The new Salvini League explained by Calderoli
Past, present and future of the League. Italics by Paola Sacchi
There are no two Leagues. The League is one. "It makes me laugh. They didn't understand a… Let's say they didn't understand anything about the League. Our choice ( to enter the Draghi government ) was not fought at all, it involved the secretariat, the governing bodies, the governors. And it was not a decision, to understand, from 60% to 40%, but we all saw it in the same way ". Roberto Calderoli thus responded to Daniele Capezzone in a significant interview for La Verità yesterday. Capezzone posed a key question, on the old schemes that mainstream newspapers have resumed proposing, to one of the interlocutors most entitled to respond, by history, curriculum, political weight in the Northern League of yesterday and in the National League of today, to that Calderoli , link between past and present, former coordinator of the secretariats of the Carroccio and now leading exponent of the secretariat of Via Bellerio, vice president of the Senate. It is the classic scheme, always cherished by the left which would prefer to see the League confined to a territorial force of 3 or 4 percent. And, therefore, it makes fun to represent "a divided League, ministers and governors loyal but distant from Savini". Calderoli laughs “they didn't understand a…. of Lega ".
For those who have followed the League of yesterday and today, Calderoli hits the mark. However you think, according to the chronicle of the facts, the structure of that party has remained a phalanx, as Umberto Bossi had conceived and created it, that is a compact body, where of course also various and important sensitivities coexist, but which in the end moves "As one man" and where only one synthesis, the secretary who decides after having listened to everyone. Concept recently reiterated several times by Matteo Salvini. It is not a slogan, but a fact. Indeed, the League for many observers has always remained a bit of an enigma.
More followed by the mainstream in reality in the Roman palaces than on the pratone of Pontida or in any case on those territories where it governs in the north and now also in the rest of Italy, often to describe it we proceed by mechanical representations, based on which there are two Leagues. And, instead, the party-movement is always one. He once explained to the chronicler Giancarlo Giorgetti, the number two League player, now Minister of Economic Development, that the tradition of the Pontida rally and that pin depicting the warrior Alberto da Giussano, which Salvini decided to keep on the jackets of managers and parliamentarians, well they were reconciled with the National League. “Because – he said with a very Pontida-style example – the 'Barbarossa' to be defeated is now everywhere, in bureaucracy, in taxation, in the block of growth, of development…”. It was the dawn of the national project and then a League in a so-called "sovereign" version also saw Barbarossa in a certain "EU technocracy".
The battle has remained, but with a premier with such strong influence and prestige in Europe as Mario Draghi, the League sees, from its first words, such as those on the distribution of immigrants, an important lever to assert the national interest in Brussels. And, in any case, Calderoli explains that the old reading according to which the League would have made this choice to obey the requests of the voters of the North is wrong: "We did not think of the North, the Center and the South, but of an overall response for the whole country ". The response of the Lega, a single, first Italian party, based on the elections after the 2018 Politics, and on polls. Which has the ambition of proposing itself as a lintel party of the political system, representative in a transversal way of the social classes, now that the Democratic Party and the old yellow-red alliance with the Five Stars have emerged strongly dented by the decline of the Conte / 2 government.
Not surprisingly, Calderoli with Capezzone raises against the return to proportional "a federation, already proposed by Salvini, of Lega, Forza Italia and Fratelli d'Italia", even if FdI is now in opposition but always an integral part of the center-right, " to strengthen the majority idea ".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/la-nuova-lega-di-salvini-spiegata-da-calderoli/ on Tue, 23 Feb 2021 08:54:00 +0000.