Stop! Burocrati, Banchieri, Buonisti, Barconi
(Stop! Bureaucrats, Bankers, Do-Gooders, Barges)
On May 26, 2019, Italians – along with the citizens of all European Union (EU) countries – went to the polls to choose their EU parliamentary representatives. Among the political parties in the running was La Lega (The League) – a far-right populist political party, led at the time of this writing by Matteo Salvini. Founded by Umberto Bossi in 1989 as Lega Nord (Northern League, LN), the party was stitched together out of a collection of six northern regional political parties – including Liga Veneta (Venetian League), Lega Lombarda (Lombard League), and Lega Emiliano-Romagnola (Emilia-Romagna League) – which shared a xenophobic worldview, the objective of realizing northern Italian separatism, and Euroscepticism.
During the LN's first twenty years of existence, the party's platform advocated for the secession of Italy's northern regions from Rome and the subsequent establishment of a new, sovereign country called "Padania." After failing to gain significant traction among northern Italian voters, however, the LN's leadership eventually passed from Bossi to Salvini, who rebranded the party as simply "The League."
Despite the party's name change, as well as its subsequent push into Italy's southern regions (a considerable irony, given the party's previously mentioned northern chauvinism towards the country's deep South), Salvini's League has maintained a number of policy continuities with Bossi's LN, above all xenophobia towards non-Italian immigrants.
In this campaign poster, Salvini is shown wearing a blue blazer and a white button-up shirt – the colors of his party's logo – alongside the following campaign slogan: "STOP! Bureaucrati, Banchieri, Buonisti, Barconi" (STOP! Bureaucrats, Bankers, Do-Gooders, Barges). Aiming to mobilize popular resentments with respect to Italy's relationship with the EU, Salvini's appeal to stoping "do-gooders" and "barges" is a reference to the controversies surrounding the entrance of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants from Africa and the Middle East via southern Italian territories, including the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria halfway between Tunisia and Sicily (Butini 2019). Intended to pit Italians against the EU by way of scapegoating immigrants and asylum seekers, Salvini's appeal for the 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections appears to have paid off somewhat handsomely. Indeed, the League won over one third of the vote, gaining some 24 seats in the EU Parliament (Randall 2019).
Although the League has intentionally rebranded itself as a legitimate populist party with national aspirations, it should be pointed out, it has, from time to time, partnered with various organizations in Italy whose ideological background is much more openly neo-fascist. Between 2014 and 2019, for instance, Lega briefly forged a loose working partnership with CPI, whose members too have been extremely vocal about their anti-immigration, "Italians First" perspectives (Piselli 2019). Although ascending to the position of Minister of the Interior in a coalition government with the now waning Movimento 5 Stelle (5 Star Movement) between 2018 and the following year, Salvini has since forged a working partnership with Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) led government.
This poster's message is similar to those conveyed in the Forza Nuova (New Force, FN) poster "Break the Chains of Brussels" and the CasaPound Italia (House of [Ezra] Pound Italy, CPI) handbill "Enough with the €uro – Freedom, Work, Independence!" In addition to these far-right posters and handbills, a variety of anti-Lega posters were distributed throughout Rome between 2018 and the following year, one of which is featured in this collection.
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