Italian politics: Bossi’s boots

Date: 24/04/04

Its leader gravely ill, the Northern League faces an uncertain future

THE Northern League, the third-biggest party in Silvio Berlusconi's coalition government, is in denial. Six weeks after its leader, Umberto Bossi, suffered heart failure, his lieutenants act as if he were getting over the flu. Roberto Castelli, the justice minister, said this week that Mr Bossi would head his party's list in June's European elections. On paper, maybe.

Mr Bossi's family (ie, his wife, Manuela Marrone, co-founder of the Northern League and highly political herself) has persuaded the hospital to impose a news black-out. Only one bulletin has been issued. But hospital sources paint a dire picture. The leader, famed for his booming voice, communicates through a writing tablet. A man of legendary stamina has difficulty moving his left arm and leg. He got out of bed for the first time only this week. Remedial therapy? “Not even in weeks”, says one source. And it is unclear if he has suffered brain damage.

In his absence, the Northern League has done little to give the lie to an opposition politician's taunt that it is “a crew, without a captain, capable of sinking the ship”. The fiction that Mr Bossi could roar back tomorrow has stifled discussion of an interim leader. Two years ago, Mr Bossi called Giancarlo Giorgetti, the 37-year-old secretary of the Lombard League, the original core of the party, his “dauphin”. But any contest could turn into a wrangle between two more senior figures representing opposite wings of a movement rooted in regional concerns, but tinged with populism and an unpleasant distaste for outsiders, whether asylum-seekers or southern Italians. Roberto Maroni, the welfare minister, represents the moderates. Roberto Calderoli, who runs the party machine, is the extreme: he wants dialect exams for immigrants and recently called for the expulsion from Europe of 1,000 Muslims a day until hostages in Iraq were released.

A test looms. More than two-thirds of the local elections being held at the same time as the European ones in June will be in Lombardy, the area round Milan. By dodging a possibly damaging power stuggle, the League risks seeming aimless. Some believe it is doomed anyway. “Without Bossi, the League cannot survive”, says Fabio Cavalera, a veteran League-watcher at the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Mr Bossi's party won less than 4% of the vote in the 2001 election (compared with 10% five years earlier), yet he skilfully engineered a disproportionate representation in government. The League is the third pillar of Silvio Berlusconi's coalition, only slightly less influential than the prime minister's own Forza Italia party and the far-right National Alliance. His disappearance, followed perhaps by his party's, would remove a thorn from the prime minister's side. The threats of withdrawal from the government that Mr Bossi has used to win his way have done more than anything to give the Berlusconi government a reputation for instability. Moreover, if Mr Bossi's party faded away, its voters would not. Surveys suggest that most would switch to Forza Italia.

Soon after Mr Bossi was stricken, Mr Berlusconi joined party faithful at an abbey in Lombardy to pray for his recovery. But the prime minister's prayers may not have been quite as fervent as others'.

With its leader, Umberto Bossi, ill, the Northern League in Italy faces an uncertain future.