Liga Veneta - Ideology

Ideology

Liga Veneta was conceived by Franco Rocchetta and others in the late 1970s. During its first official meeting in Recoaro on 9 December 1979, Achille Tramarin, who was then elected secretary of the new party, gave a speech titled Venetian Autonomy and Europe: "Today for Venetians the moment has come, after 113 years of Italian unitary colonization, to take their natural and human resources back, to fight against the wild exploitation that brought poverty, emigration, pollution and uprooting from their culture". European integration was seen as an opportunity to give Veneto its autonomy back.

Rocchetta, who left the party in 1994 after a power struggle and has since become a bitter critic of his former colleagues in the name of pure Venetism, conceived the LV as a libertarian, secular and Europeanist party. The promotion the re-discovery the Republic of Venice's heritage, traditions, culture, and especially Venetian language, and opposition to the displacement of Mafia inmates in Veneto were key goals of the party since its foundation.

The LV is aimed to unite all Venetians who support autonomy for Veneto and federal reform. For this reason it tends to be a multi-ideological catch-all party, following what Umberto Bossi stated in 1982 to his early followers of Lega Lombarda: "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 that, indeed, that we have a fundamental common goal in that face of which our division in parties should fall behind". While the bulk of the original Lega Lombarda (including Umberto Bossi, Roberto Maroni and Marco Formentini) came from the left (Bossi and Maroni were previously active in the Italian Communist Party, Proletarian Democracy and the Greens) and conceived the party as a centre-left (and, to some extent, social-democratic) political force, the LV was characterized more as liberal and centrist party and has always proposed a more libertarian political line.

This difference reflected also its position in Venetian politics: while, in the early 1990s, the League stole votes especially from the Communists and the Italian Socialist Party, in Veneto the LV basically replaced Christian Democracy as dominant political force. In fact, even if most of the early members of the party came from the centre-right (Christian Democracy and the Italian Liberal Party), there were also people coming from the left such as Giovanni Meo Zilio, Actionist and Socialist partisan in the Italian resistance movement, was one of the founding fathers of the party.