Die Lega Nord: Zwischen ethnischer Staatsbürgerschaft und föderalem Projekt

Abstract

The article reconstructs origin and rise of the North Italian protest movement Lega Nord since the beginning of the Eighties as a political undertaking of the Italian crisis which threw stereotyped thought patterns overboard and replaced them by new political mobilization offers providing identity: the North's aversion towards the South, the contrast between centre and periphery, the public and the private, the civil society and the Partitocracy. By demanding a radical federalism (Reppublica del Nord) which ties  democratic participation to an ethnically defined and economic homogenous territorium, the Lega Nord jeopardizes the national consensus. A possible effect of this ethno federalismcould be the termination of the historically developed solidarity relations between the economically and culturally less developed South and the prospering North.