Abstract
The Northern League has attracted the attention of scholars since its inception for a number of reasons. Its unexpected electoral success and its role in bringing down the Italian First Republic in the early 1990s, the party’s internal organization, the invention of Padania, Umberto Bossi’s charismatic leadership and his alliance with Silvio Berlusconi leading to long-standing participation in government, the difficulty in categorizing the party in terms of ideology, and positioning it on the left-right spectrum are just some of the issues that have ensured continuing scholarly and media interest in this party. So do we need another full-length study on the Lega? Judging from the themes addressed in the volume by Passarelli and Tuorto and the new insight it brings to controversial debates concerning the definition and interpretation of the Lega phenomenon, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.
In the first two chapters the book analyses the trajectory of the party from its tentative beginnings in the 1980s to its return to opposition in 2012 and in so doing also re-examines a series of issues related to its political strategy and territorial expansion and rootedness. As the authors clarify in the Introduction, the third chapter, which deals with the internal organization of the party and the sociological and ideological profile of its cadres, activists, and voters, forms the ‘meatiest’ part of the work. The chapter relies on an empirical survey carried out in 2011 and based on more than 300 interviews with party members and over 70 with elected representatives from the local to the supranational level. This gives us a very good understanding of where the party currently stands in terms of its positioning on the left-right spectrum and its ideological stance.
An important question related to the early period and examined in Chapter 1 concerns the role played by the Lega Nord in bringing down the First Republic. The authors explore the factors behind this momentous change and reach a balanced conclusion which few would disagree with. In their own words: The birth of leghismo did not produce the crisis of the party system of the First Republic but certainly contributed to weaken it …. The Lega Nord amplified the crisis, revealing itself as a political actor and an electoral entrepreneur able to penetrate into the cracks of a system, whose stability was by then in decline. (p. 33)
The authors also correctly assess Bossi’s twists and turns in the 1990s (his decision to ally with Berlusconi’s newly formed Forza Italia in 1994, his subsequent withdrawal from the centre-right coalition government and his renewal of the alliance in 2000) in light both of electoral trends and of party competition. The chapter is less insightful when it examines the role of the Lega in government in the period 2001–2006 and 2008–2011, as it does not address the much debated question of whether the party moderated its rhetoric once in government or indeed whether its behaviour exposed a persistent gap between rhetoric and policy-making.
Much of Chapter 2 is spent re-analysing in detail the expansion of the Lega Nord in the different areas of the North, largely confirming previous findings on the party’s ability to penetrate areas of small-scale industrialization previously dominated by the Christian Democratic Party and by the Catholic political sub-culture. The authors also test the hypothesis, made especially relevant since the Lega’s expansion into the regions of central Italy in the 2000s, that the party has succeeded in attracting the support of leftist voters in these areas thereby making inroads into the ‘Communist’ sub-culture in the same way as in the 1990s it had penetrated the ‘Catholic’ sub-culture. The authors argue that this hypothesis is only partially confirmed by their analysis of voting shifts (p. 103). Hence while they found some evidence that leftist voters in the region of Emilia-Romagna had shifted to the Lega, overall the party had attracted mainly the votes of people who had previously supported other right-wing parties.
Chapter 3 is indeed, as claimed by the authors, the most relevant and original. On the basis of the already mentioned extensive survey carried out in 2011, Passarelli and Tuorto reveal that nowadays the Lega’s voters and supporters, as well as its elected representatives, place themselves and the party well on the right of the political spectrum. This is an important finding, as it has implications for the ongoing debate on the definition and classification of this party, confirming the view of those scholars who nowadays include it in the ‘extreme right’ or ‘radical right’ family (p. 207). I would add that the corollary to this finding is that the Lega, unlike in the 1990s, would find it difficult to behave opportunistically and shift status, given that party officials and the rank-and-file hold entrenched ideological positions. Another important finding is the existence of deep tensions in the party in relation to a variety of issues: being anti-establishment versus participating in government, being strongly centralized versus the emergence of a considerable new body of local mayors and councillors, and having limited territorial roots versus expanding into new areas.
In their conclusion, the authors outline a number of different possible scenarios for the future of the Lega, each involving a different model of party organization and envisaging a more or less imminent change of leadership. Since the publication of this book, Umberto Bossi has indeed ceased to be leader, yet the thorny issue of the party’s organizational and leadership model remains unresolved, hence the various scenarios are still open.