the italianist 31 · 2011 · 112-122 Breaking up the post-war consensus: the ideology of the Lega Nord in the early 1990s Anna Cento Bull Introduction The Lega Nord was recently defned, with reference to its ideology, as ‘a movement that supports the New Right’s ideas of promoting a whole exclusionist European ethno-regionalism’. 1 According to Spektorowski, the Lega adopted this ideology from the outset, or at any rate as soon as the initial phase based on regional leagues was clearly perceived to be unsuccessful in terms of achieving popular support and developing into ‘a political movement’. Some of the ideas of the New Right fltered to the Lega through the work of Gianfranco Miglio, who held similar beliefs to those of De Benoist and other New Right intellectuals. The main tenets of New Right ideology as expressed by the League are an ‘economic “Third Way” ’, and an ‘ “ethnicization” of the market, conceived to protect it from liberalism, the welfare state and immigration’ (Spektorowski, p. 65). Thus, ‘from diferent perspectives, neo-fascists like Benoist and right-wing regionalists like Bossi have arrived at the conclusion that the ethno-regionalist idea is more than a simple redefnition of nation-state frontiers. It represents a new type of productionism and a new type of ‘ “populist democracy” in which an ethnic mythology is constructed in order to radicalize the diference from the others’ (Spektorowski, p. 68). The identifcation of the Lega Nord with the ideology of the New Right has proved infuential and has been taken up, among others, by Zaslove. 2 While I do not disagree with this interpretation as regards the Lega Nord since the late 1990s, although at times it tends to obscure the regionalist and territorial character of this party, I do take exception to the portrayal of the Lega as a staunch supporter of New Right ideas from the beginning, and especially in the years that marked its political rise. Spektorowski, in fact, appears to suggest that the ideology of the Lega did not change in any signifcant way between the early 1990s and the new century and that there is an irreconcible diference in the nature of this party compared to the other two parties of the right: Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale. In an interesting passage, Spektorowski clarifed his argument as follows: ‘If the issue at stake was simply more efcient administration and the reduction of state intervention, then the political identifcation of the North should have been