Love between the North and the Northern League has come to an end

These elections give way to many reflections. In Northern Italy, way before the triumph of certain anti-political sentiments, the Northern League’s result is what catches the eye. Such a heavy fall must hurt. And the victories in Verona and another couple of Communes in all the North are definitely not enough to heal a devastating injury.

The League loses everywhere, and badly. In Varese’s Province, apart from Cassano Magnago, which is one of their symbol, not unlike Varese and Gemonio, the League is soundly defeated in Besozzo, Sumirago and Gerenzano, which had been administered by them for a very long time. There will be a second ballot in Tradate, but it must be reminded that the town had been administered by Dario Galli, the current President of the Province, and then by Stefano Candiani, who was Provincial Secretary for many years.

It might be true, after all, that in some towns such as Besozzo and Ferno, the League had proposed rehashed candidates, because they had already been mayors, but for this very reason, they were very well known, and were strongly rooted in the territory.

In order to make a more careful analysis, however, we cannot just look at the results in the Province of Varese. If we take a look at how all of Lombardy fared, the data would be unthinkable, at least until a little time ago. The League will not go to a second ballot in Como, Legnano and Monza, and they will go to the second turn in only 4 out of the 25 towns with a population higher than 15,000.

In Piedmont, data are even worse. The League loses everywhere, and a mere candidate out of eleven will go to ballot.

In Veneto, they fare a little bit better; apart from Verona (whose result is all in the hands of Tosi’s civic list*), they win in the first turn in Cittadella, and will go to the ballot in 2 out of 12 towns.

All of Milan’s hinterland sees an astonishing defeat; there are cases where the League does not even reach 6%, and we are not talking about towns without a history of voting them. The analysis are naturally abundant, and in particular, Rome’s newspaper always look where they used to look before. They did not understand much about the League yesterday, they understand even less today.

It is not important to understand who wanted the League to run alone or to form an alliance with the extreme Right, today we need to stick to the data, and the data are crystal clear. There is no winner, everyone in the Northern League has lost.

It goes without saying that the recent scandals of the last weeks had a much more serious effect than what the surveys said, but it is not enough to explain such a result.

In Communes, candidates of the League are often rooted, present, pugnacious. They know their town very well and results were negative only where the League was there just to put a flag and nothing more. Throughout the years, in almost all cases, seats have been opened and initiatives have been taken.

These awful results in the elections are actually a line which started a year ago, when the League suffered a first, sound halt. They took a great risk in Varese, where going to ballot was already considered a terrible omen. They did not win in Gallarate and they were definitely defeated in the ballot in Malnate, which they used to govern.

In hard times, the League has always managed to recreate its political action, but there was always Bossi to invent something. This time, it is difficult to imagine what this is going to be. Belsito’s case opened Pandora’s box, and virtually everything came out of it. An extremely violent war, boiling for a long time, was started, and the League’s voters did not like it. Stefano Candiani, Tradate’s former mayor, has a lot to say about it. The League does not lose because of the ”Kuli Nudi”, but for the lack of a political vision, except that of running alone in elections in order to appear tough and pure, and that of trigger an internal fight to settle scores that were opened a long time ago and never settled.

In all Parties, internal dialogue brings about clashes which are sometimes strong, but in the League there was something else. ”Cleaning, cleaning!” it was invoked, and it still is now. Until now, it looked more like witch hunting. In these years, the League has distributed seats, roles, it has distributed power in companies’ BoDs. In short, what they had been fighting for, for years. The irony is that many important members of the League have absolutely no problems to admit, even in public, that this is the way things are.

Yes, you heard that right: this is the way things are. Someone (purportedly) stole and did a lot of bad things, but in the meantime, friends, and friends’ friends, were put everywhere, legally. This is a system that could not hold on for long, because when you open Pandora’s box, bad things do not make differences between faction A and faction B.

The list of the things to ”clean” is long, and it will be interesting to see until where the sweeps will be going.

Back to politics, objective data show that Varese’s Province, Lombardy, Piedmont and even Veneto are no longer League’s territory. They have never been, but it cannot be denied that the League had a strong relevance for every victory of the centre-right. From Milan and onwards, this is no longer the case, as it was not in Novara and in many others.

Whoever takes the lead, be it Bossi again, or Maroni, the great coordinator of the actions in the last months, will have to tackle many questions well, the first and most important of which is definitely the vote of the people.

 

*”Civic list” = an election list which is not officially tied to any political party, and is most often found in Communal elections, although it might also be present at Provincial and even Regional levels.