Former leader of the
once-secessionist Northern League (now League) Umberto Bossi has
failed to be elected to parliament for the first time in 35
years, official results of Sunday's general election showed
Tuesday.
Bossi, 81, who speaks with a pronounced slur after a stroke in
2004, was top of the League's proportional ticket for the House
in his home town of Varese but the party failed to gain a seat
there reflecting a poor performance even in its northern
heartlands in the elections where Brothers of Italy (FdI) leader
Giorgia Meloni gobbled up much of the League's former base.
League leader Matteo Salvini, who is facing calls for his
resignation after the League's vote share dropped to just under
9% from double that at the last general election in 2018, said
Bossi should be elected a life Senator.
"Bossi should be a life Senator," he said.
"It would be just recognition after 35 years in the service of
the League and the Country.
"I will personally take forward this proposal, certainly with
the support not only of the League but also of very many
Italians".
Bossi built the Northern League out of the Lombard League in the
1980s and entered parliament as a Senator in 1987, nicknamed the
'Senatur' in Lombard dialect.
His Northern League first came to power on the wings of Silvio
Berlusconi's entry into politics at the helm of the centre-right
Forza Italia (FI) party in 1994.
He brought that coalition, also including the neo-Fascist
Italian Social Movement (MSI, soon to morph into the
post-Fascist national Alliance) down after just eight months in
power.
But Bossi returned to power in tandem with Berlusconi and the
post-Fascists on two other occasions, in 2001 and 2008, and led
the Northern League until Salvini took over a year after Bossi
resigned in 2012.
Bossi took an ever more backroom role as Salvini went on to drop
the Northern tag and transform the once-secessionist force into
a nationwide nationalist group, the League.
He also suffered a string of legal woes, some involving his son,
and the League is slowly paying back illegal party funding
deriving from his time in office.
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