The 2018 Italian General Election featured a somewhat overlooked alliance between the Lega and the Partito Sardo d’Azione (PSd’Az), the oldest still existing Italian party and one of the leading autonomist parties in Sardinia. This alliance allowed the PSd’Az to secure the election of one deputy and one senator who are currently members of the Lega-PSd’Az group in Parliament.
But what unites a party built around the myth of an invented region called “Padania”, and nowadays turned into a nationalist party, with Sardinia's autonomist tradition? Do they currently share similar territorial demands and related justifications? Or did likely elements of convergence between the two parties fade over time?
To address these questions, we will analyse party manifestos of the LN/Lega and PSd’Az from 1990 to 2018 using the IMAJINE coding scheme (Elias et al. 2019) developed for the systematic, comparative and qualitative coding of regionalist actors’ territorial demands and the ways in which these demands are justified (i.e.frames).
