Umberto Bossi died last Thursday after being confined to the political margins since 2012, when a party funding scandal forced him to resign as leader of the Lega Nord, which he founded in the 1980s. Yet it is hard to deny how profoundly, and enduringly, Bossi and the party he created transformed Italian politics.
The Lega was pioneering in its form (its absolute leader-centrism), in its political focuses (regional autonomy, hostility to taxes, an exclusionary model of welfare, immigration), and in its structure (the emergence of a right-wing alliance combining neoliberalism, conservatism, and nationalism).
It also made a mark on legislation, from a reactionary immigration law cosigned by Bossi to a constitutional reform devolving powers to regions — though this was introduced by the center-left government in 2001 to compete with his Lega. Perhaps most innovative was the Lega’s language: the normalization of vulgarity, profanity, and violent aggression as key elements in the artificial construction of the “popular leader.”
Bossi aspired to be a “founding father,” and in a sense he was. He never did found the nation of his dreams — the mooted split that he termed Padania, in a now-sidelined project to separate northern Italy from the rest of the country. Yet Bossi was a founding father of the nation he pretended to hate and, in fact, helped govern for two decades: Italy itself.
It is hard to deny how profoundly, and enduringly, Umberto Bossi and the party he created transformed Italian politics.
Seen from the outside, he embodied every stereotype of Italianness: genius, braggadocio, vanity, undisciplined talent, verbal incontinence, provincialism, a tendency toward trickery and subterfuge, inconsistency, and a taste for melodrama. Bossi was the creator of the only political movement capable of weathering the great crisis of the early 1990s: the Lega Nord. For a long time, before being transformed by his successor Matteo Salvini, it was the oldest…
Auteur: Lorenzo Zamponi
