The charismatic populist leader of the
Lega Nord movement, who claims to defend the interests of rich northern Italy. His politics have oscillated between
federalism and outright
separatism, even seeing him become the champion of a newly mythical nation,
Padania, and his campaigns have frequently been laced with rhetoric against
immigration or against the inhabitants of poorer southern Italy. It's earned him comparisons to the
Austrian right-winger
Jörg Haider, although the
boorish Bossi is far from Haider's slick political style.
Bossi was born in
1943 in the small town of
Varese, and his early career had few of the hallmarks of a political aspirant. True,
Tony Blair apparently used to play a mean guitar of his own too, but Bossi worked intermittently as a factory hand for several years before studying medicine in
Milan and becoming a
laboratory technician instead.
According to Bossi's spin on his political baptism, he was inspired to the Northern cause when he struck up a friendship in
1979 with
Bruno Salvadori, whose
Union Valdotaine group stood up for the autonomy of a small French-speaking region. In fact, it took quite some coaxing to talk Bossi into the Union, but once inside he became Salvadori's loyal lieutenant and bailed the Union out of its debts - watching his first marriage break apart in the process - after Salvadori died in a car crash.
Roma Ladrona
Bossi's first movement of his own, the
Lega Lombarda (
Lombard League), coalesced in
1982 from his circle of friends in Varese: some, such as
Roberto Maroni, would remain key associates throughout his political life. Ever since
the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, the country had grappled with the
Southern Question, namely, how far the industrial north should subsidise the agricultural south. Stereotypes of south and north had evolved to match.
The Lega Lombarda's early years were spent raising its profile by means of the party newspaper, regular public meetings, the well-known
regionalist pastime of painting place names in local dialect on to road signs, and, most of all, energetic campaigns of
graffiti. '
Roma, Ladrona' ('Thieving Rome') became a frequent sight on Lombard walls, attacking central government for favouring the south at northern expense. Their most famous images depicted a Lombard hen, a regional symbol, laying
golden eggs only to see them stolen by a caricatured southern peasant.
Italian politics was already notorious for corruption and
clientilism; as the 1980s went on, Bossi's arguments that Rome needed to be refreshed with a
clean slate found fruitful ground among the small businessmen of the north. In
1983, his instructions to sympathisers to spoil their ballots with the words Free Lombardy had appeared almost as quaint as the campaign to include
Jedi as a religion on the
United Kingdom's census; in
1987, the Lombard League sent its first deputies to the Italian parliament.
Bossi formed the Lega Nord in
1990, unifying his Lega Lombarda with over a dozen other autonomist parties. The set-piece rally announcing the new party took place at
Pontida, the site where the twenty cities of the first Lega Lombarda had forged their alliance in
1167 against the Holy Roman Emperor,
Frederick Barbarossa. The event almost recalled the Spanish nationalists' veneration of
Covadonga, from which the centuries-long
Reconquista began, if not the devotion of Serbian nationalists to the site of
Kosovo Polje.
Repubblica del Nord
Under the banner of the Lega Nord, Bossi attempted to make his mark on national politics by calling for Italy to be reorganised as a
confederation: the Republic of the North would be joined by republics of the centre and the south. In the midst of the massive
Tangentopoli corruption scandals in which the traditional parties were implicated, the Lega's
novelty factor helped it to fourth place in the elections of
1992.
However, Bossi lost this particular edge and his federalist dream with the advent of media mogul
Silvio Berlusconi and his newly-formed
Forza Italia party in
1994. Understanding that Berlusconi would disastrously split Bossi's own core centre-right vote, he entered a victorious coalition with Forza Italia instead: if you can't beat them,
join them.
14 Lega deputies were rewarded with various ministerial jobs, including Maroni as Minister of the Interior, but the details of the repartition caused Bossi to split with
Gianfranco Miglio, the university professor whose writing had paved the way for Bossi's advocacy of the three republics.
Bossi's part in the first Berlusconi government did not last the year: Berlusconi, somewhat understandably, took more interest in national media policy than in federalist reform, and Bossi chafed at the bit, delighting silly-season reporters that August by announcing irritably that in the 1980s he had held back what verged on the entire population of
Bergamo from marching on Rome. He walked out of the coalition with Forza Italia and
Gianfranco Fini's semi-fascists that December. Perhaps much to his satisfaction, the government did not survive the disagreement.
Forza Padania
The Lega remained the fourth largest party in the
1996 elections. Still in opposition, Bossi became an outright separatist for a time and developed the policy for which the Lega is perhaps best known internationally: the separate nationhood of Padania. According to the Lega's ideologue
Gilberto Oneto, the Italian peninsula did not begin in the north but with the
Apennine mountains, and 'Padanians' were a Celtic people ethnically separate from other Italians and in fact had more in common with the
Romansch of Switzerland, Germans in the
Tyrol and even
Slovenes than with the Latins of the south.
Padania received its christening in September
1996, in an event which tapped into the same reserves of
folklore as the Pontida rallies: Bossi ceremonially filled a flask with water from the source of the river
Po, took it downstream to
Venice and poured it into the lagoon, symbolising the declaration of Padanian independence. Somehow. In official photographs, Bossi became increasingly fond of his
green shirt, which it now helped ambitious Lega members to wear.
Bossi was anxious to maintain tight control over his party, and new joiners had to serve a six-month probation with Supporter status before they were able to apply for promotion to
Ordinary Militant. Militants could be demoted if they failed to maintain a sufficient level of activism, and those found to belong to any other party were summarily ejected. Even
Lenin, in his years strengthening the backbone of the
Bolshevik party, might have approved.
The emphasis on Padania led to disaffection within the Lega Nord: the
Liga Veneta, representing the
Veneto region, muttered that if anybody was reviving nations then
Venetia deserved to be one too. The polemic came to a head in
1998, when Bossi expelled the Liga Veneta's leader
Fabrizio Comencino. Other moderates believed that the Padanian antics hardly suited the serious party they expected the Lega to be.
Crocodile Tears
Since toning down the Padanian rhetoric, Bossi has turned his anger towards the
EU, while seeing federalism becoming a mainstream
buzzword in Italian politics. Despite the unpleasantness of 1994, he resumed the coalition with Forza Italia in 2001, becoming a catch-all
Minister for Reform in the Berlusconi government.
Bossi's denunciation of the EU as both 'Stalinist' and fascist' provoked outspoken comments from one of his fellow ministers,
Rocco Buttiglione, that any further remarks on the same lines would give the impression that Italy did not believe in Europe.
Resuming a Lega tactic of 1990, Bossi has also taken a hard line on immigration. When nearly a thousand
Kurds attempted to enter the country after their ship sank off
Catania, Bossi described anxieties for their condition as '
crocodile tears' and asked for them to be sent back to
Iraq. In June
2002, he and Gianfranco Fini attempted to introduce the so-called
Bossi-Fini Law, making
work permit regulations more stringent, introducing
fingerprinting for all new immigrants and cracking down on the
human traffickers who help them on their way.
This second spell in government did not quell Bossi's taste for the bizarre, and in November
2002 he denounced a TV miniseries about
Napoleon Bonaparte. According to Bossi, the show, which starred
Gerard Depardieu,
Isabella Rossellini and
John Malkovich, glamorised a foreign occupier who imported the alien ideals of the
French Revolution.
In April
2003, Bossi gave Berlusconi reason to suspect he was up to his old, coalition-wrecking tricks, when he insisted that one of Italy's state television channels,
Rai Due, transfer its headquarters to the Lombard city of Milan. During the argument, he blamed Catholic parties in the ruling coalition for defeating a recent bill which would have stopped any individual from owning more than a set number of television stations and thwarted any monopolitstic aspirations Berlusconi might have harboured.
Read more:
Anna Cento Bull and Mark Gilbert, The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics
Damian Tambini, Nationalism in Italian Politics