his frames. In this sense, the messages he conveys through media are not different from the ones normally used by populist leaders, but interestingly he was able to transform the target of these attacks with respect to the previous leadership and to gain credibility thanks to this new path.

Mobilizing structure

Formal party organisation: everything is changing

Personalistic parties characterised by a high degree of leader’s centrality and by an almost total identification between the founder-father and the party such as LN are generally not able to survive to their leaders’ leave or to adapt to a new guide. However, the Lega’s case seems to be an exception to this general prediction (Vercesi, 2014). The explanation of this peculiarity should be found in the particular opportunities that opened in 2012, which

126 guaranteed a smooth process of transition unlike in other personalistic parties such as for FI of Mr Berlusconi. In particular, the possibility for Mr Maroni to obtain the leadership of the party derived from the fact that Mr Bossi and all his closer collaborators were involved in a damaging financial scandal, giving Mr Maroni the chance to ask for a leading role within the party without any serious opposition or competition. Moreover, the transition was not a sudden revolution, but instead, it was the result of a process of progressive disenchantment towards the old leader, which gave Mr Maroni the time to build an internal opposition and a network of loyal supporters who lately sustained his new leadership. The coincidence of these events allowed the party to survive beyond its founder, losing its personalistic character and acquiring a more rational and institutional organisation (Vercesi, 2015). In order to strengthen his leadership, the new 2102 statute introduced some modifications to the previous versions. For example, while Mr Bossi was awarded the title of Federal President, the statute limited the powers previously attached to this figure that was transformed in a mainly symbolic role. Moreover, to prevent Bossi from founding a new party, the document stated that the symbols of the party were part of the LN’s patrimony (A. Cento Bull, 2013).

Completing successfully the process of changing leadership, the party has made crucial steps in its path towards a permanent institutionalisation, demonstrating the ability of this formation to survive beyond the charismatic leadership of Bossi and actually reaching historical results under the new guide of Mr Salvini. However, the new leadership and its ideological shifts towards a nationalist party modelled on the Front National of Ms Le Pen

(Vampa, 2017) have generated dissatisfaction among the loyal supporters of Mr Bossi. The former leader of the Lega has often expressed his opposition against the new line of the party on national media, defining Mr Salvini as a traitor of the Northern cause. In fact, Mr Salvini has drastically transformed the party, both in ideological and organisational terms

(Albertazzi, 2017). From an organisational point of view, a first comparison between the

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2012 and the 2017 party’s statutes can inform about the dramatic changes the new leadership has introduced. A primary source of discontinuity concerns the same name of the party. In fact, in 2017 it was transformed from Lega Nord per l’Indipendenza della Padania (Northern

League for a Free Padania) to (League for Salvini Premier), removing the autonomist stance from the name, but tying the party even narrower to the leader’s personality. This transformation served at least two goals. Firstly, it allowed the party to start its transition into a national political subject, able to attract voters and support even outside its traditional constituencies and to begin a process of progressive deletion of the past opposition to Southern citizens through the figure of the young leader. After his election, Mr Salvini affirmed he was aware that the only chance for Italy to be saved was to fight for Italy as a nation, otherwise all the regions would have been condemned to the collapse (Albertazzi, 2017). Secondly, this bureaucratic stratagem allowed the party to avoid the financial collapse after the scandal of 2012. The new political subject, in fact, was able to obtain supporters’ donations, while LN counts were blocked after Bossi and his collaborators were funded guilty for misuse of party’s public funds.

In addition, the 2017 statute recognises the presence of 22 regional or sub-regional federations spread on the whole national territory, establishing the presence on the party outside its Northern strongholds (13). Moreover, in the document, there is no reference to the figure of the Federal President, the non-elective office awarded to Umberto Bossi in

2012. The office of President was mainly a symbolic charge, attributed to the founding- father as a guarantee of the movement’s unity and its previous history. However, new organisms are introduced, as the coordinator of the youth movement or the Committee for new supporters and statutes. The Federal Congress is in charge of deciding the political line of the party and is normally held every three years, to elect the Federal Secretary and part of the Federal Council’s representatives. The Federal Council is composed by the party’s

128 representative at the national, regional and local level, oversees the general political line of the party, it can be consulted for taking decisions over the most urgent questions, and supervises the discipline of party’s members. The Federal Secretary has the function of actualising and controlling the work of the Federal Congress, formally maintaining the same functions already guaranteed by the previous statutes. Interestingly, the document contains also some wording transformations. For example, in order to underline the departure from every idea of secession, independence or special status, the word “nations” before used to indicate the regional or sub-regional divisions has been replaced by the term “territorial branches”. Most notably, the Article 1 of the new statute changes drastically the raison d’être of the party, which is no more to set up the independent Republic of Padania but to transform the Italian state in federalist terms.

In strictly organisational terms, Mr Salvini has abandoned the traditional mass party model and its expensive structure, also due to the decline in party’s membership (Vampa,

2017). The costs associated to the financial scandal and the subsequent trials have forced the party to undergo massive organisational reassessments, undermining the labour-intensive structure on which the party was organised, for instance by closing its official newspaper.

LN under Bossi was characterised by a mixture of different organisational elements since it was based on a well-developed grass-root structure as left-wing parties did but also on a charismatic and personalistic leadership as in the case of FI. Thanks to these organisational features, according to militants and representatives, the Lega had always been a party able to survive Bossi’s leadership and to maintain high levels of membership and active involvement (McDonnell, 2016). It had always been a personalised party, not a personal one

(McDonnell, 2013). However, given the reduction of public funding that has constituted most part of the Lega’s revenues, it has been necessary to cut expenditures and to provide the party with a lighter and simpler organisation. “Salvini has been able to adapt effectively

129 to the changes imposed by the new political conditions, which have made heavy party structures and extensive organizations economically unsustainable for most Italian parties.”

(McDonnell & Vampa, 2016, p. 122). These cuts in the overall organisation have coupled with poor investment in order to strengthen the territorial presence of Noi con Salvini in the

South of the country. Here, in fact, the new political subject has not developed real local branches but has been formed as the unification of electoral committees linked to Mr Salvini

(McDonnell & Vampa, 2016).

Internal and external leadership: the beginning of a new era

During the phase 2012-2018, the party has been characterised by interesting leadership’s evolutions, which have generated two changes in the higher ranks of the party over less than 6 years. Analytically, it is worthy to reach a more detailed understanding of the process of transformation these changes have generated since they are likely to partly explain the fluctuating electoral results of the party over this last period. In fact, while the

2013 elections were marked by one of the party’s worse results, in 2018 the “new” Lega reached its highest peak obtaining nearly 18% of votes at the national level. Although the

2013 electoral defeat is explicable through the resonance and the effects of the scandals that interested the party in 2012, part of the story should be understood as a direct consequence of the increasing frictions that had characterised the party since 2010 and that culminated in the 2012 leadership turnover. At the same time, the current success of the Lega cannot be explained without carefully considering the role played by the new Federal Secretary in drastically restructuring the party’s image.

Umberto Bossi was the founder-father of LL and thereafter of LN and had always been recognised as the highest moral and political authority within the party. As proposed earlier, even if the party statute of 2002 clearly stated that the Federal Secretary was an elective

130 office and that was renewable every three years, no Federal Congress was held between 2002 and 2012 (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). On the contrary, Bossi remained in power even after he suffered a stroke in 2004, which forced the Senatur to leave the public scene for almost one year but did not undermine his authority and leadership. On the contrary, initially, the illness of the leader served to pacify the internal oppositions and to recompact the party’s elites with their supporters after the poor electoral performances of the recent years, opening for the first time to a less personalised and more collegial process of decision-making

(Vercesi, 2014). Nevertheless, as time passed by, this renewed unity started to erode. This was partly attributable to the strengthening of Bossi’s “magic circle” that was pursued by his second wife Manuela Marrone, to convey a clear message to those interested in fighting for the leadership’s succession (A. Cento Bull, 2013). The magic circle was composed by

Bossi’s closest friends and relatives that acquired a predominant role in the process of decision-making within the party and prevented the chance of definitively replacing Bossi during his absence (Vercesi, 2015). During and after the leader’s recovery, this circle became increasingly influent within the life of the party and brought to the emergence of subsequently key figure as Mr Renzo Bossi. The leader’s son entered the political scene in local elections and became quickly well-known on the national media, from which he has labelled the Trout, attracting several accuses of nepotism from LN’s activists and militants.

All these developments and new alignments within the party contributed to the revival of past factionalisms and in particular, marked a period of further success for one of this internal current guided by Mr Roberto Maroni. Maroni had always been considered one of the closest friends of Umberto Bossi and this particular relationship had avoided him to receive the same treatment reserved to other LN’s members once they opposed the leader. However, the relationship between the two started to deteriorate severely after Bossi’s illness and as a response to the magic circle’s closure. This created for the first time a sharp dualism within

131 the party and the coexistence of two different souls while before every form of open opposition against the leader of Bossi was eradicated with expulsions and public condemnations (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001)

However, the opposition between the magic circle and the faction of Mr Maroni intensified between 2010-2011, when the latter seemed to prevail within the party and to have also obtained the support of activist. To avoid a possible passage of the power in the hands of Maroni, Bossi and his closest collaborators tried to isolate Maroni’s supporters and to prevent him from showing up in party’s public events (A. Cento Bull, 2013). This time the expulsion was not a viable solution since Mr Maroni already succeeded in organising an internal opposition by building a network of supporters within the ranks of the party

(Vercesi, 2014). Moreover, the usual strategy that aimed at marginalising opponents and pushing them away from the party proved to be unsuccessful since it coupled with the first leaks about the financial scandal that would have hit the party thereafter. Given the strong opposition by party’s activists and the growing fear that this would have turned in a real revolt against Bossi, Maroni was allowed to take part at the anti-Monti demonstration of

January 2012, where the audience repeatedly asked for his speech while violently interrupting Bossi. At the same time, also the higher ranks of the party started to increasingly move towards Mr Maroni’s positions (A. Cento Bull, 2013). These signs indicated the end of an era, began with the birth of the Lega Lombarda, in which the leadership of Bossi was just weakly contested and during which he was considered a source of moral authority both from party’s members and from its supporters. For the first time, his leadership was actually threatened and marginalised. This phase coincided with the progressive decline both of

Bossi’s internal and external leadership. While internally the leader was no more able to silence internal oppositions and to maintain strict discipline, from an external point of view

132 he was losing the special relationship with his militants, for whom he had always represented the embodiment of the party and its cause (McDonnell, 2016).

The hegemony of Bossi officially ended in 2012, following the financial scandal that involved the party and its higher representatives. As a result of the judicial investigations, the leader was forced to leave the guide of the party again to Mr Maroni, who became the new Federal Secretary in 2012, while Bossi was declared Federal President of the party for life. “The twofold nature of the scandal was crucial for the leadership succession. Indeed,

Maroni, who had set the stage, could seek the office without directly accusing Bossi. He thus argued that Bossi had been a victim of his close entourage, which allowed him to both safeguard the founder-father’s image and indicate his inappropriateness as party leader. In

April, Bossi was forced to step down, and a triumvirate held the leadership until July when

Maroni – the only candidate for the office – became the new leader. However, Bossi continued to seek to affect party strategies, and Maroni spent the following months strengthening his position within the party” (Vercesi, 2015, p. 403). However, although Mr

Maroni was able to maintain the unity of the party during a period of electoral unsuccess and distrust towards the Lega, he was never considered a charismatic guide as his predecessor, both in internal and external terms. He “was inclined to abandon the antipolitical style that had characterised the LN since its inception. However, pivoting itself towards a more

‘institutional’ and less populist party rapidly showed its limitations and drawbacks.” (Tarchi,

2018, p. 153). The new party leadership was not able to modify the negative electoral trend or to recover the party’s image completely after the 2012 scandal. The interaction between a weak leadership in charismatic terms and the recent events led to the electoral defeat of

2013 when LN reached about 4% of votes nationwide (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). Maroni was part of the first generation of party’s founders, and his guide was not opening a new phase of deep restructuring of the party.

133

However, things changed in 2013, when after having gained the Presidency of

Lombardy Mr Maroni resigned from his position as secretary and held primaries to choose the new leader. This occasion represented a real turning point in the destiny of the party. In fact, while the founder Umberto Bossi proposed himself again to lead the party, the voting militants ensured the victory to the young member of the EU Parliament Matteo Salvini, who polled 82% of votes (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). Salvini is part of the second generation of Lega’s ranks, and before becoming Federal Secretary, he has never served in the national

Parliament, although he has been a member of the Milan local council and was then elected at the European Parliament. It is safe to say that, even if there are great differences between

Bossi and Salvini as leaders, both of them have been perceived as charismatic personalities capable of guiding the party through complex times. Particularly, Mr Salvini seems to have partially changed the style of leadership of the Lega. Thus, the internal leadership of Salvini may be considered less authoritarian at least as a facade. However, the last general elections have been characterised by internal critique to Mr Salvini, given the fact that the party’s nominees seem to reward candidates loyal to him while keeping aside those too close to Mr

Maroni (G. Diamanti, 2018). At the same time, the external leadership of Mr Salvini is at least as developed and efficient as the one of Mr Umberto Bossi was. In particular, to successfully transform the Lega in a national party, Mr Salvini founded a new and parallel political subject in 2012, Noi con Salvini (Us with Salvini), thus strongly personalising the political struggle (Albertazzi, 2017). The movement was intended to expand the Lega’s ideas and political fights to the Centre-South of Italy, broadening the interests of the party. The personalisation of the party’s message and political position was even accentuated in 2017 when the new Lega per Salvini Premier was created. The new movement was intended to fight the 2018 general elections by collecting subjects such as Lega Nord and Noi con

Salvini, trying to tie the voters’ preferences no more to the Northern question, but to Salvini’s

134 fight for the whole Italy. While in the North of Italy Salvini is still partly constraint by the positions of influential personalities within the party such as Mr Maroni and Mr Zaia, in the

South he has the chance to set up a movement totally reliant on his charismatic leadership

(Vampa, 2017). In addition, thanks to his use of new social media he has been able to realise that unmediated connection between the people and the leader that populist parties have always looked for. He is transforming the Lega from a personalised party to a personal one.

Grass-roots organisation: subculture and activists

As already anticipated, the new leadership of Matteo Salvini has also marked the beginning of a new era in ideological terms. Until his election as Federal Secretary, LN was mainly regarded as a regionalist populist party16 or as a form of regional nationalism, merely interested in defending the interest of Northern citizens and obtaining autonomy and special status for the Padania. Briefly, the Northern question had always been the raison d’être of the party and its constitutive core in ideological terms (A. Cento Bull & Gilbert, 2001). Over time and with the necessity to address its fluctuating electoral success, the party had proposed different political strategies to articulate the need to solve the Northern question, radicalising its profile at the end of the 1990s when it shifted to secessionist and ethno- regionalist positions (Spektorowski, 2003). On the contrary, the new leader has immediately started to work to obtain a radical transformation of the party trying to succeed in two strategic goals: becoming a real national/nationalist party and reaching a leading position within the centre-right coalition by overcoming Mr Berlusconi and its FI (Vampa, 2017).

Moreover, he has contributed to strengthening and radicalising the ideological position of

16 The classification of Lega Nord has gained lot of academic attention over last decades. As anticipated in previous sections, this work follows the idea of Zaslove (2011) according to which LN has become a populist radical right party during its history, particularly since its radicalisation in the mid-1990s.

135 the party, by stressing it right-wing orientations particularly through his positions about immigration and his overture to the extra-parliamentary right (Albertazzi, 2016).

The process of nationalisation has contributed to expanding the support for the party even outside its traditional strongholds. One of the first examples can be retrieved in the increasing support the Lega has received in Emilia- in the 2010s (McDonnell &

Vampa, 2016). As explained in previous sections, Emilia Romagna was part of the so-called

“red-bell” together with other regions in central Italy, characterised by their long-lasting communist subculture (Passarelli & Tuorto, 2012b). In fact, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna can be considered as two prototypical examples of the main ideological subcultures present in the country: the former dominated by the Catholic culture and the latter by the Italian

Communist Party. However, while the Lega has always well performed in white areas, it has failed in penetrating former communist regions. On the contrary, recent studies are showing a change of trends in these territories. In fact, the support for the party is increasing in small towns and mountain areas, similarly to the first phase of expansion of the leagues in Veneto.

Here, the party is nationalising its message trying to capitalise on new cleavages. The classical opposition between northern and southern citizens has been completely overcome, leaving room to a new conflict between fragile natives and undeserving foreigners. In the former red regions, this rhetoric can be functional since it enables the party to exploit traditional themes of the left-wing politics such as the issue of employment in new terms, imposing an image of continuity with the traditional past (Passarelli & Tuorto, 2012b). In this way, the party has revitalised the employment issue in new conflictual terms, now based on ethnic opposition. In red regions, as well as in the country as a whole, the new Lega of

Mr Salvini is rebuilding and strengthening the opposition between the pure people and the undeserving others at the bottom by stressing the immigration issue. During time, the anti- immigration attitudes are increasingly focused on a cultural ground, addressing the new

136 cultural cleavage. Migrants represent a possible threat since they occupy natives’ labour positions or enjoy the social benefits that the welfare state should devote to Italian citizens, and in addition, they pose a threat to the cultural unity and purity of the country (Bulli &

Soare, 2018). Cultural differences are often understood as irreconcilable (Eatwell, 2000) since migrants ‘habits and religion (e.g. Islamic citizens) are perceived as contrary to democratic ideals and Western identities. The inflow of migrants is described as an invasion that will condemn the Italian culture to disappear and to be substituted by newcomers’ one.

The migrant crisis that has followed the breakthrough of the Syrian conflict and the sensationalistic accounts made by media and politicians of the migrants’ arrivals have served as a favourable condition to strengthen the idea that the “others” are damaging the prospect of the homogenous people.

At the same time, Mr Salvini is working to rebuild the image of the party and to create a new identity. With this purpose, he is also transforming the traditional conflict between the pure people and the corrupt elites. This has been realised by working simultaneously in two directions. Firstly, Salvini has worked in order to enlarge the traditional centre-periphery cleavage that opposed the virtuous North to the undeserving others. Since he has reached the leadership, he has worked in order to extend the meaning of the people, including all the

Italians in the fight against a corrupt political class (Vercesi, 2015). Secondly, the leader has reinforced the vertical cleavage that opposes the pure people to the elites, bringing this opposition to a higher level. In fact, even though the Lega has developed critic positions against the European Union since it the second phase of development, Mr Salvini has contributed to stress the Eurosceptic character of the party. With the nationalist turn of the

Lega, it has experienced the necessity to find a new enemy for the opposition between “us vs them”. Citizens from the South are now included within the definition of the pure people and the national political class results to be a secondary enemy both because the Lega has

137 been committed with that political class for almost thirty years and in particular because the

M5S has established its ownership over the theme of the national anti-caste protest. As a consequence, the Lega has been forced to differentiate its identity by repositioning itself and assuming the new role of protector of national interests, partly abandoned by the former fascist forces such as AN, today disappeared or perceived as a too moderate right. The new

“them” is now in the European Parliament or in the European Banks, where the new corrupt and incompetent elites are formed (Brunazzo & Gilbert, 2017). “Under Salvini, the party has shifted from ethno-regionalist populism to a more marked anti-EU, radical right populist profile. Responding to broader social and political changes during the economic crisis,

Salvini has been able to move the territorial focus of the party from the sub-national to the supra-national level” (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016, p. 121). Thus, the further stress on anti- immigration policies and against the European Union, together with a new national identity are transforming the image of the party in a nationalist political force on the model of other parties such as the National Front. This turn has found favourable ground in the post-crisis scenario, in line with what is happening in other European states, where citizens’ attitudes towards political institutions and particularly towards EU and its austerity measures are increasingly negative (Longo, 2016). The Lega has followed the example of other European populist parties by creating a new nationalist identity in a historical moment when all over the Europe concerns about the progress of unification are multiplying themselves. Hearing from their electoral base, populist parties are increasingly stressing the drawbacks of the process of economic and political globalisation, underling how they can threaten national economies and cultures. The Euro and the European Union are considered as dangerous weapons used by elites against the Italian people; they are represented as crimes against the humankind. As a consequence, the traditional slogan “First the North” has been substituted by the new mantra “The Italians first”.

138

One of the aspects that is remained formally unchanged under the new leadership concern the activists of the party and its more loyal supporters. In the 2012 statute, the party reaffirmed the centrality of its local branches, which are the basic units of the whole party.

The distinction between supporter and the ordinary member is maintained as the demanding requirements that the militants should accomplish too. The full membership can be gained only through continuous direct activism, and not just paying a membership fee (Albertazzi,

2016). This organisational model in two steps has proved to be fundamental for the party since militants are just formed by highly committed supporters willing to work actively for the cause. The status of militant requires active participation, which is not dependent on the free will of the members but ascribed in their same role since they must actively take part in

LN’ activities (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). At the same time, the prospects of a political career within the party are strictly related to the degree of personal commitment towards the organisation and to the time spent in serving the party. Moreover, the levels of party members have remained quite stable during time, representing the stable core of party’s supporters that has allowed the party to reach always at least 4% of votes in national competitions (Vercesi, 2015). However, the level of membership has experienced a strong decline in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 financial scandal, when the number of

170.000 members in 2011 to less than 60.000 in 2012 (McDonnell & Vampa, 2016). Given the electoral rise experienced by the party at each electoral competition, which has culminated with the historical result of the 2018 general elections, it is possible to assume that the number of members is growing as well, even though the party has refused to publish such information since 2012 (Albertazzi, 2016).

However, today Mr Salvini has abandoned the model of a mass party that the Lega developed in its initial phase (Vampa, 2017). Under the guidance of Umberto Bossi, the mass character of the party -which resembled the territorial organisation of the communist

139 party- was perceived as a central element to become active members. The strong territorial penetration of the party ensured activists with a sense of being part of a broader community with a shared identity and has furnished the party the chance to balance its image of a party of government with the image of a party of struggle. Maintaining a strict relationship between party’s representatives and their constituencies and making them responsible for the party’s action in front of their electoral base has helped in cementing the support at the grass-root level. Under Mr Bossi’s leadership LN has succeeded in maintaining high levels of membership “by asking representatives to keep constantly in touch with the grassroots, by organizing activities and events targeted at members, and by fostering the creation of closed communities among them, the LN was able to secure a strong commitment to the party’s objectives by its activists and made sure the party continued to play an important role in their lives. In other words, the party successfully swam against the tide of disengagement of parties from voters that has characterized so many party organizations in recent years”

(Albertazzi, 2016, p. 12). Moreover, given the reduction of public funds for political parties and the recent cuts operated on the party’s structure, the role of supporters and militants is likely to become even more crucial. On the contrary, today this territorial commitment seems to be at stake. In particular, even though the party is now working in order to develop a new national identity, the difficult penetration in the southern regions can be partly attributable to the lack of efficient and extensive territorial organisations. Since its birth, the parallel organisation “Noi con Salvini” has been formed by individual electoral committees, uniquely aggregated by the image and the strength of the leader (McDonnell & Vampa,

2016). While in the North Mr Salvini can count on a well-developed and long rooted territorial presence that can continue expanding itself thanks to the help of loyal supporters, the same goal in the south still needs to be achieved.

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Framing processes: national preference frame

Diagnostic frame: On its way back

During this last phase, it is possible to distinguish different frame strategies while considering the 2013 and the 2018 electoral campaigns. As far as the diagnostic frame is concerned, several transformations have occurred and have contributed to change the terms of the traditional “us vs them” opposition, redefining the meaning of these empty signifiers.

While proposing diagnoses of current problems, the party identifies dangerous enemies and redraws the boundaries of “we, the people”.

The transformations occurred in the political system after the fall of the last

Berlusconi’s government, and the outbreak of a new crisis of the party system actively contributed to the emergence of a new frame in 2013. Over this period, through the official party’s newspaper, LN has developed a discursive opposition against the whole political system, in which parties are equally blamed since they do not differ among each other, but they are part of the same consociational scheme in which technocrats dominate (“Italy has been left to a group of experts that has experienced a foreseeable transformation from cold technocrats to skilled and passionate politicians with symbols and alliances, La Padania,

January 2nd, 2013”). Thus, the party has tried to recreate the same anti-system frame that contributed to its success in the 1990s, but with unsatisfying results. Mainstream parties both on the left and on the right (and also the newly created party that place themselves on the centre) have been harshly criticised since they have been perceived as part of the same system that subjugates the poor people to satisfy the interests of the European political elites

(“Mario Monti says he is satisfied with the agreement with the EU, it is a lie typical of politicians. For the North is a new catch”, La Padania, February 9th, 2013). While in 2001 the diagnostic frame was sharply focused on an ideological opposition to the left-wing

141 forces, in this period LN have tried to reaffirm its post-ideological character by underlining its opposition to the indistinct group of centralist and corrupt parties (“Monti wants to do the

PM of the stitch-up with Bersani”, ed. referring to left-wing and centralist leaders, La

Padania, February 21st, 2013). National politicians have been depicted as mere executors of supranational directives intended to favour political elites and banks over citizens’ interests

(“The European Back is becoming the real centre of government of the European Union, even if no one has never elected it”, La Padania, February 11th, 2013). However, the critique to the party system has resulted in being less convincing rather than in the past, since it has not represented a total rejection of the political class, given the necessity to join the alliance of Mr Berlusconi for electoral purposes. In this phase, the party has opposed a political class of which it had been part and has decided to join forces with one of those parties guilty of having sustained the not-elected government of Mr Monti. As a consequence, this anti- political frame has resulted in being less powerful. On the other hand, this rejection of the political class has contributed to reinforcing the “we, the people” subject that still coincided with the imagined community of Northern citizens of Padania. In fact, despite the economic crisis and politicians have contributed to plunder the whole country, Padania has been the most damaged area. The North has been forced to bear the costs of the austerity measures decided by the eurocrats and implemented by the national political elites, paying the bill also for the unproductive South (“The Lega has fought to free the North from the unitarian subservience (…) but we are still paying for the wastage of those who have this way of life”,

La Padania, January 9th, 2013). Over this phase, the economic discourse has acquired a new centrality, and the distinctive character of the Northern regions has been again found in their level of socioeconomic development. Thus, the “others” such as eurocrats, politicians, migrants, southern citizens have been perceived as a threat to the survival of the North and its wealth. In this adverse economic situation, the cultural opposition between native citizens

142 and the growing number of migrants has contributed to exacerbate the anger and to reinforce the rhetoric of the political class (both national and international) as speculating on newcomers at the expenses of natives to fulfil its own interests (“New citizens or “body for votes”, migrants are the only chance of survival of the left”, ed. about the possibility of changing the law to obtain the citizenship, La Padania, February 16th, 2013).

On the contrary, the 2018 electoral campaign has been characterised by a deep transformation of the concept “we, the people” that now contains all the Italians as part of the same homogenous community. This gives rise to the definition of a frame of national discrimination, or better of national preference, given the positive connotation that Salvini is trying to attach to his “common sense revolution”. This shift in the definition of “we, the people” has gone hand in hand with a partial transformation of the enemies’ identity.

Political elites are identified with those in power at the national and European levels and are blamed for their differential treatment of native citizens (“Reverse racism”, ed. referring to discriminations towards natives, Il Populista, L’invasione, January 17th, 2018). In fact, the major threat is now posed by newcomers and asylum seekers, who are often depicted as illegal migrants who are not escaping from war. On the contrary, migrants are often described as an arrogant and criminal homogenous group of people who are interested in colonising the country and exploit the natives (“Protests of migrants: they want money and mobile credit”, Il Populista, L’invasione, February 23th, 2018). The intensification of the opposition between natives and migrants contributes to the overcoming of the Northern question. Southern citizens are no more understood as a burden for the North, but as part of the subjugated pure people who is now facing the invasion of culturally diverse groups, who cannot be integrated (“It is an organised and financed invasion that aims at destroying our culture”, Il Populista, L’Invasione, January 15th, 2018). Moreover, the growing

Islamophobia, already evident in 2013, has contributed to the definition of a common enemy

143 necessary to rebuild the definition of the “we”. Migrants coming from Islamic countries are perceived as too distant in cultural terms in order to be successfully included in the national community. They are perceived as a real risk for the national identity and broadly as enemies of the Western culture and way of life. In addition, over this phase, the party’s propaganda has contributed to reinforce the relationship between the economic and the cultural aspects

(“Migrant will benefit (ed. of the subsidy) while in our country young Italians are working hard for similar amount of money, and this will make even easier the family reunification”,

Il Populista, L’Invasione, January 5th, 2018”). Further risks for the national community are coming from the European political elites. The European Union, its current functioning and its institutions are blamed for their economic policies and for their interests in feeding the migration phenomenon, which is exacerbating social tensions (“Europe leads us to this: mors tua vita mea”, Il Populista, L’incazzato, February 23rd, 2018). In this perspective, the national political elites are described as an empty locus of power, forced to execute supranational directives that are intended to strengthen the power of banks and multinationals (“PD is the party that betrays the national interests and protects the supranational interest”, Il Populista,

L’Incazzato, January 30th, 2018). As a consequence, migrants will be functional to reduce costs and to create social instability. Now the opposition is between a technocratic class of

European bureaucrats and the Italian nation-state who is losing its sovereign power, and between the deserving Italians and the foreign invaders.

Prognostic frame: rid the cause, rid the symptom

As outlined in the previous sections, the solutions proposed by the party have always been characterised by a high degree of vagueness and simplicity. In 2013 the central proposal of the party was the old idea of creating a macro-region of the North, by acquiring an unofficial special status for Lombardy in fiscal terms. The idea was to keep 75% of the

144 revenues generated in the region and to devolve just the remaining 25% to the central state.

In this way, Lombardy would have acquired a sort of fiscal federalism and would have reinvested the exceeding money in its territory. The basic idea to solve the Northern question was that the most productive areas would have been entitled to benefit from their work leaving less to the central state redistribution (“If we had no problems, fine, but our factories and families are in troubles. I will fight to retain 75% of what we are producing”, La Padania,

January 9th, 2013). This was considered the key proposal to solve all the subsequent political and social issues. Higher revenues for the Northern regions were the central factor to provide better social provisions for their citizens, to solve the problems of public order and security, to control the migration flows and to have a stronger voice in Europe since the microregion would have been one of the more affluent areas of the Union (“The North will become the core of a new Europe”, La Padania, January 28th, 2013). Also, opposing what the party was affirming about the consociational system and the technocratic nature of a government that was passing austerity measures imposed by the European Union, the attempt to reutilise the anti-system frame was not successful since the party was in need to join Mr Berlusconi coalition. Thus, although the PdL was a supporter of Monti’s cabinet, the alliance with the

PdL was strategic to win in Lombardy. The decision to enter the coalition was presented to supporters as the only way to govern the region and, subsequently, to influence the government of Rome.

Even more straightforward are the proposals presented during the electoral campaign of 2018. However, the simplicity and the directedness of the ideas proposed by the leader have contributed to the creation of a readily identifiable frame and of a recognisable and distinctive identity for the party. The most popular proposals have been elaborated both on the economic and on the cultural ground. For what concerns the economic side, the party has developed an electoral program able to attract both employers interested in lower taxes and

145 labour costs (flat tax) and employees interested in reforming the pension scheme (abolition of the Fornero law). Thus, the pro-market orientations have been combined with projects intended to address the need of the part of the electorate more in need, reaffirming a national preference in assigning welfare benefits (“We think it is necessary to help first those in needs in our territories” Il Populista, L’Incazzato, January 27th, 2018). At the same time, these economic solutions have been accompanied by radical projects for what concerns the cultural domain. The most stringent issue of migration has been faced proposing a policy of closed borders, repatriation, refoulment and surveillance (“Once in office, I will increase repatriations and stop the landings”, Il Populista, L’invasione, February 4th, 2018).

Moreover, as far as the integration of migrants is concerned, the ideal-typical solution offered by the party is no more the assimilation model (common in 2001), where newcomers are prone to abandon their identity and to adapt to the majority culture and traditions, but more focused on a real criminalisation of foreign people. This particularly impacts the

Islamic community, which is considered the most radical and the least likely to be integrated.

The Islamic religion is regarded as incompatible with the democratic values, and thus its radicalisation should be impeded by closing religious places and opposing cultural confrontation (“We will close Islamic centres, particularly if they are opposed to legality and transparency”, Il Populista, L’invasione, January 15th, 2018).

Motivational frame: Italy first!

The 2013 general elections represented the last chance to try to realise the regionalist project that characterised LN since its birth. However, the most crucial battle in that year was not represented by the general election but by the simultaneous regional elections in Lombardy.

It was the first chance for the party to reach the government of its major strongholds and, in particular, it was framed as the first step to set in motion the long-awaited process of

146 transformation of the Italian state in federalist terms. The possibility to govern Lombardy was considered a decisive moment to create the macro-region of the North, which was the primary political goal of the first phase of the party’s life-cycle in the early 1990s. Thus, people were mobilised around the idea that a victory in Lombardy would constitute a sort of referendum on the autonomy of the region and a first step away from Rome (“It is a historical occasion to create the ‘’ able to curtail the unbelievable demands of a centralist state based on welfarism”, La Padania, January 23rd, 2013). The political conflict fought by the Lega was necessary to free the North from the economic burden imposed by the central and European elites in times of austerity and to give citizens from the North the chance to take full advantage of the fruits of their hard work. The prospects regard an inward evolution of the regional communities and a strengthening of their internal solidarity at the expenses of the outgroup. In a time of economic crisis, the scarce resources should be allocated within the homogenous community of Northern citizens, because these are the most productive and thus deserving ones (“Macro-regions are the antidote to the economic crisis and the perverse dynamics of globalisation, today the dichotomy (…) is between territorial communities and global market”, La Padania, January 17th, 2013). In this perspective, those who are external to the regional community and far from its identity and culture should have fewer privileges and chances to benefit from it social surplus (“Let’s get together in the last effort and together let’s start over towards the reconquest. Of our homeland”, La Padania, January 12th, 2013).

The motivational frame of the party is well-resumed by the slogan of its leader Mr Maroni

“the North first”.

On the contrary, Salvini has transformed the slogan of the party and the subsequent ideal future society in “the Italians first”. The new mantra of the Lega has remodelled the boundaries of the “people” and the concept of nationhood and homeland. However, changes in cultural realm have been coupled by changes in the economic field. Over this phase, the

147 pro-market and neoliberal orientations that have characterised the party since its birth have been attenuated by advocating a revision of the redistribution policies (“A worker is not interested in gay marriages. A worker wants to have a sufficient income, health care access, the chance to form a family and send children to school, social rights that before were defended by the left”, Il Populista, L’incazzato, January 30th, 2018). To widen the electoral base and to gain ground in the Southern part of the country, where the presence of small- scale industry and private business is rarer, the Lega has partly shifted towards more egalitarian economic positions than in the past. However, this call for a welfare state enhancement is restricted in its scopes and targets. In fact, the new motto of the party is “The

Italians first” (“Stop the invasion! Our people first!”, Il Populista, L’invasione, January 15th), claiming that political parties and massive migration waves have exploited Italian citizens of their social rights (“Someone needs migrants to lower Italians’ rights and incomes”, Il

Populista, L’Incazzato, February 17th, 2018). The austerity measures implemented to favour

European elites and more developed countries such as Germany have severely impacted

Italians well-being. As a consequence, the party wants to represent the voiceless and the excluded that are now formed by the native population and to give them back social protection and state provisions. Thus, the economic and cultural recipes are combined in a frame of national preference: the logic of the free market is transformed. Citizens should prefer domestic goods, which should be protected by the international competition in a quasi- protectionist perspective, and the redistributive policies follow positions of welfare chauvinism or at least of welfare favouritism. Here, the scarce resources have to be redistributed among the deserving native citizens, based on their need, to their previous contributions and their effective activation (often reference to workers). As a consequence, the protection of the national community passes through a broad reorganisation of the national and international governance and institutions. However, it is not specified how

148 institutions should be reformed (“The agreements of Schengen, Lisbon, Maastricht, and

Basilea need to be reformed”, Il Populita, L’invasione, January 16th, 2018). The primary goal is to give voice to the general willingness of the people and to reaffirm the sovereignty of the Italian nation-state over the external constraints (“I will try to change this Europe, if they say no I will defend my country’s interests until the end, I have no limits”, Il Populita, Il teatrino, January 12th, 2018). The ultimate purpose of the political action seems to be the idea of reaching a homogeneous society, in which there is adherence to the cultural and civic values of the majority of the people and where there is no space for social conflict and cultural conflict (“I cannot wait to be in office to bring back security, social justice and peace in Italy”, Il Populista, L’Incazzato, February 2nd, 2018).

Summing up, the analysis of the framing strategies of the party during the latest phase of its life-cycle furnishes additional elements to evaluate its fluctuating electoral success. As mentioned earlier, the 2013 general elections were characterised by a high degree of political instability, which generated a transformation of the political space pretty similar to the one caused by the Clean Hands scandal in the early 1990s. However, the modifications of the political space and the convergence of traditional parties towards the centre have not facilitated LN as it had done in the past. This time the attempt to revitalise the anti-system frame was not successful since the party was forced to join the coalition of Mr Berlusconi to win the regional elections in Lombardy. The renewed alliance has undoubtedly contributed to the regional success, but it has undermined the LN’s frame of rejection of the consociational democracy and its representatives. Moreover, the regionalist claims presented over this phase (keeping 75% of local revenues) was a far less attracting and ambitious political proposal for Northern supporters because the project was sharply focused on

Lombardy and came after a series of unsuccessful reforms advocated by the party. Moreover, the regionalist rhetoric and the opposition towards the underserving South was losing ground

149 due to the radicalisation of other cultural oppositions. This has been understood by the new federal secretary Mr Matteo Salvini, who has opened a process of party’s renewal and expansion. To widen the Lega’s electoral base, the leader has worked to transform the concept of the homogenous people, while redefining the traditional enemies. Nowadays the people is composed of the whole Italian population, while the opponents have been moved from Rome to Brussels and from the South across the borders. Both the oppositions were already present in the previous phases but were strengthen and used as a source of new identification over the last electoral campaign. The historical electoral result the party has reached is attributable to the issue ownership it has established over emerging themes. In fact, as demonstrated in 2013, the ownership over the traditional anti-system frame was acquired by the M5S. However, the Lega of Mr Salvini has succeeded in transforming itself in a nationalist party with a monopoly over the issues of migration and Euroscepticism, about which the M5S has been far less coherent, particularly over its last phase of the electoral campaign, when it had tried to moderate its radical proposal and anti-political image. The new frame of national preference has definitively ascribed the Lega within the populist radical right parties’ family, probably as one of the most successful.

150

Tab 4. Summary of the main findings: nationalist phase (2012-2018)

2013 2018 POS Party System Convergence/ new competitor, Convergence/three poles system (+) M5S (-) Electoral System Coalition decisions, with PdL(-) (n.e.) Legal System Financial scandal (-) (n.e.) Media System Official media/New media (n.e.) New social media, unmediated relation (+) Mobilising structure Formal party Institutionalised (+) Institutionalised (+) structure Internal and external Weak (-) Strong (+) leadership Grass-root Frozen voters (+) Available subculture (+) organisation Frame Diagnostic frame Contradictory, rejection and Focused, vertical antagonism (+) alliance (-) Prognostic frame Minimally articulated, fiscal Simplistic, direct, Italy first (+) reform (+) Motivational frame Incoherent (-) National preference (+)

Discussion and conclusion

Summary of the main findings

The present work has developed a dynamic interpretation of the PRR electoral success

by integrating the study of exogenous and endogenous factors that can account for its

fluctuating electoral results through the study of the political opportunities structure,

mobilizing structure and framing processes. In particular, this study has focused the attention

on the prototypical case of the Italian Lega Nord over its entire life-cycle.

In the 1990s, in a context of increasing political instability within the political space

and electoral volatility, LN resulted to be the most convincing among the new political

realities of that time. At the beginning of its political history, the party benefited from the

international realignments deriving by the end of the Cold War era and from the gradual

expansion of a new global economy, which affected the Italian political and societal

151 landscape. Traditional parties such as PCI, PSI and DC were already disappeared or were on their way to be dissolved, and Mr Berlusconi was not yet appeared on the scene, while other extremist parties as the post-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) were not legitimised, generating a situation of increasing political instability. In this scenario, the Lega was perceived as an antagonist but legitimised competitor, since it strongly rejected fascist positions and was already well-rooted in local communities thanks to the experience of the regional leagues. The political affirmation of LN at the national level was further facilitated by the presence of a purely proportional electoral system, which furnished small parties chances to obtain a parliamentary representation thanks to its high level of representativeness of political interests, and by the presence of a strong leader, both in external and internal terms. Bossi’s style of leadership was a novelty for the Italian political landscape; he was able to mobilise and motivate supporters presenting himself as the direct voice of the

Northern people against the corruption of the centralist Italian state. At the same time, he guided the process of the progressive merge of the pre-existing regional leagues, extending his hegemony over the newly formed political actor and reducing factionalism. Indeed, the

Lega built on the first reservoir of consensus coming from the phase of the regional leagues, but most notably it capitalised on the available Catholic political subculture. In turn, the first moment of success contributed to forging the electoral strongholds of the party which would have remained solid electoral bases in subsequent years, particularly in Veneto and

Lombardy. Building on pre-existing networks and organisations typical of the white

(Catholic) subculture of the northern industrial districts, the party attracted the first nucleus of loyal supporters by furnishing material and symbolic incentives to people. Thus, LN took root in areas already apt to political mobilisation, which found in the new political subject a convincing substitute to the DC. In fact, the progressive southernisation of the Catholic party, its clientelist methods and the process of progressive secularisation coupled with the

152 disappearance of the Soviet threat. Having the anti-communist rhetoric lost its power, there were fewer reasons for the productive class of the North to vote for the DC. The Christian

Democrats were blamed for their centralist policies, which generated a mounting sense of relative deprivation of these areas. The shift of political consensus of Northern citizens towards LN was even more relevant since it took place in a historical moment of progressive political demobilisation and increased social and economic instability. The Lega contributed to revitalising the interests for political mobilisation by introducing in the political arena a previous unconsidered political issue: the Northern question. This contributed to revitalising or enhancing the mobilisation of formerly less mobilised parts of society in the new small industry and autonomous workers. On the contrary, the party’s emergence was not facilitated by its rather poor formal organisation, mainly reliant on the work of activists, totally dominated by representatives coming from the Lombardy section and close to Mr Bossi.

This set of favourable opportunities and organisational resources were successfully mobilised for the party’s electoral breakthrough thanks to the development of its anti-system frame. This framing strategy conveyed messages of a total rejection of the old political class;

LN was able to succeed in mobilising electoral support thanks to a process of frame alignment, thus building on and reshaping feelings of political distrust and resentment.

Messages conveyed by the party resonated with the general frames present in society, which at the beginning of the 1990s was mainly built around a mounting disenchantment towards politics and a growing distrust in political parties. There was a correspondence between the party’s frame and voters’ orientations, values and aims. LN successfully articulated the electorate’s demand for a renewal in the political scene, to overcome a crystallised system based on clientelism and corruption. These anti-system messages highly attracted media attention due to the radical and folkloristic strategies implemented by the party and by its leader Mr Bossi. All these elements contributed to the electoral success of LN in 1992

153 general elections. During this phase, LN was able to fill the empty place created into the political space even if other political and anti-system competitors were already present.

While other hypothetically competitive forces as La Rete of Mr Orlando or the Greens were direct descendants of the old and corrupt political parties such as DC and were less prompt to reject the political system as a whole (Diani, 1996), LN was more coherent and convincing in its rejection of the partitocracy.

However, under similar conditions, the party was not able to further expand in 1994 general elections, mainly due to the emergence of the new competitor FI of Mr Berlusconi.

With the rise of the media populism of Mr Berlusconi, which had a similar anti-system rhetoric and a more moderate and liberal image, the chances of further expansion in the

North were restricted. The empty space created from the crisis of mass parties at the end of the 1980s, and definitively expanded after the Clean Hands scandal and the collapse of the system, was filled by the emerging party of a media tycoon able to attract preferences over the whole country. On the contrary, the territorial reference of LN prevented the party from increasing its electoral base, which was slightly reduced since part of Northern voters flew towards FI. Being part of FI’s coalition, as it was somehow forced by the new mixed electoral system that benefited electoral alliances, caused LN’s loss of a distinctive identity regarding anti-system frame and led part of voters to prefer a political party that seemed to have higher chances of success. Before the 1994 general elections, the anti-system diagnostic frame coupled with a motivational frame built around the concept of freedom and popular will. Over this phase, the enemy politics developed by the party found its main opponent in the corrupt political class, clearly identifying the object of collective grievances, while mobilising supporters around a minimally articulated ideal society mainly based on a federalist and neoliberal perspective. The appeal to the people was built around populist and libertarian projects, but there was contention over the ownership of these themes by the

154 newly formed FI. The image of the successful businessman of Mr Berlusconi, his economic empire and his propaganda resonate more in the North of the country, where entrepreneurs were increasingly dissatisfied with centralist policies of an intrusive State. However, the participation in the centre-right coalition was successful in terms of political weight, since the party gained a stronger bargaining power, with a larger share of parliamentary seats and cabinet positions, while it was detrimental in electoral terms, causing defections towards FI.

For this reason, the leader rapidly decided to exit the pole of Mr Belusconi. In fact, FI not- centralist, liberal and anti-system image was more appealing for that part of the moderate electorate of the North no more represented by the corrupt DC, but which considered LN as too radical given its rhetoric and enemy politics. During the time in office and particularly after the decision to abandon the cabinet, the strong external, as well as internal leadership of Mr Bossi, were crucial in order to ensure the survival of the party and its further move to a radicalisation strategy.

The process of party’s radicalisation opened after 1994 and consisted in a shift over secessionist positions, accompanied by new stress on ethno-regionalist claims. These new political projects aimed at differentiating Lega’s profile from other forces at the right of the political spectrum, in order to reacquire its Northern supporters who had flow into the FI electorate. Federalism was no more a viable option since a significant share of political forces supported the project, in one way or another. The idea of independentism was reinforced through a series of spectacular and symbolic actions that contributed to revitalising the media attention, while the party started to strengthen its propaganda by founding its communication channels. The radicalisation of the party helped to gain new preferences among the most extreme part of the electorate while alienating the most moderate one. The 1996 electoral peak was mainly reached thanks to the party’s performance in its electoral strongholds and among the working class. The new strategy

155 brought fruitful results in general elections since the “first-past-the-post” rule applied for assigning seats in the majoritarian part of the system rewarded territorially defined parties as LN. However, the isolation the party experienced in the national Parliament negatively affected its electoral performances at the local level. There was no chance to promote secession from the central state and, given the polarisation of the political system, being outside from the left-wing or right-wing coalition constituted a negative opportunity in terms of political weight and bargaining power. Thus, in 2001 LN was almost forced to rebuild the centre-right alliance with Mr Berlusconi but this decision was opposed both by supporters and party members. After the first wave of defections that impacted the party due to Bossi’s decision to move into the opposition and to radicalise the party advocating secession, this new turn towards more moderate positions provoked further schisms and the emergence of other autonomist movements. The strong internal leadership of Mr Bossi was fundamental to avoid the collapse and to avoid further defections, but his authoritarian measures to cope with dissidents (e.g. expel them) increased the fragmentation on the supply-side of the autonomist front, which negatively impacted the electoral results in 2001. Before the elections, the new goal of devolution was presented. However, this project was less functional in differentiating LN’s identity, since it was endorsed by the whole centre-right coalition, while the issue of the nationalism of Padania was perceived as too abstract to mobilise voters. The moderation of the regionalist claims, and the reunification of the centre- right coalition forced LN to find new distinctive issues. Thus, since the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, the party further stressed its anti-immigrant attitudes, exploiting a theme still not politicised by the other rightist forces and imposing its issue ownership over it. Since other forces on the right (most notably the former post-fascist AN) were not willing to problematise the issue of migration so radically, LN found an available ground on which attracting voters. With these transformations, the party definitively lost its post-ideological

156 connotation and firmly anchored itself on the right side of the political spectrum. Since 1996 its political discourse succeeded in merging the concept of people with the one of ethnos, and the purpose of reaching a homogenous society based on the protection of shared interests and shared identities contributed to creating a new imagined community built around the idea of ethno-regional identity. This frame suited a context in which workers and small-scale employers started to perceive the serious drawbacks of globalisation, to which LN offered an answer through closure in the homogeneous regional community. However, in 2001, its frame was less successful. The diagnostic frame was less efficient in targeting well-defined enemies, by overlapping harsh critique to the national left-wing coalition, to the European left and the general mass of migrants. On the other hand, in motivational terms, it developed a glocalist frame where regions were understood as the ideal political dimension, able to soften the adverse effects of the economic and cultural globalisation and reward people with identity incentives.

However, further transformations occurred in the aftermath of the 2011 political crisis.

In fact, the increased political instability generated by the end of the last Berlusconi’s executive and the critical economic situation faced by the country furnished political actors with new opportunities. The first technocratic government of Mr Monti and the support it received by the major mainstream parties such as PD and PdL created a convergence of previously opposed political factions towards the centre of the political space. The new consociational democracy gave antagonists, and particularly populist parties, the chance to oppose the political establishment, which was depicted as a mere executor of the European elites’ directives. However, even if LN tried to capitalise on this new crisis, it had lost its initial anti-system character, and it was perceived as totally embedded in that system of corrupt powers it had always opposed. This perception was even reinforced by the emergence of the financial scandal and the subsequent legal intervention that involved the

157 leader Bossi and his magic circle of closest collaborators. The party was no more able to catalyse political resentment, and its anti-caste discourse was rediscovered and revitalised by a new political competitor, the M5S of Mr Grillo. Unlike in the 1990s, LN had lost its anti-system image, and the ownership of the anti-caste discourse passed to M5S. The scandal strongly impacted the high ranks of the party, but at the same time favoured a smooth leadership transition. While since years, the internal leadership of Bossi was weakened by the organised opposition led by Mr Maroni, the decline of his external leadership after the judicial interventions created the opportunities for the party going beyond Bossi’s reign.

However, the weak charismatic leadership of Mr Maroni and his rather modest political goals contributed to the poor electoral result the party obtained in 2013, while he succeeded in winning the regional elections in Lombardy. Maroni’s leadership was significantly restricted in scope and mainly interpreted as a transition period. In addition, the frames elaborated by the party before 2013 general elections were highly committed towards the

Lombardy question. This means that great part of the official party’s media was focused on the regional competition, while proposals on the national groud were scarce. Even though the leader tried to present its candidature as a first step to set up the macro-region project, the strong stress on the Lombardy race might have worked as a disincentive for northern voters to prefer the Lega. Unlike under the phase of Bossi’s leadership, Maroni seemed to place a great deal of attention on the localist cause, beyond the project of a free Padania for the free people of the North. However, his election paved the way to the crucial renewal of the party’s high ranks that lead to the election of Mr Salvini as new Secretary.

The outstanding electoral results obtained in 2018 general elections are mostly attributable to the new leadership of Mr Salvini. The young leader has drastically transformed the identity and the political purposes of the party, by completing its transition from a regionalist actor to a fully national and nationalist political reality. The new national

158 profile of the Lega, which identifies its reference electorate with the whole Italian population, has become a successful model for entire European PRR. The new leadership is strong in internal terms and even stronger in external ones, having evolved the Lega from a personalised party to a personal one. This has also impacted the grass-roots nature of the

Lega, which today seems to be less reliant on the traditional strongholds and the role of activists. In fact, the process of electoral enlargement experience by the Lega has greatly passed through the figure of the leader. From the name to the Southern political project (Noi con Salvini), to the name of the electoral list (Lega per Salvini Premier), the party has symbolically divorced with its regionalist past. The official websites and channels of communication of the party have been transformed or renamed, using the name of the leader.

The traditional green colour that identified la Gens Padana (people of Padania) has been substituted by the more institutional and less northern-oriented blue. These symbolic transformations have coupled with a broad restructuring of the organisational assets of the party, which has today abandoned its heavy structure, typical of traditional mass parties. At the same time, it is safe to suppose that the almost thirty years of LN history have furnished

Mr Salvini the chance to reduce the territorial presence of the party without dispelling the reservoir of northern votes. Salvini’s renewal has not deterred the loyal leghisti but has attracted a new audience. Future research should try to understand how this new wave of personalisation and the process of national expansion have impacted on the loyal supporters of the independentist cause, to know how this branch of the party has coped with and integrated the new national identity. Moreover, Mr Salvini has built a controversial image, by using a provocative communication style based on position-taking, vulgarism, personalisation and emotionalisation, and has been able to attract significant media attention.

He has developed the ability to shift between traditional and new media, establishing an entirely unmediated relationship with his followers, as in the best dreams of each populist

159 leader. In addition, the competition of the other anti-system party (M5S) has brought the

Lega to elaborate a new frame of national preference, with a clear target towards two main enemies: the European elites and the homogenous group of foreign migrants. These two themes have particularly favoured the Lega, while the grillini have exploited the anti-caste discourse. In fact, being the M5S characterised by a post-ideological character (as LN in the early 1990s), the movement has always tried to maintain somewhat vague positions over such sensitive themes to avoid the risk of fragmenting its electoral support, which is quite heterogeneous in ideological terms. On the contrary, Salvini has reinforced the connection between the economic and the cultural threats, the egalitarian and the identity domain, by developing the idea of a future society based on a balance between state and market, where the societal wealth would be redistributed among deserving natives. This has helped the Lega to succeed over its internal competitors within the centre-right coalition, FI and FdI. Mr

Salvini has benefited from the impossibility of Mr Berlusconi to be elected and from the subsequent uncertainty about FI’s PM. The proposal of Mr Tajani as PM, president of the

European Parliament, has probably made FI less attracting for those voters increasingly dissatisfied with the current status of the European Union, particularly due to the harsh attacks of the Lega towards the European bureaucrats. The primacy within the coalition has marked a historical turning point for the party, which has today completed its parabola from an antagonist party to the new face of the Italian right. With “the Italians first” Mr Salvini and his renewed Lega are today the most successful PRR realities in Western Europe and have just started a new phase of electoral growth.

A dynamic and integrated perspective

Based on this brief recap of the main findings of this work, it is possible to come back to the original theoretical model to understand how the POS, the mobilizing structure and

160 the framing processes can help in explaining any-party-similar-to-LN’s electoral success over time. In this last part, I offer both a synchronic interpretation of the weight and function of the different internal and external characteristics in determining PRRPs’ electoral success and failure and a diachronic analysis of the development of these determinants.

As a starting point, this work has observed that the first moment of the electoral breakthrough of a newly formed antagonist political organisation might be successfully predicted by the co-presence of specific internal and external factors on the supply-side. For what concerns the external opportunities, summarised in the concept of POS, the first and more trivial favourable elements can be recognised is the presence of a proportional electoral system that can help antagonist forces to obtain a first parliamentary representation

(Mudde, 2007). Most notably, the emergence of a newly created political force requires the presence of available space in the political scene (Eatwell, 2000), thus it depends on dynamics inherent to the party system. Primarily, new actors’ emergence can be facilitated by the opening of new positions along the political continuum, which can derive from different causes that lead to a profound reorganisation of the political space or at its collapse.

The instability of the political system can generate a crisis of the general political setting leaving room for new forms of grievances mobilisation by antagonist actors, weakening the formal as well as the informal institutional established structure of power (Kriesi et al., 1992) and constraining the strategies of legitimate members of the system. This reorganisation can be due to the progressive convergence of mainstream parties.

Here, the idea of convergence does not uniquely identify the progressive move towards the centre of opposite political forces from the right-wing and the left-wing areas of the political spectrum, but rather a more general homologation of their profile, not just in terms of their political proposals. In fact, the reduced salience of the left/right cleavage on the

161 political supply-side leaves room for new extremisms and political antagonists to emerge

(Eatwell, 2000; Mudde, 2007). However, a process of progressive homologation can derive either from a conflation of left/right positions towards new centralism or the overextension of political practices and registers as characteristics of the political class per se, without ideological distinctions. In this perspective, convergence has to do with the progressive collapse of previously different political forces in an assimilable party, with similar discourses, practices, and strategies, resulting in the creation of an elitist front within which differences are blurred. This has less to with ideologies and more to do with political styles

(not only discourses) and repertoires of action. In the Italy of 1990s, this convergence was embodied by the well-spread corruption practices, which impacted government forces as the

DC and the PSI as well as opposition actors as the PCI. Thus, being parties all equal in their every-day practices of distribution of power and control, even though they were sharply opposed in their political proposals, antagonist actors were able to emerge stressing their distinctive nature when compared to the broader political landscape. Over the last years, this convergence has been reshaped by the Lega through the narration of non-elected governments servant of the European technocrats and banks. As a consequence, converge should be regarded not merely as a process of ideological realignment of existing traditional forces, which still is a condition of the opening of political space, but as a more general process of mainstream parties’ homologation. Moreover, this process can be directly fed by the same PRRPs, which are not just capitalising on existing tensions and negative attitudes towards party politics but are also generating, reshaping or magnifying them (Krouwel &

Abts, 2007). By using diagnostic frames that present political opponents as a homogenous group of corrupt and incompetent enemies of the sovereign people, PRRPs contribute directly to the process of homologation and collapse of mainstream parties in a blurred and unified front, generating or enlarging themselves space for their distinctive identities.

162

However, before looking closer to frames’ transformations, it is necessary to draw some additional considerations about the POS, particularly about the inter-parties’ relationships in the so-called party system. Contrary to some of the existing theoretical explanations (Mudde, 2007), the polarisation of the political space has proved to work as an unfavourable opportunity for the PRRPs’ success, both in the moment of the first emergence and over time. Thus, when the distance between left-wing and right-wing political actors increases and appears more marked, there is little chance for PRRPs. Here, a couple of points should be discussed. Firstly, as mentioned by Mudde, the increased polarisation can act as a favourable opportunity when PRRPs are part of one of the two opponent blocks, in the coalition. However, this condition per se cannot be regarded as a convincing explanation, since it can reward in terms of seats and power positions within government but not in terms of electoral support, as the LN case has demonstrated in 2001 and partly in 1994 elections.

In fact, secondly, it is worthy to underline that the choice to enter an alliance within one of the competing blocks, and thus the shift from a total rejection of the political establishment to a logic of coalition building, can turn to be a harmful decision for PRRPs. Generally, the idea of joining forces with mainstream and already established political parties increases the likelihood of electoral unsuccess since PRRPs lose their distinctive traits and people can prefer to support similar well-established political realities within the same block, with a higher likelihood of succeeding (e.g. 2001). However, logic of coalition building can work effectively when PRRPs can enter coalitions that present themselves as a renovating force as a whole. Thus, when it is possible to claim that a political alliance has been set among anti-system forces that aim at the same minimal goal of opposition towards the established structure of power in society (e.g. alliance between LN and FI in 1994). Otherwise, entering coalitions contributes to blur the identity of the party and thus to make its profile less identifiable and attractive. Therefore, the polarisation of the political space cannot be

163 regarded as a favourable opportunity unless it is considered as a polarisation between the institutional-elitist block and the populist-democratic one, as an increased opposition between an alienate representative system of democracy and a direct appeal to the sovereign people. This has to do with the already mentioned convergence of traditional parties towards the centre of the political space and in their daily practices and image. Thus, PRRPs can have higher chances of success not when they present themselves as a third pole, but rather when they present themselves as the popular pole opposed to the indistinct corrupt elite (as it was for LN in 1994). As a consequence, the investigation of the electoral system per se can be regarded as less informative of the analysis of coalition building logic and the internal coalition dynamics. Looking at electoral systems per se can lead to misleading results, since electoral rules only explain success in the political weight gained in terms of seats but are not able to account for the reasons why people cast a vote for specific parties, as the coalition logic can do. In fact, this work has demonstrated that the electoral system per se cannot be regarded as an explanation of PRRPs success. Even if it can be considered as a necessary condition in the first moment of emergence (i.e. proportional systems allow antagonist parties to obtain the first representation), over time they are likely to produce fluctuating results, regardless the type of system. In this case, it is safe to say that is not the system that determines PRRPs take the electoral outcomes, but rather the coalition decisions. Enter coalitions is always a risky decision for those actors that can successfully exploit alliances only when they can differentiate their identity by affirming their issue ownership over specific themes. In fact, as demonstrated by the LN under the guidance of Mr Bossi, an internal opposition towards coalition partners can help PRRPs in maintaining their protest identity while exploiting the benefits of electoral alliances. Even in this case, opportunities are not directly favourable; electoral laws can be beneficial to the extent political actors can strategically exploit them. This seems to be the case both for PRRPs’ emergence and

164 survival. On the contrary, when partners in coalition present similar worldviews and use similar rhetoric and topic, PRRPs will be likely defeat by their less radical competitors able to attract the more moderate part of the electorate. In this sense, the rise of new competitors within the party system can work as a negative opportunity since it can erode part of the electoral preferences of existing PRRPs, particularly when new political entrepreneurs struggle over similar themes, for example, the anti-elite discourse or the more right-wing specific opposition to foreigners. This has been partly shown by the competition between FI and LN their several joint electoral campaigns. In 1994 the possible expansion of LN in the

North of Italy was stopped by the emergence of the new competitor. Even if LN did not lose consensus thanks to its differentiation strategies towards another member of the coalition, the former post-fascist AN, it had experienced a limitation of its space of expansion due to the figure of Mr Berlusconi. The neoliberal worldview of both parties (probably better represented by FI) and the pro-federalist stances of Mr Berlusconi had constrained LN growth. In 2001 a similar situation occurred, when the devolution project was presented as a coalition objective, and the radicalisation of LN’s identity prevented the support of the more moderate fringes of the electorate. On the contrary, in 2018 the more radical positions of the Lega, the troubles experienced by FI, and the key figure of Mr Salvini have helped the party in taking the lead in the coalition. This last point underlines how potentially similar political opportunities can lead to different results according to how they harmonise with organisational resources (e.g. leadership) and frames (e.g. resonance of political proposals with the broader master frames).

As far as the mobilizing structure is concerned, two organisational elements are crucial for the breakthrough of PRRPs: the presence of a strong leader and pre-existing grassroots political subculture and active networks. While internal leadership skills seem to play a crucial role in driving PRRPs over different phases of their life-cycle, the first moment of

165 mobilisation dramatically passes through the identification of an influential figure in external terms, able to catalyse popular grievances and desires in his/her fight in behalf of the people

(Mudde, 2007). The more the difference between the leader and the elites is marked, the higher is his/her attractiveness for the general audience. This means that a credible leader should be as far as possible by the traditional mainstream parties and from their style and rhetoric, being recognised as part of the common people. It is safe to say that for the Lega this has been the case both under the leadership of Mr Bossi and Mr Salvini. However, since emerging antagonist forces are likely to rely on an underdeveloped party’s structure, the presence of pre-existing networks of support and activism already reliant on a specific political subculture results to be crucial. In the first phase, PRR political actors are likely to receive support and to benefit from the existence of informal organisational resources, maybe not directly aimed at fostering political participation (Jenkins, 1983). Resources do not come from a highly structured formal organisation but from the re-activation and re- definition of already existing loose ties within civil society, which are based on a coherent subset of values and ideas about society and power distribution (Feldman, 1988). Already established friendly subcultures can furnish PRRPs chances of success and nourish their thin ideology. The grassroots support legitimates these actors as collectors of popular grievances and legitimate antagonists. In the case of LN, the party was able to capitalise on pre-existing networks proper of the Catholic subculture which were based on values and ideas that harmonised with the ideas proposed by the party. However, as theorised by the resource theory (McCarthy & Zald, 1977), the capacity of PRRPs to reward supporters with incentives, mainly symbolic ones, should be considered as an element able to explain why some antagonist actors can succeed over others. Thus, the compresence of an available, friendly subculture and the capacity of the party to furnish rationale and returns for action

166 through identity incentives are the bases for the creation of electoral strongholds on which

PRRPs can capitalise over the rest of their life-cycle.

In organisational terms, the crucial role of grassroots subculture is likely to change during the parties’ life-cycle, becoming less salient after their institutionalisation. In fact, while the eruption of an antagonist political actor without a pre-existing formal organisation dramatically relies on the presence of an already available network of relations and organisations within existing subcultures, over time the centrality of this support can decrease in favour of resources furnished by the formal party structure. Electoral strongholds are crucial in the phase of breakthrough and remain a secure basis of electoral preferences during periods of decline, but enlargements of parties’ support require a formal party structure to obtain higher media attention and to produce more efficient internal propaganda.

In addition, the current political scenario appears to be even more narrowly linked to the charismatic figure of the leader. As a consequence, in a context of increased electoral volatility, political personalisation and spectacularisation of politics (Moffitt & Tormey,

2014), the presence of a favourable grassroots subculture appear to be less a necessary condition in order to gain electoral success. On the contrary, the leadership issue has become increasingly salient, and the figure of the leaders may be regarded as the key used by PRRPs in order to enlarge their electoral basis. Modifications occurred in the media system, with traditional media losing ground in favour of new social media unmediated communication, have furnished leaders the chance to reach a broader potential electorate and in particular to create his/her image without passing through the distortive lens of mainstream media.

Powerful external figures can exploit the opportunities offered by these new technological tools to bound even more their followers and increasing their coterie charisma, which can be translated into actual voters’ support. However, particularly for what concerns grassroots forms of populism, as in the case of LN, one might ask how these changes are transforming

167 the relationship between strongholds, activists, and leadership and how this is impacting on current forms of political mobilisation.

Moreover, the external leadership is just a single part of the necessary organisational resource on which PRPPs should rely. As already mentioned, the relevance of resources furnished by a formal party’s structure seems to increase over time. This can be considered a problem for PRRPs that given their populist nature tend to rely on charismatic leaders, whom in turn are less interested in institutionalised the party with a routinisation of practices and a power redistribution. Charismatic internal leaderships can centralise the power in their hands, preventing the emergence of internal oppositions, but this can degenerate in an increase in the number of purge, schisms and fragmentations deriving from the need of eradicating every form of dissent., as it was for LN in the phase of radicalisation and subsequent moderation. Thus, the survival of PRRPs and their ongoing success over time require to combine a convincing and stable external leadership with an equilibrate internal leadership, able to balance the need to fix a strict party discipline with a certain degree of institutionalisation and internal democracy. Over time, the period of internal struggle for power and epuration can coincide with decline and fragmentation of PRR’s electoral support.

Along with this aspect, it is also worthy to remind the necessity for those parties of not losing their grassroots nature. In fact, once in office PRRPs have to redefine their identity in order to maintain a direct relationship with their more loyal supporters in strongholds. This requires the maintenance of a territorial presence and forms of direct accountability of representatives to their electoral base. Most importantly, this passes through further strengthening of the leaders’ figure thanks to the new social media. In fact, the last phase of

PRRPs’ development has been helped by a new wave of personalisation of politics that has tied even narrowly leader and supporters.

168

However, given favourable opportunities and organisational resources, political mobilisation and thus electoral success remains highly dependent on supporters’ convictions that their action (vote) is necessary and likely to succeed. Thus, they need a rationale for action, furnished through framing processes. In addition, frames contribute to differentiate

PRRPs’ identity and to face the rise of possible competitors able to contend their electoral basis. Over here, it is necessary to differentiate parties’ identity from the rest of the political landscape, which in the case of PRR can be achieved by further radicalising the right-wing political profile. This has to do with changing framing processes. In particular, transformations of the diagnostic frames seem to suit the purpose of maintaining a radical and populist identity, revitalising sources of opposition as a rationale for action and basis for collective identification. The identification of problems that make people’s intervention necessary on an immediate basis (diagnostic) has to attribute blame, by distinguishing between friends and foes, with foes being clearly identified. In fact, while the identification of “us” sometimes lacks consistency and can be deducted rather than directly stated (Mudde

& Kaltwasser, 2013), enemies require a focused and extensive identification that allows the opposition to the existing system as a whole (Canovan, 1999; Cress & Snow, 2000).

Diagnostic frames are more effective when they convey a message of total rejection of the existing structure of power in society and its values (Canovan, 1999). Thus, PRRPs can successfully emerge when they precisely target enemies, with the enemies’ category paradoxically being as inclusive as possible. The category of “them” should be continuously revitalised by adapting the discursive opportunities to the changing external context and internal party’s reorganisation. During LN history this has been achieved through a particular strategies of frame alignment: frame amplification. This refers to the “idealization, embellishment, clarification, or invigoration of existing values or beliefs (…) most movements seek to amplify existing beliefs and values” (Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 624).

169

Capitalising on existing attitudes and beliefs, PRRPs are able to reinforce and exacerbate political oppositions in the definition of their enemy politics. In the case of LN different enemies have been targeted over its history, accordingly to the dominant tensions in society.

While in the 1990s this led to harsh attacks towards the corrupt political elites and the southern citizens, over the last phase the party has transformed its identity by exploiting the refugees’ question and Euroscepticism.

Frame changes also serve the goal of differentiating PRRPs’ identity to acquire issue ownership over resonant themes or to revitalise the mobilising message once those parties are in power. For example, when PRRPs are or have been in office at the national level and, as a consequence, are assimilable to the elite caste. In this case, PRRPs have to work to balance their image as the party of protest and party of governer by attacking their coalition partners or intensifying their upward vertical antagonism. What follows in frame terms is a new identification of enemies at the top of the power structure to not being confused with the peak of that structure itself. On the contrary, the passage to less populist diagnostic and motivational frames, in which PRRPs remark the difference of their coalition’s partners form the ideologically opposed parties can result as less convincing and appealing for voters, as it was for LN in 2001 and 2013. A dualistic logic in the definition of enemies at the level of political elites can pay negatively on the PRRP’s image. On the contrary, the over-extension of the anti-elitist frame works as a favourable opportunity since it transposes political resentment to a new level and contributes to redefining the concept of the people. At the same time, PRR identity can also be defined by referring to a downwards vertical antagonism towards the bottom of society, enlarging the concept of “the others” in cultural and identarian terms. In PRRPs this differentiation mainly takes place targeting the others on an ethnic basis, thus building a political discourse that aims at underlining the constitutive differences between the pure people (our people) and the dangerous others. This means that the

170 diagnostic frames are restructured over time by targeting new social groups in order to give

PRRPs the chance to maintain their distinctive identity.

The redefinition of the others also leads to a redefinition of “we, the people” category.

In order to be successful, the people should be considered as a homogenous body that shares not only material interests and conditions but also common cultural roots, identity, values, and destiny. In the appeal to the people and its definition, both the material and the symbolic elements are necessary to motivate supporters. During time, frames that stressed only one of these two aspects appeared to be less successful. Over the last decades, the joint reference to the defence of economic interests and cultural traditions has increased and has proved to be electorally successful. Over time, PRRPs have maintained and expanded their electoral support when have been able to elaborate on the entangled relationship between the economic and the cultural domain in the creation of people’s political preferences (e.g. 1996,

2018). Thus, given a set of favourable opportunities and the presence of organisational resources. PRRPs have been able to succeed the most when they have framed their struggle as an opposition towards the established structure of power in society as a whole and as a necessary answer to the needs generated by the deep economic and cultural transformation and insecurity brought by the processes of globalisation, modernity and European integration. For example, these parties answer to the increased instability by developing an inward closure in an imagined community formed by a homogenous body, where members of the ingroup will enjoy favourable economic conditions thanks to welfare favouritism.

Thus, it is possible to conclude that frames prove to be efficient in determining positive electoral results when they combine an opposition toward enemies both at the top and at the bottom of the societal structure with a vision of the people as based on shared interests and a shared identity, which should be defended both in economic and cultural terms. This redefinition of the political struggle is likely to appeal to a broader electorate and to combine

171 grievances coming from different population strata that perceive similar threats. As a consequence, transformations occurred in the POS -as the appearance of new competitors in the party system- or resources coming from the figure of a strong leader, can be fruitfully exploited when PRRPs are able to redefine their identity by revitalising the long-lasting us versus them dichotomy. At the same time, this has to couple with a clear and at least minimally articulated motivational frame. Having presented the existing problems, with a logic of vertical antagonism typical of the populist rhetoric (Abts & Rummens, 2007), emerging PRRPs have to propose a rationale for action that in a first moment coincides with the sovereign rule of the people. However, from the present analysis appears that the inherent definition of “the people” is only of secondary importance and tend to be more deductive rather than explicitly stated, while framing processes are mainly intended to create exclusive identities (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2013). For sure, the definitory criterion is the non-elite membership, which can be supported by other non-membership and oppositions towards groups at the bottom of society (i.e. in the case of the early LN, opposition towards southern citizens). In this sense, frames are crucial elements in order to succeed in creating an electorally attractive identity, exploiting a populist communication style made up of simplicity and directness in language and solutions (Abts & Rummens, 2007; Bracciale &

Martella, 2017; Canovan, 1999).

Limitations and future research directions

The present study is undoubtedly affected by several limitations, among those, the most severe ones deal with its methodological structure. A first problem has to do with the lack of primary data for the 1992 general elections, due to their unavailability. The framing processes for that electoral competition are not analysed, but conclusions on them are drawn from previous contributions (Allievi, 1992; Diani, 1996). Moreover, due to the data

172 availability the qualitative frame analysis here reported has been conducted over three different sources (weekly magazine, daily newspaper and blog), characterised by a different structure and targeted to a different audience, which is likely to affect the ways in which the party has elaborated and presented its positions over time. Moreover, the choice of selecting just two months of party’s press before each general election may be considered questionable since frames are likely to change drastically before elections in order to appeal undecided voters. At the same time, the official party press offers just a partial picture of parties’ frames, but this work was intended to investigate the official image constructed from LN, and this was easily accessible through its official media. However, an important drawback of this choice has to do with the fact that the official newspaper is likely to talk with an already supportive audience and thus can be less informative about the strategies used by the political actors to enlarge their electoral support. All in all, the chosen analytical strategy has proved to be efficient in the investigation of frames’ transformations over time.

As far as the conclusions of this work are concerned, a couple of points should be discussed as well. Firstly, it is questionable the extent to which the interplay of POS, mobilizing structure and framing processes above presented is or can be informative on the

PRRPs’ specificities. In fact, it might be argued that factors such as the convergence of mainstream parties, coalition logic, media attention, role of the grassroots subculture and party organisation are likely to influence not only PRRPs but actually all antagonist political actors. In this sense, such a dynamic and integrative model could be successfully applied both to the study of radical left or of additional party families. However, I would like to propose the idea that specificities of the PRR success should be retrieved in the specific framing strategies used by these actors and from how these strategies are integrated to exploit political opportunities and organisational resouces fruitfully. In particular, these specificities

173 may lie in the ways in which PRRPs articulate their vertical antagonism at the bottom and in the identity incentives they furnish in their call to action.

In conclusion, this work has sought to demonstrate how the electoral success of PRRPs all over Europe should be interpreted as the dynamic product of the interaction between internal and external factors of PRR supply-side. The in-depth case study presented has allowed the formulation of some generalisations of the factors that can explain moments of success and of failure of those parties over time, demonstrating how political opportunities, organisational resources and frames cannot be regarded as isolated and static but as interdependent and dynamic elements. However, these findings should be corroborated by a new comparative study on analogue actors, to understand if they still hold when considered in cross-national terms. Moreover, a more ambitious research agenda might think to extend this comparative logic to the investigation of possible differences and similarities between the populist radical right and the populist radical left, trying to understand what underlying conditions can account for the emergence and success of one of these realities rather than the other in specific contexts. Until now, this study has presented the idea that PRRPs’ peculiarities mainly stem from the frames these parties have elaborated over time, but this assumption should be further investigated and integrated in order to understand why PRRPs’ frames have proved to be successful over different periods and in different countries, rather than the populist radical left ones or the other way around.

174

Tab 5. Summary of the main findings, 1990-2018

Regional phase (1992) Radical phase (1998-2003) Nationalist phase (2013) Nationalist phase (2018) + - + - + - + - POS Party System Available Isolation/bipolarism Convergence/three Convergence/thr space New poles system ee poles system competitor Electoral Coalition decisions Coalition Coalition System Coalition decisions primacy decisions Legal System Secessionist/racist Scandal accuses Media System Free Free New social exposure/ exposure/Official media propaganda media Mobilising structure Formal party Underdeveloped Incomplete Institutionalised Institutionalised structure institutionalisation Internal and Strong Strong Weak Strong external Schisms leadership Grass-root White Shared identity Available Available organisation subculture, subculture subculture enemy politics Frame Diagnostic Focused- Unfocused- Blurred Contradictory Focused frame total enemies rejection Prognostic Simplistic Simplistic Simplistic Simplistic frame Motivational Anti-system Glocalist Regional National frame preference

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Appendix:

A. Codes’ list

Code’s name Code’s subject family Code’s function family Culture Us (Lega/people) Ethic Us (Lega/people) Islamophobia: diagnostic Islamophobia Diagnostic Islamophobia: motivational Islamophobia Motivational Islamophobia: prognostic Islamophobia Prognostic Org Us (Lega/people) The Lega PROGNOSTIC Prognostic Slogan Us (Lega/people) Tangente/sostegno economico a Us (Lega/people) partito The Leader Us (Lega/people) THEM Them: allies. DIAGNOSTIC. Others at the top, elites Diagnostic (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: allies. PROGNOSTIC. Others at the top, elites Prognostic (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: consociational. Others at the top, elites Diagnostic DIAGNOSTIC. (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: consociational. Others at the top, elites Prognostic PROGNOSTIC. (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: EU. DIAGNOSTIC. Others at the top, elites Diagnostic (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: EU. MOTIVATIONAL. Others at the top, elites Motivational (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: EU. PROGNOSTIC. Others at the top, elites Prognostic (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: migrants. DIAGNOSTIC. Others at the bottom Diagnostic (migr/south/enemies) Them: migrants. Others at the bottom Motivational MOTIVATIONAL. (migr/south/enemies) Them: migrants. PROGNOSTIC. Others at the bottom Prognostic (migr/south/enemies) Them: political elites. Others at the top, elites Diagnostic DIAGNOSTIC (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: political elites. Others at the top, elites Motivational MOTIVATIONAL. (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: political elites. Others at the top, elites Prognostic PROGNOSTIC. (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: the central state. Others at the top, elites Diagnostic DIAGNOSTIC. (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: the central state. Others at the top, elites Motivational MOTIVATIONAL. (pol/eco/cult/media) Them: the central state. Others at the top, elites Prognostic PROGNOSTIC. (pol/eco/cult/media)

176

Them: the others. DIAGNOSTIC. Others at the top, elites Diagnostic (pol/eco/cult/media)/ Others at the bottom (migr/south/enemies) Them: the others. Others at the top, elites Motivational MOTIVATIONAL. (pol/eco/cult/media)/ Others at the bottom (migr/south/enemies)

Them: the others. PROGNOSTIC Others at the top, elites Prognostic (pol/eco/cult/media)/ Others at the bottom (migr/south/enemies)

Them: the others. PROGNOSTIC. Others at the top, elites Prognostic (pol/eco/cult/media)/ Others at the bottom (migr/south/enemies)

Them: the South. DIAGNOSTIC Others at the top, elites Diagnostic (pol/eco/cult/media)

Them: the South. Others at the bottom Motivational MOTIVATIONAL. (migr/south/enemies) Them: the South. PROGNOSTIC. Others at the bottom Prognostic (migr/south/enemies) us the people Us (Lega/people) Us: the Lega. Us (Lega/people) CHARACTERISTICS. Us: the Lega. MOTIVATIONAL Us (Lega/people) Motivational

Us: the Lega. PROGNOSTIC Us (Lega/people) Prognostic

Us: The People. DIAGNOSTIC. Us (Lega/people) Diagnostic

Us: The People. Us (Lega/people) Motivational MOTIVATIONAL Us: The People. PROGNOSTIC. Us (Lega/people) Prognostic

177

B. Families’ list

Family Us (Lega/people) Others at the bottom (migr/south/enemies) Others at the top, elites (pol/eco/cult/media) Islamophobia Diagnostic Prognostic Motivational

178

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