Out of Their League

...Bossi's populism and Marxist background made such an arrangement plausible, and some local League candidates had already won by running on both slates...

...Two years later it garnered 8.7 percent and 55 seats in parliament...

...At 8:35 the officers stormed the tower with an extending ladder and arrested the men without a shot being fired, even though the occupiers possessed a nine-millimeter submachine gun and 70 rounds of ammunition...

...Even by his own standards, he went too far when he admonished the "Polish Pope" to stay out of Italian politics, a breach of etiquette from which he soon backpedaled...

...Even more discomfiting to Bossi than teaming with neo-Fascists was doing so with someone with a similar agenda to his own...

...Its name was based on Padus, the Latin name for the Po, and its symbol was a green, six-rayed "Sun of the Alps" oddly suggestive of a marijuana leaf...

...MarkFRANCIS X. ROCCA is managing editor of TAS...

...And in September of that year he staged a three-day demonstration along 408 miles of the Po, in which he sailed seaward in a catamaran, periodically stopping to receive the cheers of supporters on shore, and upon arrival in Venice read the "Declaration of Independence and Sovereignty of Padania...

...That is the beauty of our dear Umberto Bossi...

...Ten days later PDS leader Massimo D'Alema became prime minister, heading a coalition that ranged from unreconstructed Communists to former Christian Democrats...

...In the Veneto, which in a generation had changed from a poor farming society into a drab but prospserous industrial one, the Venice of the Doges offered more dignity and romance than factories and strip malls...

...Nineteen-ninety-two also began a series of prosecutions of politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen that revealed a network of corruption which came to be known as Tangentopoli ("Bribesville" or "Kickback City...

...They could spend (or at least carry) money resembling lire, the most conspicuous difference being Bossi's visage on the notes...

...This grandiose, entertaining, and totally unrealistic crusade did not conquer at the polls...

...symbol of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, whose existence as an independent state had ended 200 years earlier, almost to the very day—was hanging from the top of the 34-foot-high structure...

...Mussolini's actual granddaughter Alessandra ran successfully for the A.N...

...For the same reason the League has also exploited anxiety over non-European immigration, though with nothing like the virulence of France's Jean-Marie Le Pen...

...Almost immediately, however, he is claiming that southerners "would be dressing in skins and living in caves if it weren't for us," and that the ungrateful near-savages are waging a campaign of "gynecological" genocide: The southern-controlled Roman bureaucracy subsidizes the fertility of southern mothers while sending southern "matrimonial counselors" north to propagandize for birth control...

...At the start of the 1990's the Italian political establishment was beginning to fall apart...

...In other words: The reformer who rose to prominence demanding the breakdown of big government—and who then unseated the man with the most realistic chance of accomplishing that—has cast his lot with the forces of centralism...

...Also in October, Prodi's government fell when his coalition came apart in a disagreement over the budget...

...That this arrangement bred complacency, inefficiency, and corruption was evident to all, yet in a country that straddled the East-West divide and whose Communist party was the largest in the West, most also recognized the status quo as a necessary bulwark against the Soviet threat...

...in Naples that year...

...By sunrise the place was surrounded by hundreds of police, on the ground and circling in helicopters overhead...

...Nonetheless, the combative Lombard vowed that unless there was progress toward government decentralization he would withdraw in six months...

...For over 40 years the country had been run by a system that was superficially volatile—governments rising and 35 falling at the rate of more than one each year—but really quite stable, with the Christian Democrats dominating every governing coalition, even those headed by Socialist prime ministers...

...Bossi later compounded the offense by opposing a Veneto-wide referendum on autonomy for the region and attempting to purge party members who sought that goal...

...Now, however, Bossi was calling for them to subordinate their own identities in favor of a nation he had invented...

...It seemed unlikely in 1996 that a united Italy would meet the Maastricht criteria on debt, deficit, and inflation and interest rates in time...

...As one later put it, he sought to "impose a Padanian identity...

...Every June it sponsored a reenactment of the baffle of Legnano (n76) in full period costume...

...Berlusconi in turn contributed an invaluable weapon for any political campaign: his three private TV networks, the competition to stateowned RAI 1, 2, and 3 (controlled by the Christian Democrats, Socialists, and Communists respectively under the system of lottizzazione, or "parceling out...

...The mayor of Milan, the nation's financial capital, claimed a year and a half ago that his city pays n percent of Italy's taxes while enjoying only 2 percent of public spending...

...Feudal, Mafia-ridden, and relatively lacking in natural resources, the south of Italy has long been poorer than the rest...

...Last October dissident Veneti finally broke off from Bossi's group to form "The Veneto Republic League," and the two parties promptly went into litigation over rights to the Lion of St...

...The incident itself would even help to precipitate the movement's fragmentation...

...Bossi, whose wife is Sicilian, does not usually engage in the most inflammatory anti-southern invective himself...

...By February 1993 there were over 15o members of parliament under criminal investigation, including the former Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, to this day a fugitive in Tunisia...

...The desire to stop supporting the south is, above all else, the cause with which Bossi has been able to bind together Lombards, Veneti (i.e., people of the Veneto, including Venetians), and Piedmontese, with their distinct dialects and jealously cultivated self-images...

...The League got five cabinet posts, the same number as the neo-Fascists, but Bossi's spoils included the powerful interior (i.e., justice) ministry and the ministry for institutional reforms...

...The armored car, however, turned out to be a farm tractor covered with sheet metal...

...He stayed for seven, during which time he repeatedly accused his coalition partner of being compromised by business interests, and called for anti-trust legislation to break up Berlusconi's TV empire...

...as "grandchildren of Il Duce...

...Nevertheless, the League provides a more-than-hospitable environment for nastiness just below the surface of temperate 36 March 1999 • The American Spectator rhetoric...

...He had talked before of secession, but this had seemed little more than a trope for autonomy...

...Bossi scorned the A.N...

...In municipal elections that November, Berlusconi's party won less than half its proportion of the March vote...

...Bossi had predicted a total turnout of two million for his "March to the Sea," but the audience at his final rally numbered about io,000...

...The prime minister encountered trouble from other sources, too, coming under investigation for bribery, and drawing suspicion with an attempt to rein in prosecutors...

...The end of the Cold War having reduced the need for large nation-states as protection against external threats, in some of those states the richer regions have sought to break free of the poorer...

...In a city where wheeled transportation is completely forbidden, this alone would have been worthy of comment, even if one of the vehicles had not been a green armored car...

...These organizations stressed the distinctive histories, traditions, and dialects of their regions and called for their autonomy from Rome...

...Fellow politicians have not found this frankness so endearing, however...

...The eight were part of a small group seeking the restoration of the Venetian Republic...

...Down in the toe of the boot, Calabria has a per capita GDP half as high (and an illiteracy rate several times larger...

...The seizure of the St...

...For the March 1994 general elections Bossi joined the right-wing Freedom Alliance led by Silvio Berlusconi, a media magnate who had entered politics only three months earlier...

...One of the most outspoken questioners was Umberto Bossi, a former Communist and a member of the Senate since ro87...

...Although in some ways it seemed a natural pairing—both Bossi and Berlusconi championed lower taxes and less government regulation—the alliance was uneasy from the start...

...He dismisses the League's reputation for bigotry as the distortions of the press...

...This approach by definition puts a limit on the party's growth...

...However, given its geographical limitations, it was clear that it would have to ally with others if it ever hoped to govern nationally...

...Voters fed up with the euphemism and hypocrisy of their rulers found this refreshing...

...A few minutes later a red-and-gold banner depicting the winged Lion of St...

...They had been willing to restrain their chauvinism (such as the Veneti's view of the Lombards, who invaded in the sixth century, as arrivistes on the Italian peninsula) to make comThe American Spectator • March 1999 mon cause against Rome and the southerners it forced them to support...

...Northerners are sure that much of the money sent south ends up in the pockets of crooked officials and the various mobs...

...They could tune in to "Radio Free Padania," and as of last fall, watch two nightly hours of "TelePadania...

...In 1995 he founded a "parliament of the north" in Mantua...

...But through special measures including a controversial "tax for Europe," the center-left government of Romano Prodi managed to win certain EMU acceptance by early 1998...

...Many Veneti came to see Bossi's centralism as no less oppressive than that of Rome...

...They could read a daily newspaper offering disquisitions on ancient Lombard culture in high-minded if historically dubious counterpoint to page-one attacks on Bossi's enemies...

...Such feelings have only been reinforced, and animosity aggravated, by the large postwar migration of southerners northward in search of jobs...

...Accompanied by a white van, the car raced over to the bell tower near the Basilica, where eight men clad in combat fatigues and ski masks got out and broke through the bronze doors at the tower's base...

...Bossi was able to link such nostalgia to resentment of excessive taxation by a corrupt and unresponsive central government, and thus bring the leagues together under the umbrella of their common interests—interests they saw threatened by the rest of Italy...

...At the end of 1993 the League was the largest party in the north, with the mayors of more than 70 cities, including Milan, among its members...

...Secession, on the terms Bossi now proposed, also offended some of the most fervent regionalists...

...For one thing, Berlusconi had made a similar arrangement in the south with the neo-Fascist National Alliance (A.N...

...Bossi's decision was a controversial one even in his own ranks...

...His proposed budget provoked mass protests, especially for its cuts to the recklessly overextended public pension system...

...The scandal destroyed the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties...

...Thus it was that Bossi played a key role in the accession of the first ex-Communist to the leadership of a Western European nation, an event for which he had paved the way by bringing down the Berlusconi government four years earlier...

...Negotiations took 12 days, after which Berlusconi emerged as prime minister with eight ministries under his control...

...But the seizure of the bell tower had not brought either of these dreams any closer to reality...

...39...

...0OUT THEIR LEAGUE FRANCIS X. ROCCA hortly after midnight on May 9, 1997, two motor vehicles rolled off a ferry at St...

...The Veneti now plan to make an alliance, almost certainly with Berlusconi, as a means to their goal of regional autonomy within Italy...

...Not surprisingly, the south receives much more state money, in the form of welfare as well as public-works projects...

...Each of the leagues that had joined together in 1990 remained devoted in principle to the preservation of its territory's particular culture...

...Northern League spokesmen typically disavow ill-feeling toward i meridionali, and argue that ending their dependence on northern tax revenues will ultimately serve their interests, too...

...Bossi flaunted his working-class background by dressing poorly, usually without a tie, and speaking bluntly, often obscenely...

...Yet the diabolization of the south (for instance in a recent League magazine cover, which depicted the bottom half of the peninsula as a giant piranha swallowing up the top) seems essential to the party's strategy...

...Style aside, Bossi's substantive achievement was to bring together several "leagues" that had sprung up during the 1980's north of the Po river, notably in Lombardy, Piedmont, and the Veneto...

...But Padania is only an economic identity, not a cultural one...

...Highways there are typically empty, while the road system in the Veneto (still largely two-lane) is often jammed...

...Meanwhile, D'Alema gives lip service to federalism, but few expect him to do much more...

...Sicily already enjoys a high degree of autonomy...

...More broadly, they were part of 34 March 1999 The American Spectator a phenomenon that had attracted international notice eight months earlier, when the leader of a party called the Northern League had stood in the very same St...

...In steel-rimmed glasses and a jacket of delicate brown plaid, his goatee and slightly tousled hair giving him a professorial air, the Milan software designer is clearly a rung or two up the socio-economic scale from the average League supporter...

...What remain constant are the sentiments to which he appeals, and which might never be accommodated...

...Bossi promised Padanian schools, courts, police, and (perhaps least enticingly) taxes...

...Moreover, northerners commonly feel themselves culturally superior to the supposedly benighted, less "European" southerners...

...In the April 1997 local elections the League did poorly, losing the mayoralty of Milan and the provincial council of Mantua...

...On the contrary, this somewhat farcical exploit reflected irresolvable conflicts among the northern separatists...

...This gap only widened during the postwar economic "miracle" that rapidly accelerated industrialization of the north...

...Southerners serve as a human target for anger about high taxation and bureaucracy, as well as to reinforce the sense of regional identity...

...He formed a green-shirted militia, inevitably recalling another revolutionary movement...

...For the moment, that is...

...Bossi has called one of his nominal allies a "cretin," another a "Mafioso," and once dismissed the directors of government-controlled RAI television as "those Roman s---s...

...Today Lombardy, with about 15 percent of the population, contributes a quarter of the nation's GDP and about that share of tax revenue...

...It was not only those favoring a united Italy who had their doubts...

...of Gianfranco Fini, whose strong assertion of Italian unity and rejection of any federalist schemes were vital to his standing in the peninsula's bottom half...

...Bassi speaks like the poor so that all, the poor as well as the rich, will understand," says a portly middle-aged laborer from Bergamo...

...Mark's bell tower must be seen in that light—as "a claim [by Veneti] on the leadership of the Northern League," according to the sociologist Ilvo Diamanti...

...However, as that threat became every day less credible, it grew more popular to question the premises of civic life...

...Now he seemed to mean it literally...

...We don't want to happen in Milan what has happened in the south," he says, citing organized crime and government corruption...

...The best known was Bossi's own Lombard League, which took its name from the medieval union of patriots who resisted the encroachments of the Holy Roman Emperors, and whose symbol was the sword-wielding twelfth-century mercenary Alberto da Guissano...

...The coup de grace 38 March 1999 • The American Spectator came in December, when Bossi joined the left-wing opposition in a vote of no confidence against the prime minister, bringing down the government...

...These immigrants are sometimes derided as terroni ("earth eaters"), which they answer with cries of polentoni ("polenta eaters"), reminding northerners of a humbler past when many peasants subsisted on nothing but cornmeal mush...

...All the leagues bespoke a longing for historical identity in an area where prosperity had disrupted traditional ways of life...

...The son of a textile worker from a village near Varese in Lombardy, Bossi had a rough voice and an even coarser manner, something theretofore unheard of in Italy, where politicians aimed for elegance and formality no matter what their ideology (the Communists being especially debonair...

...In the north, Berlusconi's party Forza Italia appealed to much the same constituency as did the League—proprietors of small and medium-sized businesses—and thus threatened to absorb Bossi's power base...

...and at first his defense of the party seems reasoned though passionate...

...Bossi can be counted on to change his masks as often as necessary to preserve his political viability within (if just barely within) the system...

...Bossi provided the rich novice with an established organization and candidates throughout the north...

...Northern League losses in December's local elections have been attributed to the split...

...Mark's Square and declared the independence of a new nation to be drawn from the north of Italy, with Venice as its capital...

...In theory a platform of federalism could appeal to Italians of all regions...

...And those who wished to believe in his conceit were given plenty of encouragement...

...After its formation as a single party in 1990, the Northern League quickly found success, winning 4.8 percent of the national vote (19 percent in Lombardy) in local elections that year...

...Even the economic identity was losing its appeal...

...I've got a hard-on and I'm going to stick it right up Rome's am" he declared, leading to the coinage "hard-onism" (celhodurismo), which nicely conveys the impulsiveness of his political style...

...Bossi had argued with some cogency that an independent Padania, comprising the richest parts of Italy and none of the poor, would qualify for first-round membership in the European Monetary Union in 1999, with all the advantages to the export-heavy north that this would entail...

...The 1990's, in the words of the historian Pascal Boniface, "is the decade of secession," as exemplified most dramatically by the The American Spectator • March 1999 Balkans, but also by the former Czechoslovakia and USSR...

...almost 3o percent of his parliamentary delegation defected to Berlusconi, and those who remained exacted a promise that their leader would not ally with the rising former Communists, now calling themselves the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS...

...The Lombard Bossi mocked such claims by dismissing the stunt as "no way to stage a revolution...going to St...

...They are our brothers," acknowledges Gianfranco Porelli of southerners living in the north...

...Attempts to campaign in the south have met with scant success...

...Rather than make alliances, however, Bossi chose to go it alone—to a degree that transcended conventional politics...

...No party was spared embarrassment: In December of that year a top Bossi aide admitted taking illegal campaign contributions...

...He voiced his solidarity with separatist movements in other lands and likened himself to such freedom fighters as William "Braveheart" Wallace and Gandhi...

...No sooner had they won the election than Bassi declared that he would not participate in a government run by "Berluskaiser...

...Mark's Square to stand around and raise a little flag...

...The case of northern Italy is an example of that economically based trend, as well as of the yearning for traditional identity in an age of global markets and culture...

...It seems only a matter of time before Bossi makes his de facto alliance with D'Alema de jure...

...However, the counter-demonstrations organized around the nation suggested that Bossi had struck a nerve with the march...

...Following the League's strong performance in the April 1996 general election, he called for a peaceful, Czechoslovakian-style split...

...There are even party militants of southern origin, such as Emanuele Cappello, a plasterer from Sicily who moved to Milan in the early 1960's...

...In those ten days, D'Alema received crucial though indirect assistance from Bossi, who directed his members not to vote against D'Alema's interests...