Bossi: “Salvini? With him the League has transformed into the far right”. But the strategy was a winner, that’s why
After a long time, the senatur, Umberto Bossi, responded by attacking the secretary Matteo Salvini, his heir at the helm of the “new League”, rather explicitly.. He describes it as the “less successful copy of Fratelli d’Italia” and he does so in an interview with Corriere della Sera telling of a carbonara meeting with about thirty people in which the situation was taken stock. Bossi, who defined the League as “an offshoot of the left”, gets straight to the point: “He has made the League become an extreme right party, just while Giorgia Meloni is in government and has the symbol of the Flame. But between the copy and the original, who do you want people to vote for?”.
Relations with the deputy prime minister do not seem goodwhy, as one of those present at the meeting says: “Salvini doesn’t answer his phone” and that he still sees the Minister of Economy Giancarlo Giorgetti and the President of Lombardy Attilio Fontana. The meeting place is a historic place, Gemonio, where “it all began”. The old leader didn’t just make a reunion but aims to make a political association in view of the European elections, something he had attempted five years ago, in the last electoral round. A sort of natural instinct to compulsion. Bossi contests the “National League” against Salvini, that is, the project that has led the political movement of the north to become an adult party, rooted in the territory and no longer marginally relegated to a regional redoubt, while not forgetting traditional issues as the reform of differentiated autonomy is demonstrating. In reality Salvini, from a strictly political point of view, succeeded in a very difficult undertaking: to replace the founding father and bring the League, beyond the nominations, to be for a certain time even the first national party, after having also reached the minimum.
And he did it in the only way possible, that is by filling the spaces on the right, those left by the end of Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance. Indeed, he did even more by recovering the “right right”, the one whose militants had felt betrayed by the new Atlanticist Finian course that seemed to be the Christian Democracy. And then the accusation of not having managed to govern the sensational victory of the last European Championships: “You won by a landslide. In Strasbourg you had a parliamentary group that was perhaps second only to the EPP. You had representation from the entire entrepreneurial North. And what did you do? You brought the League into opposition. The reference is to the fall of the yellow-green government of Count I. But then you count for nothing. In 1989 we agreed to join a group with some runaways just to have something to count for.”
However Bossi thinks above all about the present and that reference to the “original” represented by Meloni is the fundamental point. For the old senator, the mistake was not to replace Forza Italia after Berlusconi’s death: “There was a political space left empty and he had to fill it. Instead he left it free.” But this would have been a fatal mistake and in fact here Bossi loses his clarity. A moderate League, a Christian Democratic League, a left-wing League, would not have and does not have any political future in the long term but also tactically a League firmly on the right is the only viable space when Fratelli d’Italia had to veer to the center to keep the “Atlantic powers” represented by the EU and the USA are good, with a democratic albeit confused traction, like that of Joe Biden.
The only possibility was and is the move to the right to intercept Meloni’s orphaned voters who no longer have political representation and certainly not a competition with Forza Italia in a crowded and above all occupied centre. It seems that Gemonio’s meeting, however, ended with a prudent: “… And no tears. We need to be united around the League to prepare for the aftermath.”