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The Right in Italy: The Northern League

by Tiziana Pirovano

The Northern League is one of Italy's most interesting phenomena of the last decade. For a long time, the League was considered only as the expression of protest against the old ruling class and not as a distinct political actor. So the League was underestimated and labeled as something transitory.

The Northern League was born in 1989; its founder is Umberto Bossi, the charismatic leader. It is a federation of different autonomous leagues that were active in the 1980's. Its political base, as its name shows us, is in the north of Italy, especially in Lombardia, a generally more rural region of the country.

The League's first electoral success was in the regional elections of 1990, and later at the national election in 1992. On this occasion the League achieved 17.3% of votes in the North. During this first phase, the League gave voice to the protest that had emerged against the old parties that had ruled the country since the end of the Second World War, and at the beginning of the 1990's there was a deep crisis in this old system of power that had ruled the State. For example, there was a big campaign to eliminate the corruption of the old and powerful political class. The League did well in this climate, succeeding in exploiting its estrangement from those old parties (D.C.=Christian Democracy, P.S.I.= Italian Socialist Party, P.C.= Communist Party).

Bossi's movement can be defined as a regionalist and neo-populist movement. It appeals to a feeling of ethnic belonging of the inhabitants of the North, and it does this with a populist style of communication. In fact, the Northern League has some characteristic features of right populist parties, such as its representation of itself as spokesman for the 'common people', the attempted de-legitimisation of the traditional parties through the promotion of plebiscitary democracy supposedly guaranteeing a strong relationship between the leader and 'the people', the protest against taxation, and its intolerance towards immigrants.

Anti-immigrant
But the Northern League is essentially a regionalist movement. It was born to defend the interests of the petit- and middle-bourgeoisie of the regions of Northern Italy. Its votes come mostly from the little entrepreneurs that are in large number in Lombardia and Veneto, the areas in which the movement is strongest. But Bossi's support also comes from the working class and the small shopkeepers. The Northern League attracts these votes with its ability to cover over the real problems of workers by focusing its attention on criminality and unemployment, problems deeply felt in the North, and issues compatible with an easy scape-goating of poor immigrants and workers from the South.

In fact, one of its main constituent elements is its anti-Southern policy. Italy has always suffered - since its constitution as a united state last century - from a deep fracture between the industrialized North and the rural South. The League exploits this difference and it affirms the right of the Northern region to move away from a much poorer South. Moreover, there is the race against the central government, which the League accuses of stripping the North of its riches through high taxation. At the beginning the movement became popular with a slogan in which it called Rome "the thief" that the League would undertake to punish.

To this end, the goals of the movement include the transformation of the Italian State into a federation of three independent republics (North, Centre and South). As a political provocation in 1995, the League formed a parliament of the 'Northern Republic' which settled in Mantova (Mantua), near Verona. The Northern League has an organization that reminds us of Mussolini's fascist party. It creates a sort of alter-State, with its own police (the 'green shirts'). Occasionally, this pseudo-police force has been involved in episodes of violence against immigrants, but its daily routine is to parade in the demonstrations of the movement.

Right wing coalition
Nevertheless, it was able to enter into the official state. In 1994 the League formed an alliance with Berlusconi, the leader of the major Italian centre-right party, and won the election. That government had a short life. The following year Bossi broke the alliance because his party risked disappearing within the coalition. Berlusconi's party is, itself, the Italian champion of populism and it steals some political themes from the League. So Bossi decided to return to the original idea of the independence of the North in order to maintain the League's political specificity. Now the leader theorizes the secession of 'the economic heart from the ill body'. To pursue this goal he created the concept of 'Padania', the mythic region of the 'people of the Po', the biggest river in the North of Italy. Bossi argues that this region has its own particular features and it was independent before the birth of the Roman Empire.

This fascistic ideology is accompanied with symbolic feasts, such as celebrating the birth of the god Po. Generally speaking, nobody takes this mythologizing seriously, but it is worrying for the fascistic culture that it presupposes.

The other parties reacted against the League in different ways. Most of the other right-wing parties wanted to exploit the success of Bossi using the same themes. The social democratic parties did not understand the real power of the League and simply tried to ridicule its symbolic demonstrations, ignoring the causes of this phenomenon. The only party that was worried about the success of Bossi was Rifondazione Comunista. Rifondazione attempted to capture the votes of the working-class in the North in a campaign designed to demonstrate that Bossi's policies were nothing more than demagogic propaganda. It now explicitly calls Bossi's movement fascist and racist. But Rifondazione, itself, also underestimated the appeal of the Northern League at the beginning.

At the moment, the Northern League is again approaching Berlusconi for next year's national elections. Bossi needs an alliance to reach power at the national level; only in this way can he exercise a power bigger than the proportion of his votes, but to do this he has to lose some of the originality of the movement. On the other hand, Berlusconi needs Bossi to increase his vote in the North. To break this alliance before the next election we have to answer the needs of people who might think their problems will be solved by voting for these proto-fascist parties. We have to underline the capitalistic origin of these problems and to promote a new, strong season of class struggles.

Class politics in Fiji

by Martin Thomas

Working-class politics submerged in Fiji
A day of protest is due to shut down Fiji on Wednesday 2 August. It will demand restoration of the 1997 constitution, which gave Indian-Fijians something nearer to equal political rights. The protest was initiated by Fiji's trade union movement and (according to the unions) is backed by "key private sector employers". The Methodist Church also backs the protest, although usually it has been aligned with indigenous Fijians in Fiji's communal conflicts.

Rise of the Labour Party
A stand-off in those communal conflicts, whereby indigenous Fijians (or rather their chiefs) controlled land, government, state patronage and the army, while Indian-Fijians (44% of the population) controlled private industry, the media, and the university, broke down with the rise of the union-based Fiji Labour Party. Although mostly led by Indian-Fijians (since they are the majority of the wage-working class, and especially of the skilled workers), the unions and the Fijian Labour Party have won support from some indigenous Fijians, mainly younger, more educated, and urban ones.

Backlashes from the chiefly hierarchy (or segments of it) and from indigenous-Fijian business people oriented to state patronage have led to coups in 1987 and this May. The coup this May was led by George Speight, a businessman. His armed supporters were from the Fijian army's Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Unit, an equivalent of the SAS. The army's high command both acquiesced in Speight's coup and evidently, later, came into conflict with him because of his swollen personal ambitions. Speight wanted to be Prime Minister. The army set up its own military rule, scrapped the 1997 constitution and the rights for Indian-Fijians included in it, negotiated an end to Speight's occupation of the Parliament building - and then arrested Speight and more than 300 of his supporters.

Chaudhry demands return of elected govÕt
Fiji is in economic chaos. Government workers are due to have their pay cut by 12.5% from 1 August. In the western areas where most industry is sited, indigenous Fijian chiefs as well as Indian-Fijians have backed the previous Labour-led coalition government of Mahendra Chaudhry. (The capital, Suva, is in the east). Since he was released from being held hostage by Speight, Chaudhry has maintained his demand for his elected government to be restored, but has not yet set up a government-in-exile as he had previously suggested.

During the stand-off between Speight and the army, the Australian and US governments hinted that they would back a military regime as long as it rebuffed Speight and his wilder demands and made Fiji safe for business again. But the military conceded too much to Speight, and the Australian government is now talking of economic sanctions.

ACTU response
Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) president Sharan Burrow says that "Australian unions remain ready and willing to reimpose transport and communications bans on Fiji but believe governments should apply maximum pressure to support a constitutional solution. We will not compromise the strong stand we have taken, but we do want to make sure we offer to work with the government and the rest of the international community to bring maximum pressure to bear". Australian unions imposed bans on mail and air and sea freight to Fiji between 28 May and 29 June. They were lifted on the request of the Fiji Trade Union Congress (TUC), presumably as a result of the Fiji TUC's efforts to forge an alliance with business people in Fiji. Socialists and democrats will wish the 2 August protest well

Working class unity needed
However, the clearing-away of Fiji's increasingly-tangled web of entrenched privileges - and, in the first place, the unification of the working class, indigenous and Indian-Fijian, in struggle to achieve that - requires relentlessly independent and consistently democratic working-class policies, not an alliance with Indian capitalists disturbed by the army's chauvinism. Green Left Weekly has called for Australian government sanctions against Fiji. Even when the trade union bans were in force, the DSP dismissed them as insufficient and demanded government action. Of course Australian government sanctions against a chauvinist regime in Fiji are more welcome than Australian government support for that regime. But any sanctions will by their very nature be geared to capitalist class objectives, and largely indifferent to the effects for the working class and oppressed groups. Recent big-power sanctions against Iraq and ex-Yugoslavia illustrate the point. Such sanctions cannot be put under even that degree of parliamentary-democratic control possible for such meliorative capitalist government measures as factory laws, publicly-funded health care, and so on. To look to government sanctions to resolve Fiji's crisis is to abjure independent working-class politics