equally opposed to his northern-autonomist agenda. His close collaborator here was PCI veteran Massimo d’Alema, a leading figure in the PDS, able to promise the centre-left’s votes for an alternative government. The two men’s meeting at Bossi’s little-used Rome address would rather bathetically be named the ‘pact of the sardines’ – an allusion to the sparse snacks that the Lega Nord leader was able to muster for his guests. It was nonetheless significant, as Bossi agreed to pull his party out of the Pole of Freedoms and join the PDS in backing an alternative administration led by former Bank of Italy director-general Lamberto Dini. This ‘technical’ government was appointed by president Eugenio Oscar Luigi Scalfaro in the name of piloting Italy toward a fresh general election, but it also had the task of ‘cleaning up the public finances’ – above all through a reform to cut the state’s pension bill.
Supporters of this deal to back Dini characterised it as a break in ‘political government’, instead inaugurating an administration which could impose reforms that stood above ordinary party divides. Such an arrangement had been premiered in April 1993, in the final months of the First Republic, when former Bank of Italy governor Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was appointed head of a majority-DC cabinet, in the first republican administration to be led by an unelected figure. In the Italian political system, no prime minister is directly elected, and indeed it was only through the rise of Berlusconi (and later Renzi) that this office assumed such a strong electoral-media role, more akin to a presidential system. But what was new in the technical cabinets headed by first Ciampi then Dini was that they each relied on personnel drawn from outside the electoral arena, lifted to office in the name of correcting the inefficiencies of democratic politics. Every minister in Dini’s cabinet was an unelected technocrat, and its base in parliament bore no reference to the coalitions that had stood in the 1994 general election.
The Dini government was also notable for enshrining a characteristic trait of the Second Republic, itself driven by Italy’s changed international position. This cabinet of technocrats was built on the consensus that decisions were needed to adapt the Italian public finances to the conditions of the European Economic and Monetary Union, even if no democratically elected party wanted to take direct responsibility for implementing them. For the hard-right Lega as for the ex-Communist PDS, the pursuit of certain policies – and in particular the need for so-called ‘balanced budgets’, with rock-bottom levels of public borrowing – now stood above normal democratic competition. Even Forza Italia abstained on confidence votes during the Dini administration, rather than try to block its work. In the period of the post-2008 economic crisis, these principles would again assert themselves in the technocratic cabinet led by former Goldman Sachs advisor Mario Monti from 2011 to 2013, as well as by the grand coalition that immediately followed it.
There was nothing incompatible between this logic and the Lega’s identitarian radicalism, which in fact hardened in the period of its break with Berlusconi. Within just years of its founding, the Lega Nord had become a key force in a national government, throwing its weight behind a tycoon and then a former central banker in order to further its aim of trimming the Italian state. But the parliamentary pact with the PDS had not amounted to a wholesale dissolution of left-right divides. When the early general election came in April 1996 the Lega Nord found itself standing outside of both the main electoral blocs – and the results were paradoxical. While the Lega’s overall vote share rose two points – to over 10 per cent of the national electorate – it was squeezed by the same first-past-the-post system that had powered its initial rise. Already in January 1995, Bossi’s ‘pact of the sardines’ had seen his party lose 40 of its 118 MPs, who remained loyal to Berlusconi’s Pole of Freedoms. With the 1996 general election, the Lega was reduced to just 59 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The Lega’s attempt to deal with these setbacks was defined less by a move to the right as by the sharper stance it now adopted against the central Italian state. Having repudiated the centre-right alliance and Berlusconi, Bossi pushed for a change in the party’s image, adopting an openly secessionist agenda. As the promise of reforming the Italian state waned, in 1997 Bossi renamed the party the ‘Lega Nord for the Independence of Padania’, insisting that this ‘country’ straddling the Po Valley from the Alps to the Adriatic should cast off the South altogether. Yet, if this secessionism marked a sharp break from the typical codes of republican politics, there were also elements of continuity with the agenda the Lega Nord had followed in backing Dini. With Italy widely expected to fail to meet the convergence criteria to join the euro upon its launch in 1999, Bossi insisted that the wealth-ier northern regions should not allow the South to drag them down: a new and independent Padania would, instead, be able to take its place in the concert of European nations.
There were certain tensions between the Lega Nord’s pro-business agenda and its folk nationalism – the radical-right party’s secessionism represented a clear destabilising force in Italian politics. Yet Bossi also sought to diversify the party’s image and make it more like the ‘nation’ it sought to rally. This was the impetus behind the unofficial Padanian Parliament it created in 1997, which would supposedly serve as the launchpad for a new state. In this cause, a series of Potemkin parties were organised, from the Padanian Communists (whose candidates included one M. Salvini), to a list aligned to Bonino’s Radicals, or the top-placed lists, respectively named European Democrats – Padanian Labour and Liberal Democrats. The Lega claimed that around six million people had participated in this vote – far beyond its own four million tally in the 1996 general election. The institution created by this election had no actual powers. Yet this also set a precedent by which the Lega Nord used unofficial referendums to mobilise its own base, a dress rehearsal designed to show that a Padanian state could, or even would, soon come into being.
In Government, against Rome
Yet Padanian secessionism brought major strategic problems, even in elections for regional councils – bodies with a wide array of powers over health care, education and transport, as well as an important platform for propaganda. And the Lega had no chance of securing absolute majorities in such councils without the aid of the wider, all-Italian centre-right parties. In the 1996 general election, the party had been isolated from both main political blocs, and the success of Romano Prodi’s centre-left government in bringing Italy into the euro in 1999 scotched even the notional possibility of Padania joining the single currency on its own. Bossi’s politics of slimming down the state and pushing privatisation were now the mainstream, but its pro-independence stance was minoritarian. It was thus caught between its ability to mobilise a radical minority, including in party activism, and its need to form broader alliances to win first-past-the-post contests. Hence, for all its rhetoric on the impossibility of reforming the Italian state, by the 1999 European elections the Lega Nord had turned back toward a pact with Forza Italia and the smaller right-wing parties. Just as the experience of 1994–96 had highlighted Berlusconi’s need to keep the Lega on the side, Bossi would, over the next two decades, repeatedly return to electoral pacts with his eternal brother enemy.
In the era bracketed by the war on terror and the financial crisis, the Lega Nord’s involvement in the Berlusconi governments of 2001–6 and 2008–11 would begin its conversion into a more conventionally hard-right force, indeed the tycoon’s strongest ally within the centre-right coalition. Even beyond the Bossi-Berlusconi connection, there were also specific areas of accord between the postfascists and the Lega. Having at least muted its commitment to destroy the Italian state, around the turn of the millennium, the northern chauvinist party increasingly took up the campaign against immigration. In 2001, Bossi buried the hatchet with AN’s Gianfranco Fini to co-author a bill that massively expanded the apparatus of migrant detention and expulsion. At the same time, in the bid to maintain an ersatz ‘outsiderishness’, Bossi increasingly resorted to shock communication tactics, for instance in his comments that the navy ought to fire on the boats of arriving refugees. This harsh identitarianism – expressed in the form of victimhood – was also put on display in election posters portraying a Native American with the tagline ‘They didn’t control immigration, now they live on reserves!’
The Lega Nord’s tonal divergence from the codes of republican institutions sat oddly with its actual presence in government. Clinging to their own territorial identity, Bossi’s activist base did not warm to Berlusconi or even to leghista officials serving in ‘the Rome government’