Italian league movement

Last updated
Foundation of leagues
in the 1970s to 1990s
1965Venetian Regionalist Autonomous Movement
1966–1976
1977 Ossolan Union for Autonomy
1978 List for Trieste
1979 Liga Veneta
1980
1981 Piedmontese Union
1982
1983 Liga Federativa Veneta
1984 Lega Lombarda
Liga Veneta Serenissima
1985–1986
1987 Movement for Tuscany
Autonomist Piedmont
Autonomist Union, VdA
Union of the Venetian People
1988
1989 Ligurian Union
Lega Emiliano-Romagnola
Alleanza Lombarda Autonomia
Lega Autonomia Veneta
Lega Meridionale  [ it ]
1990
1991 Lega Nord
Ticino League
Lega Nuova
1992 Lega Alpina Lumbarda
Southern Action League
1993 Popular Alliance, San Marino
League of Leagues
League for Piedmont
1994 Federalist Union
Liga Nathion Veneta
1995 Savoyan League
Federalist Italian League
1996 Lega Sud Ausonia
Lega per l'Autonomia Lombarda
1997
1998 Liga Veneta Repubblica
1999 Lega Padana
Liga dei Veneti

The League movement is a political movement in Italy consisting of regional parties and movements. [1] [2] Since the early 1980s many different "leagues" (Italian : Leghe) were founded. [1]

Contents

Ideology

The parties were opposed to the centralized tax policy, political system and the corruption. Eventually, the movement became an anti-system party against partitocrazia. [1] In its early years, the leagues supported Eurofederalism allying themselves with the European Federalist Party  [ de ] [3] before moving towards euroscepticism. [4] The movement believed that Northern Italy subsidized the poorer South through taxes. [5] Lega Nord's position towards the South was even compared to racism. [6] While Lega Nord joined the Centre-right coalition, other parties joined the Centre-left coalition or remained independent.

Padania

Lega Nord

Liga Veneta was the first league to be founded in the 1970s. [2] It was inspired by and cooperated with other regionalist parties like the Ossolan Union for Autonomy (UOPA) formed in 1977 (which merged into Lega) and the two older regionalist movements Valdostan Union (UV) and Friuli Movement. [3] [7] Both Bossi and UOPA ran on UV's Federalismo  [ it ] list in the 1979 European Parliament election. [8] During the 1980s, leagues like the List for Trieste (1983) and Liga Veneta (1984) lent their symbols to other leagues allowing them to compete in elections. [3] In 1989, Lega Lombarda, Liga Veneta, Piemont Autonomista, Union Ligure, Lega Emiliano-Romagnola and the Alleanza Toscana ran on the Lega Lombarda – Alleanza Nord list. [1] In 1991, the Lega Nord was established as a national federation of these leagues. [5] After Lega Nord left the Berlusconi government, a small group split of to found the Federalist Party [1] alongside the Federalist Italian League and the Federalists and Liberal Democrats. They returned to the Centre-right coalition in 2001. Under Matteo Salvini, Lega Nord rebranded as a nation-wide right-wing populist political party. [4]

Other

For the 1992 general election, 71 symbols for "leagues" were submitted. Leagues which ran included an alliance between Lega Nuova of Pier Gianni Prosperini  [ it ] and Italian Democratic Socialist Party, Piemont Liber [9] and the Housewives Pensioners League (which included former members of Autonomist Greens, Pensioners' Party and the earlier Lega Ligure). [10] Lega Nord saw these minor lists as spoiler parties. [9]

In 1989, Umberto Bossi brother-in-law split from Liga Veneta and founded the Alleanza Lombarda Autonomia (ALA). [11] By 1996, the Lega Alpina Lumbarda (which won a seat in 1992), [9] Piedmontese Union, Valdostan Autonomist Union and ALA merged into Lega per l'Autonomia – Alleanza Lombarda (LAL). Lega Autonomia Veneta, Lega Autonomia Friuli and Lega Autonomia Trentino founded in 1993 the Lega delle Regioni [12] and later the North-East Movement. Another more long-lived competitor, Liga Veneta Repubblica (LVR) was established in 1998. None of these ever gained major success but both the LAL (0.12%) and the LVR (0.06%) were crucial for the victory of The Union over the House of Freedoms backed by Lega Nord in the 2006 general election. [13]

1992 Italian Senate election in Lombardy [9] [14]
PartyVotes%
Lega Lombarda 1,150,02220.46
Lega Alpina Lumbarda 119,1532.12
Housewives Pensioners League65,7121.17
PSDI–Lega Nuova 64,3931.15
Lega Lombardia Libera52,3660.93
Alleanza Lombarda Autonomia 32,7480.58

Other regions

In the autonomous regions Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol and Aosta Valley, the South Tyrolean People's Party and Union Valdotaine were already active [5] limiting their success there. [15] In the 1990s, LVR and the Lega delle Regioni joined the wider Federalismo  [ it ] coalition. In the late 2000s and early 2010s Lega Nord allied with UV's Aosta Valley coalition and sometimes South Tyrolean Die Freiheitlichen.

As a reaction to Lega Nord's hostile stance towards Southern Italy Neo-Bourbonism was reawakened. [6] Former members of the Italian Social Movement founded the Southern Action League and the League of Leagues  [ it ]. [16] Nevertheless, Lega Nord tried to gain a foothold in the South. In the mid-1990s, LN ran as Lega Italia Federale  [ it ] in Central and Southern Italy, they founded the Lega Sud Ausonia which distanced from the Lega Nord in the early 2000s and the Federalist Alliance as its replacement in 2003. Us with Salvini in 2014 was the last attempt in forming a Southern sister-party. Only when Lega Nord transformed into Lega in 2018, Lega was able to establish itself in Southern Italy, South Tyrol and the Aosta Valley.

Outside of Italy, the leagues inspired the Ticino League in Switzerland [17] and the Popular Alliance in San Marino. [18] The Savoyan League had some success in the 1998 regional elections outperforming the older Savoy Region Movement [15] but it could not run again when parties had to put list in any department of a region. [19] In 2010, Jacques Bompard founded the League of the South which was inspired by Lega Nord. [20] Similarly to the Popular Alliance and Lega Sud, Greeks for the Fatherland (founded in 2020) adopted a logo inspired by Lega's Monument to the Warrior of Legnano with a statue of Leonidas I but the party was de facto neofascist and acted as a replacement for Golden Dawn. [21] [22]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Grasmück, Damian (2000). Das Parteiensystem Italiens im Wandel: die politischen Parteien und Bewegungen seit Anfang der neunziger Jahre unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Forza Italia (in German). Tectum Verlag DE. pp. 74–76. ISBN   9783828881839.
  2. 1 2 Domenico, Roy P. (2001). The Regions of Italy: A Reference Guide to History and Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. pp. XIV. ISBN   978-0-313-01650-9.
  3. 1 2 3 Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro, Margarita (2017). Ethnicity and Nationalism in Italian Politics: Inventing the Padania: Lega Nord and the Northern Question. Routledge. ISBN   9781351938891.
  4. 1 2 Kitzler, Jan-Christoph (18 January 2017). "Die Lega Nord in Italien". Federal Agency for Civic Education (in German).
  5. 1 2 3 Puzey, Guy (2011). "Two-Way Traffic: How Linguistic Landscapes Reflect and Influence the Politics of Language". Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape. Springer. ISBN   9780230360235.
  6. 1 2 Dal Lago, Enrico (2005). Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861. LSU Press. p. 351. ISBN   9780807130872.
  7. ↑ "Quarant'anni fa nasceva l'Uopa, l'Unione Ossolana Per l'Autonomia". ossola24.it (in Italian). 27 October 2017.
  8. ↑ Maestri, Gabriele (12 April 2018). "Le radici dell'autonomismo? Cercatele in Val d'Ossola". isimbolidelladiscordia.it (in Italian).
  9. 1 2 3 4 Maestri, Gabriele (12 July 2020). "1992, Gremmo porta la Lega alpina lumbarda in Senato (con De Paoli)". isimbolidelladiscordia.it (in Italian).
  10. ↑ Maestri, Gabriele (26 May 2020). "1992: alla Lega Casalinghe-Pensionati non bastano i voti di De Jorio". isimbolidelladiscordia.it (in Italian).
  11. ↑ "I Bossi, questione di famiglia". espresso.repubblica.it. 31 October 2011. Archived from the original on 2014-05-28. Retrieved 2015-02-10.
  12. ↑ "Statuti ed evoluzione politica di Iniziativa Civica - Patrimonio dell'Archivio storico Senato della Repubblica" (in Italian).
  13. ↑ "Camera 09/04/2006 Area ITALIA (escl. Valle d'Aosta)" (in Italian). elezionistorico.interno.it. Retrieved 2025-05-02.
  14. ↑ "Senato 05/04/1992 Area ITALIA Regione LOMBARDIA" (in Italian). elezionistorico.interno.it. Retrieved 2025-05-02.
  15. 1 2 Daniele Caramani; Yves Mény (2005). Challenges to Consensual Politics: Democracy, Identity, and Populist Protest in the Alpine Region. Peter Lang. pp. 64, 89. ISBN   978-90-5201-250-6.
  16. ↑ Walter G. Pozzi. "Il romanzo mai scritto sugli anni Novanta (parte 5/5). Fallimento delle Leghe del sud e appoggio a Forza Italia". Paginauno (in Italian). Archived from the original on 30 March 2018. Retrieved 29 March 2018.
  17. ↑ Lob, Gerhard (12 February 2016). "Der fulminante Aufstieg einer anti-europäischen Regionalbewegung". SWI swissinfo (in Swiss High German).
  18. ↑ Turner, Barry, ed. (2013). "San Marino". The Stateman's Yearbook 2014: The Politics, Cultures and Economies of the World. Palgrave Macmillan. p.  1062. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-59643-0. ISBN   978-1-349-59643-0. ISSN   0081-4601.
  19. ↑ Bertoni, Patrick-Alain (1 November 2012). "Ligue savoisienne, congrès du Bois : "Le poison de la division" rendu responsable de sa soustraction du paysage politique". Le Faucigny . Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 November 2021.
  20. ↑ Mestre, Abel (19 June 2012). "L'ex-FN Jacques Bompard retrouve l'Assemblée nationale". Le Monde.
  21. ↑ "In Greece, a new far right movement is taking the stage". openDemocracy. 20 August 2020. Retrieved 2 May 2025.
  22. ↑ ""Greeks for the Fatherland": Ilias Kasidiaris and Greece's New Far-Right Party". FOIA Research. 5 September 2020. Retrieved 2 May 2025.
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