The internal challenges of the Northern League have never been simple, only two have defeated the leader: first the one who was “a brotherly friend”, Roberto Maroni, then Matteo Salvini, the disciple “who betrays the North”. “People were shouting secession, not succession”, smiled Umberto Bossi when the debate over his heir raged in the summer of 2011 and in Pontida the crowd cheered (almost) only him. In that period, however, it was clear that the party was no longer monolithic.
The handover and Maroni’s role
Already a few years earlier the hypothesis of the handover within the family had been discarded. Far from being a dolphin, his son Renzo was branded by his father as “trout”, a nickname from which he never freed himself. The politician closest to Bossi has always been Maroni, 14 years younger, already at his side when he launched the autonomist challenge from Varese at the end of the 1970s.
And when the Belsito case weakens the Senatùr, the handover is almost inevitable, plastically sanctioned by the famous “broom evening” in Bergamo in 2012. A complex transition, with some forbidden moves, such as the directive – which was apparently suggested by Bossi to the Northern League secretariats – not to allow Maroni to participate in the party’s public meetings.
The breakup, the congress and the rise of Salvini
In April peace takes place in front of Besozzo’s green risotto, but within a month the ‘capò returns to office, surprisingly running for office, only to have to surrender on July 1st, at the Assago Forum, to the vote of the congress, which elects Maroni as secretary. «We had to prevent the League from destroying itself. Someone didn’t understand it but I did this… And then the child is his”, Bossi’s moving biblical quote, who however was not particularly accommodating in the following months.
At the end of May 2013 the clash is harsh. The ‘boss wants to take back the League, “because they destroyed it for me.” The secretary warns: “Whoever doesn’t agree can leave, the world is big.” Dissent is spreading from Veneto. Maroni launches the first “primaries” in Po Valley style to legitimize his successor directly from the Northern League base and not from the delegates of the congress. The challenge to Bossi this time comes from the young Lombard secretary Matteo Salvini.
Bossi against Salvini: the clash over the future of the League
The master does not have great respect for the disciple. «The quality that the secretary must have must be that of holding the League together. Anyone who makes a mess is no good”, says Bossi about the 40-year-old MEP who after twenty years in the city council and a few months at the helm of the party in the mother region, has just coined the slogan “enough euro” (comparing the single currency to the “Nazi panzers”) and imagines forming an alliance in Europe with the right-wing forces of Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and the Fpoe. “He doesn’t understand anything, if we want to leave the euro they’ll shoot us”, he shouts into the microphones of Radio Padania. founder, who prefers Scottish and Catalan independentists to nationalists like Le Pen.
The new era and farewell to leadership
The Senate struggled to collect the thousand signatures needed for the dispute, which crowned Salvini with 82% of the almost 10 thousand votes of the militants. And from there a new era opens for the Northern League. An era in which the founder is less and less central. If Bossi and Salvini don’t argue directly, the lawyers do so for the symbol, while the new secretary initiates the national turning point. «I don’t agree with his overtures to the South», says the ‘capò, who on 17 September 2017 in Pontida for the first time is not on stage at the event he invented. “Angry? Enough. It’s a sign that I have to go away…”.
In a few months, Salvini will leave this League to found the one with his name in the symbol: «The noble fathers of the League are the 9 million Italians who give us the vote». Bossi becomes the point of reference for the Northern Committee, excluded from the centre-right coalition for the regional elections in Lombardy. “A mistake, a missed opportunity to assert the demands of the Autonomy and the requests of the Northern militancy”, the last public criticism of the ‘capò who would never have wanted to give up the leadership.