close down the center, and that the narrative of Salvini at Leoncavallo serves the purpose of depicting him as beyond left and right. Early political career In 1990, Salvini became a member of the Lega Nord, the regionalist and separatist movement founded by Umberto Bossi in 1989. He was an active member of Young Padanians Movement, LN's youth faction, of which he became city coordinator for Milan in 1992 and city secretary in 1997. In the same year, he started working as journalist for La Padania, the official newspaper of Lega Nord. In 1999 he also worked on Lega's radio broadcaster Radio Padania Libera and since July 2003 he has been registered as a journalist on the list of Italian professional journalists. In 1993 he was elected in the City Council of Milan, a post that he would hold until 2012. While in 1997 he participated in the Padanian elections and was elected within the list Comunisti Padani (Padanian Communists), which gained 5 seats out of 210. In the following year, he was elected provincial secretary of the League for Milan. In 1999, during an official visit of Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in Milan, Salvini refused to shake his hand, stating that Ciampi did not represent him. European Parliament and local leader Salvini was elected with 14,000 votes a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the North-West region in 2004 and participated in the European Parliament as a part of the Non-Inscrits. During the legislature he selected Franco Bossi, brother of the party's secretary Umberto, as his parliamentary assistant. In 2006, he lost his office as member of the European Parliament and was replaced by Gian Paolo Gobbo. Salvini was then re-elected city councilor in Milan, in the municipal election of that year, with over 3,000 votes. In the same year, he became deputy secretary of the Lombard League, along with Marco Reguzzoni, and the party leader in the city council. He sat on the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education, and was a substitute for the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety and a member of the delegation to the EU–Chile Joint Parliamentary Committee. He stood down from the European Parliament in November 2006. Salvini ran in the 2008 general election and was elected in the Chamber of Deputies for the constituency Lombardy 1. However he resigned on 13 July 2009, after being