Ghosts of the past visit Salvini

A soulless wasteland next to the 342 national road in Bergamo illustrates the heroic mythology of Matteo Salvini's League.

Pontida, a small town of 3,230 inhabitants in Bergamasco, one of the richest provinces of prosperous Lombardy, is the place where, according to a legend, the oath of the Lombard League was celebrated on April 7, 1167, an army that defeated the invader Frederick I Barbarossa.

Nothing less.

So in 1990, the party officially turned this lot into a "sacred meadow" and began to fill it annually with their faithful.

Here the flag of Padania was hoisted, another fictitious territory over which Umberto Bossi proclaimed an independence as false as the accounts of his party when he was in charge.

It happened long before the Northern League got rid of his name,

became a national artifact to sweep the polls.

But those times are over.

And when the ghosts of the past knock on the door, as happened this Sunday in Pontida, it is convenient to have the halls of the present well arranged.

In the case of Salvini, it could be said that the house is sleeve by shoulder.

The Pontida party, which on Sunday brought together some 100,000 people according to the organizers - 20,000 according to the police -, is the annual celebration of the party that Bossi founded in 1991, a tough guy who walked around wearing Empire shirts and a Tuscan cigar. halls of power of Rome.

The open space was always filled at the beginning of September with militants from the old Northern League, mostly Lombards and Veneti, who sang racist songs against the South, drank beer and ate pork chops and polenta.

a

nationalist where sentence was passed against the southern part of the country as the cause of all evil.

The borders of Padania, the imaginary world for which independence was proclaimed, were marked by the meandering course of the prosperous River Po, today punished by drought: everything below belonged to poor Italy.

They were different times.

That Northern League allied itself with Silvio Berlusconi, who jibarized everything, encircled his autonomist vision and lost power.

Until a young Milanese with a murderous instinct to ride the unrest of the electorate took the reins of the artifact.

League fans, on Sunday in Pontida. PIERO CRUCIATTI (AFP)

When Matteo Salvini became leader of the Northern League, the party did not exceed 4% in the polls.

The politician, with little experience in the Milan City Council and on the party's radio, understood that he had to change, grow and take advantage of the fear that was taking hold of Europe at the time: immigration, middle class crisis, unemployment... He transformed the party in a national artifact and allied in Brussels with a squad of ultras: Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or Alternative for Germany in Berlin.

The northern barons gritted their teeth, privately protested.

Bossi distanced himself from Salvini and they ended up having a terrible relationship, although this Sunday the secretary of the League invoked "strength and honor" for him.

The plan had nothing to do with the Northern League or with its autonomist identity.

But the electoral abundance, which allowed the formation to become the most voted force in the 2018 European elections and to have a vice-presidency of the Council of Ministers, silenced the complaints.

Today, however, with 12% in the polls and increasingly distant from his partner Giorgia Meloni (Brothers of Italy), Salvini once again confronts his past.

And this Sunday his militants and barons told him very clearly: the issue is autonomy.

The League is not a party that discusses the leader, no matter how moribund he may seem, while he is present.

But the staging of Pontida, a mixture of an open-air political convention and a Viking carnival, made it possible to decipher the mood of the militancy.

Andrea Pastore, flag in hand, believes that he can pay for some things, such as his ambiguity on the subject of vaccines.

"This was an area hit hard by the pandemic, and you're not kidding about that," he says.

Even so, he shows no fissures: “Discuss a week before the elections?

No kidding.

He is our leader,” he proclaims as a cloud of smoke from grilled meat fills the plain.

Some of his co-religionists, however, qualify his expansion strategy in the south.

Alex Marchione, from the province of Brescia, wields a green Padania flag and shows some doubts.

“I think the new national strategy is mixing too many ideas and cultures.

South is not North.

And a lot of the problems we've had come from there.

I claim the free Padania”.

In the first row of the public a banner also reminded him.

"Autonomy".

The founder of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, in 2012.ALESSANDRO GAROFALO (REUTERS)

Salvini seems not to be aware and on Sunday he continued with his international rants.

A speech with a rancid aroma of Steve Bannon.

She first praised Trump and assured that nothing that happens today would happen to him.

And then she called US President Joe Biden a communist.

A rhetoric that tolerated militancy when things were going well, but that begins to produce boredom now that the formation has given Meloni half of his votes.

"The parties of the coalition are united on all issues," he shouted on stage, further restricting the list of reasons to vote for him: if the program is the same, better a new candidate who brings more serenity, thinks part of the electorate.

Salvini knows it.

And in reality, today he only aspires to occupy the Ministry of the Interior.

But even in that he did not seem to have a clear strategy.

On Sunday he assured that he will propose a lawyer for the Justice portfolio or a doctor for the Health portfolio.

"It's common sense," she launched.

A premise that would also invite us to think that the Interior should be occupied by a security expert or a police commander instead of the leader of a far-right party.

The results of the League next day 25 will mark the internal dynamics of the formation.

If they were lousy – some sources assure that he has not yet hit rock bottom – there could be talk of relays.

The best placed today are the governors of Veneto, Luca Zaia - he won the last regional elections with 77% of the votes - or Massimiliano Fedriga, governor of Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

This Sunday they were acclaimed on stage.

A clear sign that the party wants to recover part of the essence of the past and some of the old theses of Umberto Bossi.

The great founder, by the way, did not want to attend the meeting on Sunday.

He avoided the photo because he wanted to celebrate his birthday as a family.

But as Salvini himself recalled, microphone in hand, the calendar attributed it to him for the following day.

Follow all the international information on

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber