The Grand Chamberlain Bruno Vespa that spring day in 1996 is particularly excited; after weeks of negotiations he managed to put it together Ciriaco De Mita And Umberto Bossi for a face to face to Door to door. The intellectual of Magna Graecia (so Gianni Agnelli had nicknamed Ciriaco for his vaporous nothingness) attacks an endless pontifical, ranging from a bird’s eye view over the country’s problems with improbable and dusty recipes for solving them. When the word passes to the Visigoth, the whole studio’s eyelids droop. He is absorbed for a few seconds, then turns to the grand vizier of Nusco and says: «Ma tàches al tram». At that precise moment, while millions of Italians ideally explode in a stadium roar of approval, the end First republic.
With that motto from the Porta Cicca tavern, the leader of the Alloy send a world into retirement. A revolutionary. He is the first to understand that in addition to the age-old southern question, in the 1980s a slightly more difficult issue of well-being began to develop because it concerns Italy’s treasure chest: the northern one. Taxed by the State, slaves of a Bourbon bureaucracy, abandoned by PCI – and in general by the left-wing parties who have understood nothing about the decline of the large factories and the explosion of VAT numbers -, those Italians from Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto, Liguria, Emilia feel the physical need for less State and more autonomy.
The first stage: the invention of the “Northern Question”
Faced with the failure of the centralist Moloch, they would like to be able to fly on their own, compete on international markets without strings and taxes. They expect to reinvest public wealth in their lands to build roads, bridges, airports, but also to clean up rivers, create parks, leave their children something better than what was reserved for their fathers. «Masters in our house». Umberto Bossi he died at 84 in his Vareseat the Circolo hospital. He was born on 19 September 1941 in Cassano Magnago where the Varese valleys become plains, and there he managed to intercept the reasons for post-Fordism without knowing what it was. And he couldn’t even know it, because he wasn’t an intellectual.
He ended up stuck with a lapidary definition like the one the professor would one day reserve for him Gianfranco Miglio: «Bossi is someone who doesn’t read anything, he has never read a line. Not that he is ignorant, but the things he reveals to his ears.” Yet he possessed two even more important qualities for a successful politician: a flair for the topics to be discussed and the immediate ability to connect with the people. Let’s talk about it in the present tense, then: he founds a movement, creates a strong identity around it Alberto da Giussanoplaces a green handkerchief in his pocket, finally summons him to the lawn Pontida which according to legend was the scene of the oath of the first independentists against the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. And he sums it all up with the supreme slogan: “Rome is a thieves, the League does not forgive.”
The electoral boom and the fall of the giants
In the valleys of that North mistaken for a cash cow, nothing else is needed and in the 1987 policies, although not going beyond 1% at a national level, in the small municipalities of Lombardy and Veneto the League gained percentages close to 10. Crazy. In the headquarters of the large dying parties no one pays attention to it, so three years later, at the regional elections, the movement of Bossi reaches 19 percent. Second party after the DC, the PCI destroyed. It wouldn’t take much to understand that behind that success there are the people, there are the numbers, there is the strong identity of people who want to give the system a push. A street grillism 30 years in advance.
The Palace simply raises its eyebrow, a little irritated, and then unleashes the journalists in the operation of demolishing those voters, defined as “racists, barbarians, scum”. And the more they make ferocious judgments, the more Bossi closes ranks and gathers consensus. To the 1992 policies, while it rages Tangentopoli with the League supporting the judicial revolution, those happy barbarians who arrived from Varese, Bergamo, Brescia, brought home 6 million votes, 80 among deputies and senators, which became 177 after the alliance with Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi. All this while one day he explains his nebulous past: «I distanced myself from the severe ethics of my parents and the Weltanschauung of the agricultural world». And the next day he attacks the head of state, the archbishop Oscar Luigi Scalfarowith the delicate phrase: «We’re sending Scalfaro away. If he resists, we’ll bleach his hair with a fart.”
The rise of the “Braveheart” in the vest and the dream of Padania
The League is the masterpiece of a man with a hoarse voice and 26-inch Rayban glasses, with the wrinkled trench coat of Lieutenant Colombo or the tanktop on sight (this is how he presents himself in Porto Cervo and even scandalizes the Knight). A rough guy who holds strategic meetings in a pizzeria in Ponte di Legno, transforms Think about it in the party anthem and explains seriously with the Tuscan between his lips: «Julius Caesar was the first Northern League member, that’s why they killed him. He wanted to replace the Roman political and military class with the Gauls. Better yet, with his third legion, which were the Lombards.” Umberto Bossithat is, the first postmodern politician in the history of Italy was a showman. Even more than Berlusconi because to keep his people together he must invent a promised land, there Padaniawith the water from the Po collected in the ampoule at Monviso and spread across Venice. A little glue, a lot of folklore.
Here, at the height of his success, it is worth taking a step back and grasping those fragilities and youthful cunning that make Umberto Bossi a character who dances between contradictions. After all, he said Indro Montanelli: the portrait is like a Flemish painting, it requires chiaroscuro. The most obvious inconsistency: the person who “sends the whole of Southern Italy to work” at lunch and dinner has never had a particular affinity with the verb to work. His sister Angela explained: “We’re talking about someone who organized three graduation parties without ever graduating.” Umberto got by, sang the hit in the dance halls Caterpillarstudied medicine and defined himself as an “expert in electronics applied in the operating room”. He left the house with his doctor’s bag, but when his first wife Gigliola Guide them realizing that he wasn’t going to practice in the hospital, he left him. The former ambassador Sergio Romano he would have defined it: «A charisma in search of employment».
From the “Sardine Pact” to the decline of the magic circle
Once in government, Bossi he shows he has tons of charisma, but not yet maneuvering experience. After less than a year of alliance with Berlusconi destroy everything for the happiness of Massimo D’Alema And Rocco Buttiglione who had convinced him to take the plunge in the famous “Sardine Pact”. It’s the turnaround, it’s the beginning of a season of adjustment that doesn’t bring success, rather it announces the decline in the ballot box. But precisely in those years the leader built his favorite creation, the one that would lead him to be Minister of Institutional Reforms: the two-faced League of struggle and government. A political class is born. Roberto Maroni he has been minister several times, Roberto Calderoli presides over the institutions, Giancarlo Giorgetti join the boards that matter. And he, the leader in the vest, is free to play the role he prefers, that of a free-handed leader of the people. Between a middle finger and a quiver of celodurism. But people are starting to understand that federalism is a mess, secession a fairy tale, taxes an increasingly intrusive bad company. And the Bossi he shouts for nothing.
The decisive turning point came in 2004, when the number one of the League was hit by a stroke very heavy and remains in the clinic for a long time for a very tiring rehabilitation. «After the illness I was so scared that I became better». These are the words that define a more fragile, intimate season, spent alongside his second wife Manuela Marroneto his sons Renzo known as Trota, Roberto Libertà and Eridano Sirio and to that magic circle of friends that envelops him in its coils. It’s a Bossi different, he knows that the life of a leader is coming to an end, that Padania is a hypothesis and that the League can even do without him. The 2012 investigation is the final blow: the Northern League members convinced they are different discover that the party treasurer Francesco Belsito he used election reimbursement money to make investments in Tanzania, Cyprus and Norway. He passed them to the boss’s family, bought the degree in Albania (70,000 euros) to the rampant Renzo, allowed them all to live the good life. The rest is today, it’s the night of the sweeps at the Bergamo Fair where the slogan was: “It’s time to clean the chicken coop”. The rest is Matteo Salvini.
The final blues of the Braveheart of Varese
Umberto Bossi did he win or lose? He certainly lost because he failed to give shape to the protest of millions of people and channel it towards decisive institutional reforms to modernize an immobile country. He certainly won because, riding the spirit of the time, he gave the first blows of the pickaxe to the then unapproachable caste of First republic. Today it is no longer the time for gladiators, and those who expected more were romantics. Honor to Umberto Bossito his liberating tank top, to his man-in-the-street spontaneity. Imperfect, ambiguous, sometimes cruel and sometimes weak like all men.
The Braveheart blues of Varesewhich dreamed of a Lombardy as orderly as Switzerland, as rich as Bavaria and as proud as the Basque Country, is now fading into silence. And in the last hour that hoarse, rough and ultimately wise voice of the eccentric uncle who shows up for Sunday lunch with a thousand ideas and a bottle of wine remains inside the eardrums. He has an answer for everything, the piebald armpit and the Tuscan between his lips. If you contradict him he stays absorbed for a few seconds. Then, accompanying the words with a large gesture of his arm, he shouts at you, laughing: «Ma tàches al tram».
