The localisation of citizenship: welfare chauvinism and PRR in local government

The parties of the so-called populist radical right are probably the most studied political family. However, the scholarly debate remains predominantly focused on a national or transnational level of analysis. The study of the local forms and territorial articulation of these political forces remains largely under-researched, although recently the academic community has begun to deal with this research gap. With this paper, I aim to contribute to partially fill this void, focusing in particular on one of the longest-lived and most voted parties in the PRR: the Lega (formerly the Northern League), studied in the context of a medium-sized city, located in an area of party’s historical entrenchment, where the Lega governs at the local and regional level. My contribution, part of a broader Marie Curie project (comparative ethnography on Lega and Rassemblement National, is based on 6 months of fieldwork (participant observation of public and political life and semi-structured interviews with militants, local leaders and elected officials in the local administration). Within the rich body of data collected, I would like to focus in particular on one issue, which has largely marked the party's local governance, giving rise to an affair that has had great political resonance, including internationally. During its term of office, the League changed the regulations on access to transport and school canteen services for primary schools. The new regulation required that, in order to access the subsidised rates, families of foreign origins had to present additional documentation, not required for Italian families, in order to prove that they had no income or property abroad. This decision led to the exclusion of most children from the service, provoking a broad and compact countermobilization by the local civil society. The 'canteens affair', as it was often referred to in interviews, has thus constituted a topical moment for the local political context, a source of strong polarisation, political but also emotional, given its strong symbolic and value-related implications. Around it, very wide-ranging and wholly under-researched issues are developing, pertaining to the process of progressive erosion of citizenship rights on a local basis. In fact, several recent studies are beginning to reveal how parties (above all pRR, but not exclusively) use the instruments of local government to develop sub-national policies of welfare chauvinism and exclusionism. This process, which we could briefly define as 'localisation of rights' or 'residency of citizenship', passes through the implementation of strongly ideological local policies. The sub-national level, however, makes it possible to avoid excessive public and media attention on such policies. Starting from the individual case in question, the paper aims to contribute to an examination of the problem on a broader scale, in an attempt to understand how access to the mainstream of PRR at the territorial level can, over time, give rise to forms of attack on individual citizenship rights and, with them, to a progressive erosion of the very paradigm of citizenship and its values of universalism.