Ideology
Lega Nord aims at uniting all those Northern Italians who support autonomy and federalism for their land. For this reason it tends to be a multi-ideological catch-all party, following what Umberto Bossi stated in 1982 to his early followers: "It does not matter how old are you, what your job is and what your political tendency: what matters is that you and we are all Lombard. It is as Lombards, indeed, that we have a fundamental common goal in face of which our division in parties should fall behind". Writes Roberto Biorcio, a political scientist: "The political commitment of Umberto Bossi was influenced by his encounter with Bruno Salvadori, leader of the Valdotanian Union . The convictions of Salvadori on federalism, the self-determination of the peoples (the so-called nations without state) and the belonging to a people on the basis of cultural criteria and not on blood, were adopted by the future leader of the League". Since the beginning the electorate of the party has been very diverse on a left-right scale. At the 1992 general election, for instance, 25.4% of the party supporters were former Christian Democratic voters, 18.5% Communists, 12.5% Socialists and 6.6% Missini.
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