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Lega (English: League), whose official name is Lega per Salvini Premier (English: League for Salvini Premier; abbr. LSP or LpSP), is a right-wing populist political party in Italy, led by Matteo Salvini. The LSP is the informal successor of Lega Nord (English: Northern League, LN) and, while sharing the latter's heartland in northern Italy, it is active all around the country. The LSP was founded in December 2017 as the sister party of the LN and as a replacement of Us with Salvini (NcS), the LN's previous affiliate in central and southern Italy. The early LSP aimed at offering LN's values and policies to the rest of the country. Some political commentators described it as a parallel party of the LN, with the aim of politically replacing it, also because of its statutory debt of €49 million. Since January 2020 the LN has become mostly inactive, being supplanted by the LSP. It came third in the 2018 general election and first in the 2019 European Parliament election. Like the LN, the LSP is a confederation of regional parties, of which the largest and long-running are Liga Veneta and Lega Lombarda. Despite misgivings within the party's Padanian nationalist faction, the political base of the LSP is in northern Italy, where the party gets most of its support and where it has maintained the traditional autonomist outlook of the LN, especially in Veneto and Lombardy. In February 2021 the League joined Mario Draghi's government of national unity, providing three ministers, led by the party's deputy secretary Giancarlo Giorgetti, minister of Economic Development. Since October 2022 the party has participated in Giorgia Meloni's government with five ministers, including Giorgetti as minister of Economy and Finance and Salvini as deputy prime minister and minister of Infrastructure and Transport. The League also participates in 15 regional governments, including those of the two autonomous provinces, and counts five regional presidents, notably including Attilio Fontana (Lombardy), Luca Zaia (Veneto) and Massimiliano Fedriga (Friuli Venezia Giulia), who is also the president of the Conference of Regions and Autonomous Provinces.
