Salvini made a mistake that anyone who has run an organisation will recognise, though often only after making it.
He confused having an audience with that audience belonging to him. Two very, very different conditions. And the result is plain to see.
According to YouTrend (18 June 2026), Futuro Nazionale has reached 5.9 per cent. The Lega has fallen to 5.8.
The party that had offered Vannacci its own structure was overtaken by Vannacci in little more than four months.
A surprise? No, simply the consequence of a specific choice made in 2024, when the party decided to bring in an already established personality without ever asking whom the audience he brought with him belonged to.
Today the Lega is paying for that choice, and the full consequences have yet to be measured.
A convenient solution called Vannacci
Let’s get straight to the point: we all know who Vannacci is, what book he wrote and what trajectory took him first to the European Parliament, and then to the national stage.
What not everyone knows, however, is the neuroscientific mechanism that first led the Lega to choose him, and then led him to break away from it.
The blame lies entirely with immediate visibility.
When a result is visible and measurable in the short term, the brain registers it as success and stops looking for contrary signals. In the 2024 European elections the Lega won 8.97 per cent: very, very convenient for Salvini’s Lega, which, riding Vannacci’s popularity, did not think twice before bringing such an outsized figure into its ranks.
The fact that some of those votes followed the General more than the party was a subtle signal.
Today, two years on, the Lega can no longer ignore it. Futuro Nazionale has overtaken it in one poll and keeps growing in the same political space.
Daniel Kahneman would probably have recognised a form of System 1 applied to governance. The most obvious signal captures attention, while whatever might contradict it requires slower, more effortful and deliberate analysis.
When this analysis comes late, the results have already begun to have consequences.
The law of personal support
Support built around a person does not automatically transfer approval to their organisation.
Research on social capital distinguishes trust in others from trust in institutions. Studies on the personalisation of politics then show how central the assessment of leaders has become in political competition.
A relationship with a person and a relationship with an organisation follow different paths. They are formed through different experiences and can deteriorate for equally different reasons. A voter may vote for a party symbol to follow a person without developing, through that vote, a lasting bond with the party.
Vannacci had built his community through a book, controversies and a language that spoke to a specific part of the country. That community had a relationship with him, and when it voted Lega, it simply lent its vote to a symbol.
The problem is that the Lega was expecting a gift.
What Salvini should have done (and did not)
Rejecting strong personalities is not the solution. The only correct response was to create the conditions for the General’s audience to become the organisation’s. That would have required three things, none of which the Lega considered.
The first was to measure the public’s relationship with the organisation, beyond the person. Did Vannacci’s followers join the Lega’s channels? Did they take part in party initiatives when he was not present? Did they recognise other party figures? If the answer was no, the audience was not becoming an asset of the party.
The second was to give the personality a defined territory, with declared boundaries. Vannacci had his own network, his own events, separate communication. That is the signal that a second entity was growing inside the first. And choosing not to choose would not have prevented it.
The third was to prepare for the exit from the start. Every strong personality who joins an organisation brings with them the possibility of leaving. Governing it means building, while they are present, what will remain once they are gone.
The Lega did the opposite. It gave up autonomy to preserve immediate support, and postponed every decision until the structure was no longer in its hands.
How we would guide Salvini today
Today Vannacci is no longer an internal problem for the Lega.
He is now a competitor: one, moreover, who knows its structure; who speaks to part of its electorate, and who occupies a political space the party had tried to hold through him.
In July 2026, several polls put Futuro Nazionale ahead of the Lega. The General’s rise has also opened up a wider problem for the centre-right. Leaving him outside the coalition could scatter decisive votes. Bringing him back would mean handing him a role precisely when he is proving he can stand on his own.
The Lega is therefore forced to manage two relationships at once.
The one with Vannacci, now marked by the split, and the one with the voters who followed him.
Continuing to portray the General as a traitor may strengthen the emotional bond with the party’s most loyal base, but it hands Vannacci a favourable position. It allows him to present himself as the man who had the courage to leave an organisation unable to fully represent the ideas it claimed to defend.
Chasing him onto his own ground would also come at a cost.
Every time the Lega adopts Vannacci’s language to win back those who have left, it confirms that the general understood what voters wanted before anyone else. And so the party would end up strengthening him while trying to shrink his space.
If we were handling the Lega’s communication and operations, the first thing we would do is work out which people followed Vannacci, what drove them away and which part of that support could still identify with the party’s project.
The overall numbers tell the story of the loss, it is true. Only an analysis of motivations, however, reveals what remained recoverable.
From here, and only from here, a recognisable proposition should emerge.
The Lega has a territorial history, an administrative network and an institutional presence that Futuro Nazionale has yet to build. It has regional presidents, mayors, ministers and a structure capable of turning promises into decisions. These are elements that could give it a clear function again, provided they are organised within a common direction.
And above all, the relationship with Vannacci should remain on the political level.
Few personal responses. No attempt to compete with the General in the ability to provoke. Clear boundaries on future alliances, while letting programmes and election results determine subsequent choices.
A separation becomes final only when each side can tell who it will be after breaking away from the other.
Vannacci has already done so. The Lega has yet to decide which story to tell.
An uncomfortable lesson for anyone who runs an organisation
Vannacci and the Lega is not merely a political case. The same dynamics recur in every company that entrusts its visibility to a single manager and discovers that clients follow them when they move on; in every professional firm where one partner has become more recognisable than the firm itself; and in every brand that used a celebrity endorser until their face was more recognisable than the logo.
In all these cases, the individual’s success exposes a problem that began long before, when governance allowed the personal relationship to grow without turning it into a shared asset.
This is the risk that founder-independent branding seeks to prevent in organisations overly dependent on a single figure.
Anyone who runs an organisation knows that borrowed support sooner or later has to be given back.
The question is not whether it will happen, nor when. It is whether, in the meantime, something of one’s own will have been built.
Those who did not think about it, like the Lega, will pay the consequences for a long time.
Those who did will not even notice they ever had a problem.
New connections (FAQ)
What can a company learn from the case of the Lega and Vannacci?
Every organisation should distinguish the support directed at its own structure from the support tied to a single individual.
Votes, likes and overall visibility tell only part of the relationship. How the audience behaves when the central figure is absent offers far more useful information. A Brand Audit can observe which channels are followed, which figures are recognised, which initiatives work without the personality present and how far the audience associates their promises with the organisation as a whole. What is then needed is clear roles, measurable boundaries and a narrative capable of linking individual results to a collective project. Visibility must be spread across different people without losing coherence. The signs of a parallel centre of power must also be watched before that centre becomes autonomous. A personal network, separate communications and initiatives outside the organisation’s control already point to the likely future direction.
The problem begins the moment the personality comes in and nobody asks what will happen should they decide to leave.
How do you measure dependence on a personality?
Dependence becomes visible when you observe what happens as the person temporarily steps back from communication.
If attention, participation, enquiries and the organisation’s ability to mobilise its audience decline, the relationship still appears centred on the individual.
Equally important is people’s ability to recognise other representatives, use the organisation’s owned channels and connect the promise they received to a broader project. Measurement should be continuous. Waiting for the central figure to leave makes it possible to quantify the loss, but leaves very little room to govern it.
How do you win back an audience after a central figure leaves?
Recovery begins with the reasons that led the audience to follow the person.
Imitating their language risks reinforcing their leadership. Attacking them constantly keeps the story focused on them. The organisation must understand which need that person managed to tap into, which parts of that need are still consistent with its own identity, and what offer can meet it through capabilities the departed figure does not have.
What is needed, then, is a recognisable function, verifiable results and new faces capable of representing them.
A Brand Recovery Program can support this transition, rebuilding the relationship with the audience from the remaining assets and the direction the organisation intends to take.
After a separation, the audience looks for a simple answer. It wants to know why it should keep choosing those who stayed.