ABSTRACT
This chapter accounts of the origins and rise to power of autonomist leagues in the 1980s and their merger into a unitary party a decade later. The chapter investigates the shifts in aims and strategy of the Northern League, particularly since the invention of Padania, and its influence in the ongoing process of identity building in the Northern regions of the country. While leaving aside a more detailed analysis of the League's electoral results and its transformations, the chapter gives the different definitions of the party provided by scholars, focusing particularly on the theoretical and pragmatic reasons for its distinctive attitude to immigration. It introduces its ambiguous relationship with the Catholic Church, arguing that both actors pay particular attention to certain key concepts such as those of freedom of speech, solidarity, multiculturalism, integration and traditional identities, while sharing an original rhetoric based in both cases on the critique of what they perceive as the supposed hypocrisy resulting from political correctness.
