God, fatherland and family: The role of gender and sexuality in the nationalist turn of the Italian League

The Lega, formerly Lega Nord, is the longest-lived party currently present in the Italian parliament. Born in the late 1980s as an aggregation of various, small regional leagues, for more than thirty years, with various watchwords, it has advocated the project of a federal Italy, when not even the independence of the North. In recent years, starting in 2012, the Northern League has undertaken a radical symbolic and identity transformation, attempting to expand its electoral and organisational base to the South and transforming itself into a nationalist party. Following a severe internal and electoral crisis, combined with judicial investigations involving the historic founder and leader, Umberto Bossi, the Northern League changed its secretary in 2012, electing the young Matteo Salvini. The latter masterminded the party's nationalist turn, which within a few years changed its name - from Lega Nord to Lega Salvini Premier - symbols, watchwords. This strategy to save the party involved several radical changes. Firstly, a decisive turn to the right and the beginning of a political flirting with the neo-fascist right wing area. Second, a new emphasis values proper of ultra-conservative Catholicism and a strategic alliance with the so-called Italian anti-gender movement. In the paper, I will mainly focus on this second dimension, showing how the construction of a new national-nationalist image also and not secondarily passed through a repositioning of the party in relation to issues related to gender, sexuality, women's and LGBTQ rights. I will also show how the mobilisation of religious symbols and buzzwords reinforced this political operation. The paper will focus on two levels of analysis. On the one hand, through the use of secondary sources (press releases, public speeches, party manifestos, statements via social networks) I will analyse the construction of a new ultra-conservative public discourse, carried out mainly by the secretary Matteo Salvini. On the other hand, I will draw on semi-structured interviews conducted with militants and local leaders of a party section located in Lombardy, one of the Lega's historical electoral and organisational strongholds. The interviews were conducted as part of a larger research project (Marie Curie Individual Fellowship), a comparative ethnography of the Lega and Rassemblement National. As will be seen, the discourses conducted on these two levels present numerous points of friction, or at least distance, showing the face of a 'two-speed' party. The media League, committed to showing itself credible as a new national subject and, on the other hand, the League of the historical territories of rooting, still strongly anchored to a Northern and federal identity. In this identity friction, issues related to gender and sexuality become a sort of middle ground, an ambiguous ideological no man’s land. If, on the one hand, local militants and leaders do not recognise themselves in the new Catholic-reactionary messages, on the other hand they recognise their strategic and instrumental character, thus configuring gender as a real ideological-identity bargaining chip for the purpose of constructing a nationalist message that inevitably remains fake.