The League with its chest out: the sly devotion to Salvini and membership of a tribal party. What now?

"You have to know how to make a choice in good time, not end up there out of contrariness." Riding the wave of emotion still fresh from Guccini’s farewell, to the League supporters of yesteryear, the people of the North and the hallowed Pratone, the Lombards and the Venetians who now seem, or wish, to raise their heads once more and send the retired Captain Salvini packing (“free, free, freeee / nos Domine!”) it would be wise to reflect a little, just before taking action, on a crucial lesson from the Maestrone: "Tu giri adesso con le tette al vento / io ci giravo già vent'anni fa". In love, but even more so in politics, one must know how to choose in good time. One of the recurring – and, all things considered, sensible, if perhaps not particularly imaginative – criticisms levelled by politicians and observers regarding the discontent amongst much of the party’s traditional grassroots, which has finally become tangible enough to rouse its leadership of governors and administrators, is the suspicion that it is now well past the deadline. The damage in the Po Valley has already been done, and things are even worse for the voters; whilst the regions of the legendary and much-maligned North (even by the ‘friendly’ government) have now been left in ruins.

Attilio Fontana’s interview two days ago, “we are calling for a sustainable and effective review of the party’s approach”, in which the fateful phrase “step backwards” was still on the interviewer’s lips, but the response was finally unequivocal: “no solution should be ruled out a priori. ‘The League does not fear renewal’ was hailed as the blare of the hunting horn of the resurgent Po Valley barbarians. ‘Our greatest asset is our many local councillors, who embody on a daily basis the practical approach we demand of the League’. Fontana’s outburst, and the others during this sweltering Po Valley summer, were greeted as the long-awaited, all too long-awaited, full-throated cry of the northern tenors: the truest voice of the League, long stifled in its throat. Even if, for the moment, there is talk of the creation of an ‘association’ – not exactly the storming of the Winter Palace.

On the other side of the fateful riverbank (of the Adda, of the Po) – and, of course, in a voice that is just a touch less persuasive, the hoarse voice of the besieged garrisons – stand the staunch supporters of the League for Salvini, the Praetorian Guard of the revolution that had transformed the very nature (and DNA?) of Bossi’s movement, the oldest political party still active in Italy today. The governor of Veneto, Alberto Stefani, said: “I ask myself: who is causing a stir today because, at the time, they chose not to stand as a candidate and win the support of the party’s activists?” And he is not entirely wrong – except that in politics one can change one’s mind, because politics evolves – except that there are two factors that cannot be overlooked when it comes to the League.

Firstly, there is the background. Salvini’s reign over the Lega lasted thirteen years, during which he picked up the party’s banner – a tattered rag representing just four per cent – from barren ground and led it to triumphs prior to Papeete. Back then, no one objected. Even though there had always been grumbling about the transformation of the autonomist, northern-focused League into a nationalist, sovereignist party (the League for Salvini Premier, an excess of egomania). Nostalgics dismissed them as such. Unrealistic. But in 2022, the Northern Committee was blessed by Umberto Bossi, alongside Roberto Castelli and other stalwarts from that heroic era. Then came the defectors from the Grande Nord, and further unease.

The other factor is called DNA, or the ‘Padanian spirit’ – an indestructible bond with the ‘territories’ and with the founding myths: autonomism, self-government, a sense of popular belonging that Pope Montini would have described as ‘a sui generis ethnic community’. A bond of belonging that has managed to weather the crises of the now ailing Senatur’s ‘Magic Circle’, of diamonds and danée; capable of rising again during the ‘night of the brooms’ and of believing once more in Bobo Maroni’s myth of the ‘dreaming barbarians’. A political and sociological resilience that has but one equal in Italian political history: that of the former rank and file of the PCI. And the comparison is not out of place. For the League – be it the Northern League or Salvini’s League – has its own Trotskyist, or perhaps Leninist, nature: loyalty to the party, to the Line, to the Secretary, whoever he may be, has been the true glue holding together four decades of a history lived recklessly, and with an endless series of blunders and stumbles that have always constituted the flip side of the coin of a relatively or effectively good government, a territorial union.

It is these two elements – the somewhat overly cunning, timid or cynical submission to the new leader, who in the meantime was shifting the locus of the myth from Padania to Putin’s steppe, and the tribe’s unshakeable loyalty – that are now coming to the fore. And contradicting one another, and casting doubt on the success of the new resurrection: the Association is like the brooms of yesteryear, with fewer dreams. On the one hand, the photos of the governors sitting round the table do not hold the same appeal for voters (those fleeing towards Vannacci, but also the others, as perplexed as performers beneath a circus big top). On the other hand, the new leaders – who have political experience and know-how, and may well have valid arguments – lack that anointing by the god Po, that battle cry which was the prerogative of Bossi, and, it must be said, of the early Salvini too – the hallmark of new leaders. Of those who know how to seize the right moment. They needed to make the right choice in time: now, with their backs exposed, it risks being only Vannacci who gets a look-in.