It seemed that the collapse of the old party order had brought a sudden rewriting of its origin story. Indeed, this offensive especially exploited the discredit into which the parties of the Resistance had now fallen. As il manifesto’s Lucio Magri put it, after the Bribesville scandal, the democratic republic born of 1945 was no longer bathed in heroism but damned ‘as the home of bribes and a party regime that had excluded citizens’; the largest Resistance party, the PCI, was remembered only as ‘Moscow’s fifth column’ therein.13 This narrative was even taken up by many who had long laboured in its own ranks. Exemplary was Giorgio Napolitano, who joined the PCI in December 1945 and embraced Stalinist orthodoxy before becoming a key leader of the party’s most moderate migliorista (gradualist) wing. In the 1990s, he sharply repudiated the party’s record, which he recast as a regime of lies unable to face up to its own essential criminality. As president from 2006, Napolitano went so far as to commemorate the Communist partisans’ victims in the foibe of north-eastern Italy, including known fascists.
The Lega Nord
Some anti-fascists did remain mobilised, unwilling to swallow the more flagrant misrepresentations of the republic’s founding values. This was visible as early as 25 April 1994, in the commemorations which marked the traditional anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Nazi–Fascist rule. When Lega leader Umberto Bossi attempted to join the Liberation Day march in Milan, just four weeks after he had helped elect the most right-wing government in decades, he was quickly driven away by protestors. The Lega Nord was not itself of Mussolinian origin: rooted in the Northern regions where the Resistance was strongest, it expressed a sometimes virulent hostility to Fini’s ex-MSI, refusing to seal any direct electoral alliance with the postfascists even when both parties were joined to Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. The Lega Nord leader later received a suspended jail sentence after an outburst when he suggested that his members might go ‘door to door’ and deal with the fascists ‘like the partisans did’. Yet Bossi’s initial promise that he would ‘never’ join a government that included postfascists proved short-lived.
Bossi’s ability to shift on such a profound question of political identity points to the highly contradictory and opportunistic character of the party he created, as volatile as the political times in which it came to prominence. Its origins lay in the late 1970s, when, spurred by the creation of regional governments, new parties took form in the wealthiest parts of Italy to demand more funds for their own regions. In the 1987 general election, Bossi was elected senator for the Lega Lombarda – a force active in the region surrounding Milan – and, in 1989, it merged with similar groups that had arisen in five other regions, united by a common decentralising agenda. A breakthrough in the 1990 local elections (where the Lega came second-place across Lombardy) showed that it was a force to be reckoned with, and in particular its ability to break through the class binary which had done so much to structure the First Republic’s political system. In 1991, the various leagues formed a single party, though, in some contexts, they also maintained their own regional names.
The leagues had made their first advances in regions that had once loyally voted for the DC. Key was a first breakthrough in Veneto, a strongly Catholic region of particular cultural idiosyncrasies, which had long enjoyed an outsized representation in DC cabinets. In the 1950s, this agricultural northeastern region was as poor as southern Italy and marked by similarly high emigration, but its rapid industrialisation over subsequent decades transformed it into the richest part of Italy.14 Yet as Veneto raced ahead, the local DC led by Antonio Bisaglia was accused of channelling the region’s taxes toward an overbearing central state, making local firms pay for its handouts in the less successful south. Where Bisaglia toyed with the notion of creating an autonomous party akin to Bavaria’s Christlich-Soziale Union, some local DC cadres went further, in 1979 forming the regionalist Liga Veneta. Building its profile over the 1980s, the Liga would soon exploit the crisis of the First Republic, coming second to the DC in Veneto in the 1992 general election.
Indeed, if the decline of the First Republic presented a vacuum, some ‘outsider’ forces caught the mood of the time better than others. In an insightful article remarking on the Lega’s early breakthroughs, Ilvo Diamanti highlights its capacities as a ‘political entrepreneur’ – a force which captures and mobilises the disillusionment with some other party, before using this base to conquer a broader popular hegemony.15 Both the Liga Veneta and Bossi’s Lega Lombarda at first saw particular success in areas long held by the Christian-Democrats but where the social glue provided by the Catholic Church was undermined by secularisation. This, however, also corresponded to a changing approach to public life, less defined by unifying cultural visions or even collective material demands, as by a transactional relationship between the atomised citizen and the state. This shift also had a particular class basis – indeed, the leagues were at first heavily based among (mostly male) small businessmen and their employees, categories in which the Lega still enjoys relatively high support. But as the Lega Nord became a more recognised political force, its identitarian appeal became more transversal – and its demography more representative of the areas where it is rooted.16
Because its rise has broadly coincided with the decline of the old left – allowing it to win elections even in historic ‘red heartlands’ – the Lega Nord is often erroneously presented as a ‘welfare-chauvinist’ party, namely one which claims that reducing migrant numbers is necessary in order to protect and extend the welfare state. Yet, despite its attacks on spending on migrants, the Lega Nord was from the outset also dominated by anti-statism and the call for sharp tax cuts. At its founding congress in 1991, Bossi explicitly connected his regionalism to the simmering discontent against the First Republic and its so-called ‘elephantiasis’.The Lega’s ability to transcend a purely middle-class electorate owed not so much to the promise of welfare as to the fact that it presented corruption as a characteristically ‘southern’ problem from which northerners of all classes could be liberated. Bossi told his followers that it was no surprise that the voter revolt against the First Republic had arisen ‘in the areas of industrial civilisation, where citizens’ relation to institutions is more critical – though it will come in the South too’.17 Indeed, even before the Bribesville revelations, the Lega was advancing much of what soon became the common sense about Italy’s institutions and in particular the need to break the power of a high taxation, a corrupt state machine weighed down by patronage, and clientelism.
The end of the First Republic had raised the importance of ‘anti-corruption’ in a contradictory and limited way. Contra the Lega’s own presentation, both the case of the Milan PSI and Bossi’s own behaviour shed doubt on whether abuses could be pinpointed to the South specifically. Indeed, if the Lega Nord’s path to prominence was eased by the demise of the old parties, it immediately moved to claim the same privileges – and more illicit benefits – available to its predecessors. In March 1993 Bossi marched his supporters into a Milan courtroom to shake hands with prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro, congratulating him for his moves against the local post-Communist PDS. However, within just months Bossi was himself in the firing line, as a fresh set of hearings – the Enimont trial – exposed the bribes that chemicals giant Montedison had made to figures across the political spectrum: Bettino Craxi, local DC members, and also the Lega leader. Appearing in court at the turn of 1994,