Italian Pride: The People and The Nation in the Populist Propaganda of the Northern League, a Multimodal Study

The Italian party Lega Nord (Northern League), now simply Lega, was founded and thrived for almost two decades thanks to a regionalist/independentist programme. Under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, however, it has progressively shifted towards a nationalist message; so much so that it obtained 34.2% of share in the 2019 European elections. Nonetheless, the borders of this nationalist propaganda seem still influenced by implied regionalist overtones. The study exam-ines the definition of the people and the nation that the party builds in discourse in order to fore-ground its ingroup affiliation and its putative Other. The analysis focuses on the multimodal dis-cursive strategies that Salvini chose to build a shared concept of heartland at the rally of the centre-right coalition held in Rome on 19 October, 2019. To highlight the values that Salvini expressed in discourse, the textual and visual elements of his speech are examined by means of qualitative appraisal analysis in combination with the notions of demos and ethnos to which they refer (ideation-attitude couplings).