page_title: Lega Nord
section_title: Yellow-green coalition
hierarchical_section_title: Lega Nord / History / Yellow-green coalition
caption_attribution_description: English: Logo of Matteo Salvini campaign.
context_page_description: Lega Nord, whose complete name is Lega Nord per l'Indipendenza della Padania, is a political party in Italy. In the run-up of the 2018 general election, the party was rebranded as Lega, without changing its official name in the party's statute. The party was nonetheless frequently referred to only as "Lega" even before the rebranding as well as Carroccio.
  The LN was established in 1991 as a federation of six regional parties of northern and north-central Italy, including Liga Veneta, Lega Lombarda, Piemont Autonomista, Uniun Ligure, Lega Emiliano-Romagnola and Alleanza Toscana which became the founding national sections. The party's founder was Umberto Bossi, federal secretary from 1991 to 2012. After an internal crisis and struggle, the LN was briefly led by Roberto Maroni, who was elected President of Lombardy in 2013. Consequently, Matteo Salvini defeated Bossi in a leadership election and became secretary.
  Currently, Giancarlo Giorgetti and Lorenzo Fontana serve as deputy secretaries, while Roberto Calderoli coordinates the national sections. Leading members include Attilio Fontana, Luca Zaia, Massimiliano Fedriga, Maurizio Fugatti and Donatella Tesei.
context_section_description: The League ran in the 2018 general election within the four-party centre-right coalition, also composed of FI, Brothers of Italy (FdI) and Us with Italy (NcI), which formed a joint list with the Union of the Centre (UdC). In a further effort to broaden its base, the League welcomed in its electoral slates several independents, notably including Giulia Bongiorno and Alberto Bagnai, as well as a wide range of minor parties, including the Sardinian Action Party (PSd'Az), the Italian Liberal Party (PLI) and the National Movement for Sovereignty (MNS). The League obtained a resounding success, becoming the third largest party in Italy with 17.4% of the vote (+13.3pp). The ticket won most of its votes in the North (including 32.2% in Veneto, 28.0% in Lombardy, 26.7% in Trentino, 25.8% in Friuli-Venezia Giulia and 22.6% in Piedmont) while making inroads elsewhere, especially in central Italy (notably 20.2% in Umbria), the upper part of the South (13.8% in Abruzzo) and Sardinia (10.8%).
  In the simultaneous regional election in Lombardy, LN's Attilio Fontana ran for President after Maroni, increasingly critical of Salvini, chose not to run for a second term and step aside from politics. Fontana was elected with 49.8% of the vote and the party scored 29.4%. In late April in the regional election in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, LN's Massimiliano Fedriga was elected with 57.1% of the vote and the party scored 34.9%.
  As neither of the three main groupings (the centre-right, the PD-led centre-left and the M5S) obtained a majority of seats in Parliament, the League entered in coalition talks with the M5S which was the most voted party with 32.7% of the vote. The talks resulted in the proposal of the so-called "government of change" under the leadership of Giuseppe Conte, a law professor close to the M5S. After some bickering with President Sergio Mattarella, Conte's cabinet, which was dubbed by the media as Western European "first all-populist government", was sworn in on 1 June. The cabinet featured Salvini as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, Giancarlo Giorgetti as Secretary of the Council and four other leghisti (plus an independent close to the party) as ministers.
  Along with the membership recruitment of the "Lega Nord per l'indipendenza della Padania" (LN) in the Centre-North, the party launched a parallel membership recruitment in the Centre-South under the name of Lega per Salvini Premier (LSP), practically supplanting NcS. The LSP, whose statute had been published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale in December 2017 and had been described as a "parallel party", might eventually replace both the LN and NcS, which would be merged into one. In the meantime, the parties' joint parliamentary groups have been named "Lega–Salvini Premier" in the Chamber and "Lega–Salvini Premier–Sardinian Action Party" in the Senate. According to news sources, Salvini might even launch a brand-new party and absorb most of the centre-right parties into it.
  Since the government's formation, the party was regularly the country's largest party in opinion polls, at around or over 30%. The party's strength was confirmed in October by the Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol provincial elections: in Trentino LN's Maurizio Fugatti was elected President with 46.7% of the vote and the party scored 27.1% (despite competition from several autonomist parties), while in South Tyrol it came third with 11.1% (being the most voted in Bolzano and, more generally, among Italian-speakers), leading it to replace the PD as junior partner of the South Tyrolean People's Party in the provincial government coalition.
  In the 2019 European Parliament election in Italy, the League won 34.3% of the vote, winning for the first time a plurality of the electorate, while the M5S stopped at 17.1%. The election thus weakened the M5S and strengthened Salvini's position within the government. At the European level, Salvini worked to create a pan-European alliance of nationalist political parties, the European Alliance of Peoples and Nations, and he continued these efforts after the election th
caption: Placard for the 2018 electoral campaign, resembling Donald Trump's one in 2016
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