Affluent Secessionists: Italy’s Northern League

In the national elections held in Italy in late March that ushered in a “Second Republic,” the enfant terrible of Italian politics over the last several years, the Northern League, won only 8.4 percent of the national vote. Yet as a result of the concentration of that vote in the northern part of the country and of new electoral arrangements intended to break the hold of the country’s entrenched “partyocracy,” the League secured slightly more than one-sixt...