ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an analysis of the Northern League party, and of the role that anti-politics played in the creation, development and subsequent decline of this party, and ultimately in its successful recovery from the serious crisis within the party. Anti-politics is one of the principal ingredients – together with racism, tax resistance and demands for local autonomy – permitting the League to emerge in the late 1980s led by its founder Umberto Bossi. The anti-politics embraced by Bossi and the Northern League was to backfire however, when Bossi, who was already an ill man, found himself implicated in a series of financial scandals over the management of the party's funds. Anti-politics was quick to exact its revenge against a man who had built his political reputation through his moralising of politics, and ultimately threatened to destroy his very political creation. In fact, as a result of those scandals, the League closed branches, lost members and was abandoned by many party militants and voters. In order to avoid its disappearance from the political scene, the party entrusted the reins of the party to a young leader, Matteo Salvini, a self-styled “political outsider”. The final section of the chapter offers an overview of the anti-political ideas and expressions enabling Salvini to come across as a new, different leader battling against the political establishment.
