Populism in Europe: Lessons from Umberto Bossi's Northern League

By Davide Vampa and Daniele Albertazzi

Populism in Europe offers a detailed and systematic analysis of the ideology, electoral and governmental performances, organisational model, type of leadership and member activism of the Northern League under its founder, Umberto Bossi (1991-2012). Based on a wealth of original research, the book identifies the Northern League’s consistent and coherent ideology, its strong leadership and its ability to create communities of loyal partisan activists as key ingredients of its success. Through their in-depth analysis, Albertazzi and Vampa show that the League has much to teach us about how populists can achieve durability and rootedness and how parties of all kinds can still benefit from a committed and dedicated membership today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526133977

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Populism in Europe

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Populism in Europe

Lessons from Umberto Bossi's Northern League

Daniele Albertazzi and Davide Vampa

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Daniele Albertazzi and Davide Vampa 2021

The right of Daniele Albertazzi and Davide Vampa to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7190 9607 5 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover design:

Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

1 Introduction

2 The ideology

3 The electoral arena: North, peripheries, cross-class appeal and shifting alliances

4 The party in office

5 The Northern League as a mass party

6 Umberto Bossi's leadership

7 Participation without power

8 Conclusion: populism in Europe – lessons from Umberto Bossi's Northern League

References

Index

Figures

2.1 The changing programmatic profile of the Lega Nord (Authors' own calculations based on Volkens et al., 2018)

3.1 The distribution of LN's support across Italian regions (1990–2010) (Italian Ministry of the Interior)

3.2 The peripheralisation of the LN's vote (Authors’ own calculations based on results from Italian Ministry of the Interior)

3.3 A new national party? Dispersion of LN's electoral support across regions from 1992 to 2018 (Coefficient of Variation) (Authors’ own calculations based on results from Italian Ministry of the Interior)

3.4 Electoral map of the LN in 2009 (Italian Ministry of the Interior, authors’ elaboration using MapChart)

3.5 Electoral map of the LN in 2019 (Italian Ministry of the Interior, authors’ elaboration using MapChart)

4.1 Average age of LN senators, 1992–2013, compared to all senators (Official Statistics of the Italian Senate (www.senato.it))

4.2 Percentage of women elected in the Senate: comparison between the LN and the whole chamber, 1992–2013 (Official Statistics of the Italian Senate (www.senato.it))

4.3 Number of LN mayors in Italian provincial capitals (capoluoghi), 1993–2012 (Italian Election Archive (https://elezionistorico.interno.gov.it/))

4.4 Percentage of LN regional councillors in central-northern Italian regions, 1990–2010 (Italian Election Archive (https://elezionistorico.interno.gov.it/))

6.1 The LN one month before and after Bossi's resignation, voting intentions (%) (YouTrend (www.youtrend.it/2012/02/10/tabella-riepilogo-sondaggi-politici-elettorali-storico-2008-2009-2010-2011-2012-2013-2014-2015-2016-2017/))

6.2 Popularity of LN leaders from Bossi to Salvini (Demos (www.demos.it/atlante_politico.php), Percentage of respondents assigning a score of 6 or above (on a 1–10 Likert scale) to the leader)

Tables

3.1 LN's performance in general, European and regional electionspage

3.2 LN's electoral performance in a selection of northern and central regions

3.3 The ten northern provinces where the LN has obtained its best results (%)

3.4 The ten northern provinces where the LN has obtained its worst results (%)

3.5 Comparing the electoral results of the first and last elections of the Bossi era

3.6 Support for the LN (% of respondents) in northern Italy by occupational profile

3.7 From Bossi to Salvini: the LN's electoral performance 2008–2018, by region

4.1 LN elected representatives in the Italian Parliament (Chamber of Deputies and Senate), 1990–2008

4.2 LN ministers in Berlusconi I, II, II and IV cabinets

5.1 Membership of the LN, 1992–2011

6.1 The ten longest-serving leaders of the main Italian parties, 1945–2012

6.2 Bossi and other populist radical right leaders in Europe

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making. Daniele, who developed its original concept and approach sometime around 2014, was already working on the Lega Nord's invention of the nation of Padania for his PhD in 1998. He then published his first article on the topic back in 2001. Davide, who provided new impetus to the project from 2018 onwards, had also already written extensively on this party (and, more generally, Italian regionalism) by the time he agreed to come on board.

In the end, after many years of work and debates about it, completing this book has forced us to come to some sort of conclusion about what kind of party the Lega Nord has been under the leadership of its founder and long-time party secretary, Umberto Bossi. This task could only be accomplished after 2012, when Bossi was forced to relinquish the leadership; however, became more urgent from 2014 onwards, as it became clear to what extent Matteo Salvini was reinventing the party.

As for the people who helped us complete this project, the first mention must go to the several party representatives and members of the Lega Nord who sat through interviews that fed into our analysis, starting in 2004 and at different moments in time after that. Unlike being interviewed by the press, talking to academics brings no obvious advantages to party representatives and activists, hence we are very grateful to all respondents for agreeing to take part.

This is our second book together, run as a collaborative project of the University of Birmingham and Aston University. Over the years, the Politics Departments at the two institutions have joined forces to organise events on populism and Italian politics, where we could engage in enriching discussions with colleagues and visiting scholars. Our involvement in the Italian Politics Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association has also given us the opportunity to be part of an international network of experts on Italian politics and society. The research agendas of our colleagues have inspired us and helped us to situate the case of Bossi's party within the broader Italian and European political contexts, and for this we are grateful.

We also want to thank Tony Mason, former commissioning editor of Manchester University Press, and his successor, Rob Byron, for their support throughout the writing and editing process. Moreover, we are grateful to the anonymous reviewer who provided extensive feedback and helped us strengthen the content and presentation of our findings.

As we have mentioned above, researching and then writing this book has taken a very long time. We would like to thank our friends and families – yet again! – for supporting us throughout. Daniele would like to dedicate this book to his mother (Mara), partner (Liz) and children (Elena and Francesca), while Davide would like to dedicate it to his parents (Raffaele and Rosaria) and his husband (Arne).

Abbreviations

1

Introduction

Lombardy is a nation, Italy is only a state. (Bossi in La Repubblica,

1985)

[Italy] treats the Padanian people as internal colonies whose economies can be exploited and ethnicities subjugated. (Bossi in Lega Nord,

1997)

Ours is the first book written for an international readership that provides a full assessment of the Lega Nord's (LN – Northern League) fundamental features since its founding by Umberto Bossi in 1991 and up to 2012, when he had to relinquish its leadership. One of the oldest right-wing populist parties in western Europe, and one that has accumulated considerable experience in government at both national and subnational levels, the LN has much to teach us (and other parties) about how populists can achieve rootedness and success. It is an example of how populists are not simply challengers, as is often wrongly assumed by the literature, but may become established while continuing to rely on an anti-elite discourse, as the LN did (Albertazzi and Vampa, 2021). Our volume will interrogate the reasons behind the party's resilience, the importance of grassroots organisation and the involvement of party members in its activities. We will show that the LN has bucked the trend of many other European parties whose key policies and messages have become indistinguishable from those of their competitors, and whose willingness to fully engage people, explain the world to them and get them involved in politics appears to have greatly diminished in the last few decades.

The fact that today's League is the oldest party represented in the Italian Parliament and has achieved unprecedented electoral success under the new leadership of Matteo Salvini cannot be fully understood and explained without considering Umberto Bossi's legacy. Indeed, many of the party's recent developments – from its more marked Eurosceptic profile to its leader-centric campaigns – are rooted in episodes, decisions and ideological shifts that took place, or started, during the Bossi era. Notwithstanding his transformative role within the party, Salvini is therefore Bossi's heir in political terms: hence this book also provides important theoretical and empirical tools for interpreting some of the key strategic choices made by the new party leader.

¹

The LN was created by Bossi in 1991 via the merger of six regionalist Leagues (Biorcio, 1997: 39–53), of which the most successful in electoral terms was also Bossi's own creation a few years earlier: the Lega Lombarda (LL – Lombard League). This party was named after an alliance of Lombard communes that had fought the emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, in the twelfth century. Unlike other populist parties (both left and right wing) that have acquired a central role within their national political systems only after the Great Recession of 2007–8, the LN provides an excellent case study of a party that was already prominent as early as the 1990s (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015), when it was instrumental in bringing about the demise of the main political parties that had governed Italy since the Second World War. In analysing Bossi's League, the book will advance an argument about the party's success grounded on our understanding of it as a regionalist populist party that managed to politicise the economic and social gap between the North and South of the country for the first time, and embraced the mass party as its organisational model. These claims will be briefly substantiated below, to then be explored and discussed at length, particularly in

Chapters 2, 5 and 7.

A regionalist populist party embracing the mass party organisational model

In this book we argue that the most descriptively useful term for defining the LN's ideology is that of regionalist populist, as deployed by Roberto Biorcio (1991), Duncan McDonnell (2006) and Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (2015). Organised exclusively on a regional basis and aiming to cater for a regional electorate, regionalist parties aspire to government of, by and for a region (Mazzoleni and Müller, 2016: 5–6) which, they invariably say, enjoys a distinctive sense of collective identity grounded in some variable combination of ethnic, linguistic, economic, geographic, religious and historic traits (Albertazzi et al., 2018). Based on this framework, Bossi's LN fully satisfied all the criteria of a regionalist party. It advocated a territorial cause (i.e. the alleged need to defend and promote what it saw as its regions, broadly defined as the North and/or Padania), consistently presented northern Italy as ontologically different and distinctive from the rest of the country (Keating, 2009: viii; Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2005) and argued that the central state had damaged the interests and identities of the people living in these areas. Therefore, under Bossi the party always sought some form of autonomy for the North and filed candidates only in northern regions (with a couple of exceptions).

Regionalist parties often present themselves as anti-system (Hepburn, 2009), and the LN under Bossi was, again, no exception. This links to the second fundamental defining characteristic of the party: its populism. Hence, in classic populist fashion (Mudde, 2004; Taggart, 2000), the LN has always justified its juxtaposition of northern Italians with Rome by positing the former as a homogeneous, hard-working community of people attached to their distinctive traditions and the latter as the place where the political and cultural elites running the country (to the benefit of themselves and the South) can be found.

As for the party model adopted by Bossi, the evidence shows that this was that of the traditional mass party. Based on the available literature, we regard the three features listed below as those that define this organisational model:

a. the drive to recruit a large activist membership as a way to reach out to the public through canvassing, campaigning etc.;

b. rootedness on the ground and the provision of a variety of activities to members (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015);

c. most importantly, the preservation of collective identities through ideology (Panebianco, 1988: 268) by creating closed political communities of activists, by promoting social integration among them and by shaping their interpretations of political developments (Albertazzi,

2016).

Mass parties are characterised by vertical organisational ties, a clearly defined ideology and reliance on members for their success (Panebianco, 1988: 264). Moreover, they are rooted at the local level as a way to preserve collective identities through ideology (Panebianco, 1988: 268). Note that, according to this understanding of the fundamental features of the mass party, internal democracy is not an essential ingredient of this organisational model.

The League's adoption of the mass-party model suggests that Bossi sought to actively counteract the public disengagement with politics that was exacerbated in the country by the crisis of the state at the beginning of the 1990s (see next section). Importantly, in this volume we see the LN's ideological and organisational aspects as inextricably linked and consider the latter a natural consequence of the former. As Susan Scarrow (2014) has argued, organisational models are not neutral: in other words, ideologies tend to be compatible with certain organisational models, and not with others. As a self-appointed party of the people that wanted to take the place of pre-existing mass parties, such as the Democrazia Cristiana (DC – Christian Democracy) and the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI – Italian Communist Party), the League aimed to build a strong presence on the ground, including in small villages and towns, via an ever-growing network of branches. This eventually allowed Bossi to argue that his was a people's party and a territory-rooted party, as far removed from the elites as it could possibly be (Bossi and Vimercati, 1992). Unable to rely on the huge financial and public relations resources that other leaders had at their disposal during those years (see later), Bossi embraced an identitarian and communitarian approach and built an organisation that brought with it several practical advantages for a brand new party such as the LN. Ultimately, the mass-party organisational model:

a. was able to draw financial resources from its members, which was particularly important just after the party was founded;

b. made the mobilisation of an army of street canvassers and campaigners possible, hence counteracting the critical coverage which the League was getting in the national media (particularly by the public service broadcaster, Radiotelevisione italiana);

c. most importantly, helped to create a new subculture – which was quickly dubbed "leghismo" by the press (Diamanti, 1993: 16) – through which to shape identities and the beliefs of members and sympathisers.

In this sense, the LN positioned itself as a very different party, in organisational terms and the degree of members’ participation, from its competitor (and ally) on the right, that is, the personal party (Calise, 2000) launched by Silvio Berlusconi in 1994: Forza Italia (FI). This alleged alterity of the LN was also a source of great pride for its activists (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015: ch. 2). Generally, despite populism being an essential ingredient of both Bossi's and Berlusconi's ideologies, the two had very different needs as far as their party organisations were concerned. Berlusconi's party had to be personal (and remained as such in the decades to come), due to his proprietorial conception not only of his own creature, but of politics more generally. A vehicle that would allow Berlusconi to fulfil his political ambitions, FI did not need to rely on its members and their commitment to the cause for its success. It was the direct relationship between the leader and the voter – played out through the media that Berlusconi himself controlled (Albertazzi and Rothenberg, 2009) – that really mattered. Able to communicate through the leader's own means – and indeed even financed to a large extent by him, particularly at the beginning – FI did not embark on investing heavily in moulding and shaping the views of a committed group of dedicated followers who could then be trusted to bring its message into the world.

In recent decades, much academic debate has focused on the crisis of democracy affecting post-industrial societies – specifically its pillars of parties and popular participation (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000; Pharr and Putnam, 2000), with particular attention being devoted to the parties’ declining membership (Mair, 1994; van Biezen, Mair and Poguntke 2012; Whiteley, 2011). In their seminal article Going, Going, … Gone? The Decline of Party Membership in Contemporary Europe, Ingrid van Biezen, Peter Mair and Thomas Poguntke (2012: 42) argued that party membership data provided evidence of no less than the sheer extent of party transformation in Europe since the 1980s. One reason for the drop in the number of party members that has been noted in many countries since the 1980s has been identified in the increasing dominance of the party in public office over the party on the ground (Katz and Mair, 1994). As parties have turned into cartels that share out resources provided by the state (Katz and Mair, 1995; 2009), they are thought to lack the incentive to build or maintain a large membership, since they no longer believe that they need the financial and organisational support that the latter can provide (Mair, 2013; Scarrow, 2000; Whiteley, 2011). The literature on party organisation has therefore been unanimous in pronouncing the obsolescence of the mass-party model as famously described by Maurice Duverger (1964), pointing to similar political, sociological and technological changes as contributing to its seemingly inevitable downfall (particularly the erosion of traditional social milieux and the shift from local canvassing to mass-media campaigning for the dissemination of political messages) (Katz and Mair, 1995; 2009; Kirchheimer, 1966; Panebianco, 1988). One of the main arguments developed throughout this book will be that while the mass party has certainly become less of an ideal (Scarrow 2014) to which parties necessarily aspire, its adoption by the LN has been a fundamental reason for its success during Bossi's time, providing evidence of the model's resilience. In Chapters 5 and 7 we will therefore show how well Bossi was able to reap the benefits of this organisational model and exploit them to their full extent. By asking representatives to constantly keep in touch with their grassroots, via the organisation of meetings and events targeted at members, and by fostering the creation of closed communities of members via the party's presence and rootedness on the ground, the LN was able to secure a strong commitment to the party's objectives by its activists. In turn, activists fully subscribed to the ideology and system of values put forward by their party, were happy to rely on Bossi for explanations of political and social developments and enjoyed the feelings of empowerment and sense of belonging which activism provided to them (Albertazzi, 2016). In other words, the adoption of the mass-party model by Bossi's Lega worked, helping the party effectively to shape group identities and create strong emotional bonds between the party and its members.

As already mentioned, the fact that Bossi was a strong believer in the virtues of the membership-based mass-party model (Bossi and Vimercati, 1992: 41, 73–74) does not mean that the LN had solid democratic procedures, and that members would be given many opportunities to influence its strategy, message and choice of representatives (see Chapter 5). On the contrary, and mainly due to the aura of invincibility surrounding the leader until he eventually fell from grace, Bossi was able to keep an iron grip on his party and avoid the bickering and infighting that beset populist radical parties, such as the Austrian Freedom party. As Duncan McDonnell (2016: 728) explains, Bossi was very clearly considered by interviewees [i.e. party members] to possess unique and extraordinary powers and there was unconditional acceptance of his personal authority. This allowed Bossi to go as far as to override the internal party rules when convenient via the informal use of central powers (McDonnell and Vampa, 2016: 114), hence keeping a tight grip on the party and being able to deal very swiftly with critics and opponents (normally by throwing them out). In the end, Bossi's LN remained a disciplined, united campaigning and governing machine, highly centralised and dominated by elites from a single region, Lombardy (McDonnell and Vampa, 2016: 126).

To sum up, in this book we study and discuss three fundamental features of Bossi's League that we regard as key ingredients of its resilience and success:

a. its ideological coherence and consistency, at least as far as its key regionalist themes of greater northern autonomy, federalism and decentralisation were concerned. These were framed in populist/anti-establishment terms, which, over time, became more clearly right-wing. Indeed, in the late 1990s and 2000s the party placed increasing emphasis on anti-immigration and law-and-order policy stances (Chapter 2). These, however, did not replace the original territorial mission of the party, but were subsumed to it. Thus, thanks to its ideological core, the LN was able to maintain continuous electoral relevance (Chapter 3) and have an influence on the political agenda by gaining significant representation in municipalities, regions, the national Parliament and government (

Chapter 4);

b. Bossi's skills as leader, particularly the loyalty that his charisma – widely acknowledged within the party – was able to inspire among party ranks,