Poisonous Bubbles: The Support for the League in the Prosecco Region in Italy as a Case of Radical Right-Wing Populism in a (Wealthy) Rural Area

Electoral success of radical right-wing radical populist parties (RRPPs) is often associated with the ‘losers of globalization’. Such broad and stylized accounts may, at least apparently and/or partially, enter in collision with empirical reality, though. This research focuses on the mechanisms of (re)production of the political consensus of the radical right-wing populist League in an emblematic rural area of North-eastern Italy: the “Prosecco Hills”. It is a wealthy area, where export-oriented intensive agriculture and tourism are both well-established and on the rise, in a province where the unemployment rate is 50% lower than the national average: quite far from the usual depiction of those places left behind by globalization processes. Our research aims at offering some accounts for the long-lasting and even increasing popular support for the League in this area, even more striking if we take into account recent and well-known political evolution of the League from an ethno-regionalist party to a populist-nationalist party, while maintaining the main attributes of right-wing populism: anti-establishment narrative, authoritarianism and nativism. How can this happen? How can RRPP take such deep roots in a well-off rural area that they can resist such an ideological shift? And which of the characteristics of this area, and of similar areas of North-eastern Italy, play a role in this process? The paper aims at answering these questions, relying on the collection and the analysis of individual-level survey data from an on-line questionnaire submitted through local Facebook groups, as well as on semi-structured interviews with local key players.