Umberto Bossi, founder of the Northern League, dies aged 84

 ROME – Umberto Bossi, the raucous populist who founded the Northern League and came closer than any politician in modern Italian history to breaking the country apart, has died at the Circolo hospital in Varese. He was 84. 

 

 Bossi, who had been admitted to intensive care two days earlier, died on Thursday. Premier Giorgia Meloni said Bossi had “marked an important phase in Italian history and made a fundamental contribution to the formation of the first centre-right.” His most celebrated adversary, former centre-left leader Pierluigi Bersani, was more personal: “The most dignified opponent I have ever had in my life, and in the end the one I loved the most.” 

 

 He was a rogue and an extraordinary politician in equal measure: a man with sharp instincts and rough edges who, as Indro Montanelli once put it, simply did not wash. By near-universal consensus, he was also the most foul-mouthed politician in the history of the Italian republic. 

 

 Bossi founded the Lega Lombarda in 1984, which became the Northern League – a movement that at its height in the 1990s seemed genuinely capable of splitting Italy in two. He was the inventor of the Pontida rally and the ritual of the ampulla on the Po, a ceremony in which river water was solemnly collected as a symbol of northern identity. His slogan Roma ladrona, or “thieving Rome,” became the movement’s battle cry against what he portrayed as a corrupt and parasitic capital draining the productive north dry. The party, rebranded simply as the League under Matteo Salvini, is now a pillar of Giorgia Meloni’s governing coalition. Bossi had long since been pushed to its margins. 

 

 He was first elected to the Senate in 1987, and journalists quickly took to calling him il Senatur, the Senator rendered in Lombard dialect. The title stuck for the rest of his life. 

 

 Bossi’s project was to give political form to a feeling: the idea that there was a country within a country. He initially demanded full independence for a territory he called Padania, a loosely defined region stretching along the Po valley from Turin to Venice, but as the League embedded itself in national politics, secessionism was quietly set aside in favour of a more pragmatic demand for regional autonomy. The north, in his telling, was the prize cow; the south drank at the udder. 

 

 Pietro Citati described Bossi as a born bar-stool orator, and the same could be said of the first wave of League parliamentarians who arrived in Rome in 1992, a cohort the press likened to a barbarian invasion. They were, according to Citati, culturally unpolished but ferociously in tune with the people who had voted for them. Bossi had studied at the Radio Elettra correspondence school in Turin and wore his modest origins without embarrassment. 

 

 At Pontida in 1991, he delivered what became his most celebrated slogan, "The League has it tough," and proceeded to prove it. Over the following decade he defied those who insisted the movement could never reach beyond the northern heartlands, eventually winning support in Romagna, Florence, and Rome itself. A “tax strike” he threatened in 1993 was typical of his methods: inflammatory and entirely effective at keeping him at the centre of the national conversation. 

 

 His relationship with Silvio Berlusconi was one of Italian politics’ great on-again, off-again affairs. He helped propel Berlusconi to power in 1994, then pulled the plug on the government before the year was out, turning on his former partner with characteristic savagery and dubbing him “Berluscazzo,” a crude diminutive that became one of his most celebrated coinages. They eventually reconciled, and when Berlusconi won again in 2001 Bossi was rewarded with a place in cabinet, serving as Minister for Institutional Reforms and Devolution from 2001 to 2004 and again as Minister for Reforms for Federalism from 2008 to 2011.

 

 In 2004, il Senatur was felled by a stroke. His heart had already been weakened by an ischaemia in 1991 and further illness in 1996 and 2001. The circumstances were characteristically not without colour: reports at the time suggested he was in the company of a showgirl considerably his junior. The stroke progressively robbed him of the ability to articulate his thoughts, and he never fully recovered. 

 

 The financial allegations that had long trailed his family eventually caught up with him in court. He and his sons were alleged to have misappropriated party funds for personal use, with the family home in Gemonio said to have absorbed considerable sums. He stepped down as League secretary in Apr. 2012, and was convicted of fraud in 2017 and sentenced to two years and three months in prison. The conviction was annulled in 2019, however, when Italy’s highest court ruled that the statute of limitations had expired. 

 

 His name had already disappeared from the party’s logo by then, replaced by “Padania” beneath the figure of Alberto da Giussano. Salvini subsequently refashioned the party in his own image, and Bossi’s relationship with his successor was never warm. In the 2024 European elections, Bossi went so far as to vote for Forza Italia, a pointed rebuke to Salvini, whom he accused of betraying the north. 

 

 At the 2022 general election, his re-election seemed lost, but a recount returned him to the Chamber of Deputies after 35 consecutive years in parliament, though by then he was rarely well enough to attend. 

 

 He was, in the end, an opportunist who understood Italy’s contradictions better than almost anyone and reshaped the country in his own image.