House of Freedoms

The House of Freedoms (Italian: Casa delle Libertà, CdL) was a major centre-right political and electoral alliance in Italy, led by Silvio Berlusconi.

The former two-headed coalition had won the 1994 general election and formed the Berlusconi I Cabinet, which fell in December 1994, when the LN, whose relations with AN were quite tense, withdrew its support.

In the run-up of the 2001 general election, after a six-year spell in opposition, which Berlusconi called "the crossing of the desert", he managed to re-unite the coalition under the "House of Freedoms" banner.

In government, FI, whose strongholds included Lombardy as well as Sicily, and the LN, which was active only in the Centre-North, formed the so-called "axis of the North", through the special relationship between three Lombards leaders, Berlusconi, Giulio Tremonti and Umberto Bossi; on the other side of the coalition, AN and the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats (UDC), the party emerged from the merger of the CCD and the CDU in late 2002, became the natural representatives of Southern interests.

The PdL, allied with the LN in the Centre-North and the Movement for Autonomy (MpA) in the Centre-South, won the election and the centre-right was thus returned to the national government through the Berlusconi IV Cabinet.