[1] As no candidate won a majority in the first round, a runoff was held between the top two candidates – Marco Formentini, a former socialist partisan and lawyer at that time member of the newborn regionalist Northern League (LN) and Nando Dalla Chiesa, son of general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and member of the newborn christian-leftist The Network (LR) – which Formentini won by a decisive margin.

[2] After gaining 11 seats in the City Council in 1990 election, for the first time the newborn regionalist Northern League (LN) presented its own mayoral candidate: the partisan and lawyer Marco Formentini.

Formentini was a former socialist, politically a left-wing, and for this reason he was considered a strong candidate in a city like Milan, historically close to leftist ideas but at the same time attracted by the new proposals of the Northern League party.

The electoral campaign was characterized by a strongly polarized debate, with Dalla Chiesa repeatedly warning that if Formentini would have won the city would have experienced a "new regime, more arrogant than during the craxism and a violent one, not just with words".

[8] Meanwhile the Northern League leader Umberto Bossi defined Dalla Chiesa "ignorant" and offensively renamed him "Nando Cosa Nostra".