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Venetian nationalism

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Generally speaking, Venetists promote the distinct Venetian identity and the rediscovery of the Republic of Venice's heritage, traditions, culture, and language and/or demand more autonomy or even independence for Veneto from Italy. According to journalist Paolo Possamai, Venetism is "the strain of Veneto and Venetians toward the recognition of their identity and autonomy". Venetism is a broad movement, which definitely includes Venetist parties, notably Liga Veneta, but also encompasses people from several political parties. In 1982 Goffredo Parise, a writer and journalist, wrote: "Veneto is my fatherland. [...] Even if a Republic of Italy exists, this abstract idea is not my Fatherland [...]. We Venetians have travelled throughout the world, but our Fatherland, that for which we would fight if it were necessary to fight, is Veneto. [...] When I see "River sacred to the Fatherland" written on the bridges spanning the Piave, I am moved, not because I think of Italy, but rather because I think of Veneto."

Most Venetists consider Veneto a nation distinct from Italy and some refuse the validity of the result of the referendum through which Veneto (or, better, Venetia) was united with Italy in 1866. Some of them have long proposed a re-edition of that referendum and campaign for the independence of Venetia, a country that would be composed of the territories of the historical Venetian Republic, covering Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and large chunks of Lombardy (the province of Brescia, the province of Bergamo, the area around Crema and a portion of the province of Mantua). The proposal, regarding to Veneto alone, has more recently gained the support of Liga Veneta, the Government of Veneto, and the majority of the Regional Council of Veneto, which endorsed a bill aimed at organising the referendum in 2014. The Constitutional Court ruled that referendum out as contrary to the Constitution, but authorised an autonomy referendum, which took place on 22 October 2017: 57.2% of Venetians participated in the referendum and 98.1% voted "yes". Consequently, President of Veneto Luca Zaia started a negotiation with the Italian government.

Although it usually refers to the whole Venetian autonomist movement, the term "Venetism" is sometimes used to identify specifically culture-oriented Venetists, hardline Venetists or those Venetists who refuse the concept of Padania, a proposed country by Lega Nord / Lega, of which Liga Veneta (the most successful Venetist party so far) has been the "national/regional" section in Veneto. Alberto Gardin, a pro-independence publisher and later self proclaimed 121st Doge who supports the boycott of Italian elections, offers another interpretation by considering "Venetism" a "partisan concept, that is part of the Italian political system (Venetists, as Socialists, Communists, PD, PdL, etc.)".

Background and history

Annexation of Veneto by Italy

The Venetian Republic existed for 1100 years from 697 to 1797 (submitted to Byzantium until the 9th century), and was one of the first modern republics of the world. After defeating the Republic of Genoa in a series of wars, it became the most powerful Mediterranean maritime power, and at its height, extended its rule from large parts of the Po Valley to the coastal regions and islands of present-day Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, and Greece. Venice was a leading power of the Western world in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1797, after a long decline, through the Treaty of Campo Formio, Napoleon traded what remained of the Republic with Austria in exchange for other territories. In 1848, Venetians, led by Daniele Manin, rebelled against Austrian rule and established the Republic of San Marco. Manin, who opposed the proposed unification by some Venetians with the Kingdom of Sardinia, resigned, but returned to lead again the opposition against Vienna in 1849.

Venetian territories with the former Duchy of Mantua and Friuli were annexed to Italy in 1866, five years after the Italian unification and the creation of the Kingdom of Italy under the House of Savoy in 1861. The unification of Veneto with Italy was the result of the Austro-Prussian War, won by the Prussians, Italy's allies. In the Italian unification process, the conflict is known as Third War of Independence. Austria lost Venetia, ceded to Napoleon III of France, who in turn ceded it to Italy. Austria refused to give Venetian territories directly to Italy because the Austrians had crushed the Italians during the war, defeating the Italians on land during the Battle of Custoza (24 June) and on sea during the Battle of Lissa (20 July). Giuseppe Garibaldi's Hunters of the Alps had some success against the Austrians at the Battle of Bezzecca (21 July), but the Italian government ordered Garibaldi to withdraw when Prussia and Austria concluded an armistice. With the Peace of Prague (23 August), Austria agreed to the incorporation of Venetia in the Kingdom of Italy. The same point was repeated in the Treaty of Vienna (12 October), achieved through the mediation of France.

The Venetian territory was first ceded by Austria to France (under a treaty signed by General Karl Moering, on behalf of Franz Joseph I of Austria, and General Edmond Le Bœuf, on behalf of Napoleon III) as a compensation for French neutrality during the war. According to the treaty, France ceded Venetia to Italy "under the reservation of the consent of the people duly consulted". Whether an option other than becoming Italian was available was unclear, nor was the treaty any more precise on how to consult the people. Venetia was already under Italian control after the French government renounced to it on 19 October.

This increases doubts on the real importance of the plebiscite and leading historians suggest that the referendum in Venetia was held under military pressure, as a mere 0.01% of voters (69 out of more than 642,000 ballots) voted against the annexation and a mere 0.1% (567 ballots) was null, and that it was ultimately rigged. Some historians, who investigated into the historical archive of the Austrian foreign ministry, also suggest that the referendum was a mere administrative affair to Italy, just to formalise the sovereignty on a territory already under its possession, and that no real choice nor free vote was granted to the local population. The plebiscite could have been a mere demonstration to gain legitimacy after the bad conduct of Italy during the so-called Third War of Independence.

The Kingdom of Italy adopted Italian as the official language. Venetians, similarly to several other regional communities, largely rejected that and continued to use their own Venetian language, often dubbed as dialect. Linguistic nationalism soon started to be part of Venetian culture, and during the last decades of the 19th century, also some revolts against southern Italian bureaucrats occurred. After its incorporation to Italy, Venetia was so poor that millions of Venetians had to emigrate toward the Americas, especially Brazil and Argentina (three millions left their homeland from 1870 and 1910), without losing their heritage, so even today, many Venetian descendants in Latin America, most notably in two Brazilian southern states, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, speak Venetian as their mother tongue.

World Wars and the Italian Republic

Right after World War I, the economic and political situation in Veneto was critical, so that a former Prime Minister and native of Venice, Luigi Luzzatti, wrote to Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and told him there could be a "Venetian Ireland", in parallel to the simultaneous Irish War of Independence, while the prefect of Treviso signalled the risk that a separatist movement aimed at separating Veneto from Italy might flourish in the province of Treviso.

Precursors of the present-day Venetist movement date back to before World War II and were both left- and right-wing. In 1920 La Riscossa, a Venetian newspaper close to the Socialists and the Republicans, espoused the need for a "united elective governorate with autonomous and competent technical and administrative organs" as an alternative to the "central political rule" Guido Bergamo, a Republican member of the Chamber of Deputies elected in Veneto, wrote that "the Venetian problem is so acute that from today on we will preach the rebellion of Venetians. Citizens, let's not pay taxes, not recognise the central government in Rome, chase away prefects, retain the money from direct taxes in Veneto". Shortly after Italico Corradino Cappellotto, a member of the Chamber of Deputies for the Italian People's Party, launched the first Venetist party forth of the 1921 general election: the Lion of Saint Mark won 6.1% of the votes in the province of Treviso.

After the takeover of Benito Mussolini, who among other things proposed to eradicate the local languages in favour of Italian language widespread, the rise of Fascism, World War II, and the birth of the Italian Republic, Venetist ideas lost ground, in an era in which the "myth of the indivisibility and the unity" of the country was strong even in Veneto. However, the campaign of Mussolini to eradicate regional languages was largely unsuccessful in the region, which soon became a stronghold of the Christian Democracy (DC) party due to the leading role of the Catholic Church in the region. In the 1948 general election Christian Democrats won 60.5% of the vote in Veneto.

Since 1919, Venetia plus the newly annexed territories from Austria, which included Trentino and South Tyrol, were called the Three Venices (Tre Venezie, whereof Triveneto), meaning Venezia Euganea (Veneto plus large chunks of Friuli), Venezia Giulia (the eastern part of current Friuli-Venezia Giulia) and Venezia Tridentina (Trentino and South Tyrol). However, under the Constitution of Italy adopted in 1948, only Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol and Friuli-Venezia Giulia were granted of the status of special-statute autonomous region and the connected special privileges, mainly including fiscal autonomy. Hence, the proposals by some groups of unifying Veneto with the two regions cited above (or with Trentino alone) or giving also Veneto an autonomous statute.

Comeback of Venetist ideas

Venetist ideas made a comeback in the 1960s, when the Venetian Regionalist Autonomous Movement (MARV) campaigned for the institution of the ordinary regions (including Veneto), prefigured by the Italian Constitution. The ordinary regions were finally instituted in 1970.

Since the 1970s, Veneto experienced a dramatic economic boom due to a new production model based on small enterprises. The high burden of taxes and bureaucracy, associated with the increasing frustration with the inefficient and overstaffed Italian government in Rome, that continued to channel northern taxes as massive development aid to the corrupt and backward southern regions, was the key element, along with linguistic and historical claims, that led to the formation of Liga Veneta (LV) in January 1980. The opening speech of the first congress of the party in December 1979 recited: "Today for Venetians the moment has come, after 113 years of Italian unitary colonisation, to take their natural and human resources back, to fight against the wild exploitation that has brought emigration, pollution, and rooting out from their culture". European integration through the European Union (EU) was seen as an opportunity to give back to Veneto its autonomy.

One of the regional leaders of Christian Democracy (DC), Antonio Bisaglia, early understood Veneto's demand of more autonomy and that his party, the dominant force in Venetian politics since 1946, would have been the main victim of the rise of LV as both parties competed for the support of the middle class. He thus proposed the evolution of the DC into a regional party on the model of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria. In 1982, Bisaglia tellingly declared, "Veneto would be mature for a federalist state, but this state, centralist and bureaucratic [as it is], will never concede autonomy to my region". Opposition from Rome and Bisaglia's sudden death in 1984 stopped the plan of a regional DC on the "Bavarian model". Giancarlo Galan, regional leader of Forza Italia and President of Veneto from 1995 to 2010, made a similar proposal in 2008, taking example mainly from the South Tyrolean People's Party, but his "Forza Veneto" remained just an idea.

The LV, whose leader in the 1980s and early 1990s was Franco Rocchetta, made its main electoral debut in the 1983 general election, when it garnered 4.3% in Veneto, resulting in two elects to the Italian Parliament. The party suffered many splits in its first decade of life and became a large political force only after its federation with other regional leagues, notably including Umberto Bossi's Lega Lombarda, which resulted in Lega Nord (LN) in 1991: in the 1996 general election, the party was Veneto's largest with 29.3%. However, clashes between Bossi and hardcore Venetists led to several splits; in 1994, Rocchetta left in protest, but more damaging was the 1998 split led by Fabrizio Comencini and Alessio Morosin, who launched Liga Veneta Repubblica (LVR). As a result, in the 2001 general election, the LV garnered a mere 10.2% of the vote, its worst score since 1987, while the LVR gained 4.9%. As the latter faded, the LV returned to gain ground in the 2005 regional election, despite the meteoric success of North-East Project (PNE). More recently, a string of separatist parties, notably including Venetian Independence (IV), emerged.

Both in 1992 and 2000 the Italian Constitutional Court rejected proposals for an autonomy referendum, brought forward by the Regional Council of Veneto.

In the 2010 regional election the LV, in steady rise since 2001, was by far the largest party in the region with 35.2% of the vote, while its leader Luca Zaia was elected President of Veneto by a landslide 60.2%. The combined result of Venetist parties was 37.6%, the highest so far.

In the 2015 regional election, the LV set another record by winning 40.9% of the vote (combined result of party list, 17.8%, and Zaia's personal list, 23.1%) and Zaia was re-elected President of Veneto with 50.1% of the vote and a more coherently Venetist coalition. Separatist parties (Venetian Independence, Independence We Veneto and Veneto Confederal State) obtained 5.4% of the vote, while other regionalist and/or Venetist parties (Tosi List for Veneto, LTV's sponsored Il Veneto del Fare list, North-East Union, and Autonomous Veneto Project) another 8.0% of the vote. Consequently, a majority of regional councillors adhered, at least to some extent, to Venetism.

In the 2020 regional election, the LV set one more record by winning 61.5% of the vote (combined result of party list, 16.9%, and Zaia's personal list, 44.6%) and Zaia was re-elected President by a landslide 76.8% of the vote, more than any other candidate in any other region of Italy. Minor Venetist lists and parties (Venetian Autonomy List — sponsored by the LV and including Liga Veneta Repubblica —, the Party of Venetians, Venetian Left and Veneto for the Autonomies) obtained a further 4.1% of the vote. As a result, 34 out of 51 seats in the Regional Council were controlled by Venetists, 33 by LV members.

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