Italy’s
clowns: no joke for establishment parties
Comedian Beppe Grillo and
the Five Star Movement have taken centre stage following Italy’s general
election in February. It is the latest, dramatic manifestation of the
widespread rejection of establishment politics. CHRISTINE THOMAS reports
on this new political phenomenon.
The shock result in the
recent Italian elections reverberated around the world, leading to
market instability and fears about the possible economic fallout. The
Five Star Movement (M5S – Movimento 5 Stelle), launched by the comedian
Beppe Grillo just four years earlier, emerged as the biggest single
party, with more than 25% of the vote. "We channelled all the anger in
society", said Grillo, summing up this election ‘victory’ in an
interview with the international press (he refuses to speak to the
Italian media).
While workers and youth in
Greece, Spain and Portugal have been waging general strikes and taking
to the streets in their millions in opposition to a never-ending
austerity onslaught, in Italy there has been relative quiescence. This
is in spite of the devastating economic impact on ordinary people, with
living standards falling to the level of 27 years ago. But, on 24/25
February, all the accumulated anger and dissatisfaction poured into the
ballot boxes, with the M5S becoming the main beneficiary.
In packed electoral rallies
in piazzas all over the country, Grillo’s cry of "tutti a casa" (send
them all packing) had a particular resonance with a population sick to
the stomach of the corrupt, moneygrubbing, self-seeking politicians of
the establishment parties, and of the industrialists and bankers
involved in scandals. With just 2% having faith or trust in political
parties, more than eight million voters turned to the M5S which pledged
to ‘clean up’ and ‘shake up’ the political system.
Consistent with its election
pledges, the M5S is refusing at this stage to form an alliance with the
PD (Partito Democratico) electoral coalition, or with the coalition of
the PDL (Popolo della Libertà), the party of Silvio Berlusconi, both of
which got around 29% of the vote. The ‘grillini’, as they are often
called, effectively hold the balance of power. While the immediate
perspectives are unclear, if any government emerges from these elections
it will be weak, unstable and short-lived. New elections are likely,
possibly within months. In that situation, the M5S could even increase
its support – it has already gone up three points in opinion polls to
29%.
A ‘movement’ not a party
Clearly, the Five Star
Movement is a key player in the Italian political arena. But what is its
character, what does it stand for and how is it likely to develop in the
future? In reality, the confused, ambiguous and fluid nature of the
movement makes it difficult to define. Grillo describes himself as its
‘megaphone’, because the M5S, which developed in opposition to the
traditional parties, is a ‘movement’ rejecting the structures of a party
and which, therefore, cannot have a ‘leader’. In actual fact, Grillo,
who co-founded the M5S with Robert Casaleggio, a wealthy marketing and
web businessman, has an enormous personal influence over the movement.
He owns the M5S ‘franchise’ and can personally decide who can and cannot
use its symbol in elections.
Grillo describes the M5S as
"neither right nor left", a "movement of ideas not ideologies", and this
is reflected in its membership, programme and electorate. The movement
is mainly one of young, educated middle-class professionals. Of its MPs
and senators, 24% are self-employed or small-business owners, 35% are
professional/white collar workers and 15% students, pensioners or
unemployed, 78% have a university degree.
The M5S votes were
geographically evenly spread and came from all political parties, both
‘left’ and ‘right’. Around 25% of its electorate had previously
abstained. Which parties its votes mainly came from varied from region
to region. In Turin, an industrial city in the north, for example, 37%
of the M5S votes came from the PD (which includes part of the
ex-Communist Party), and 20% from the ‘radical’ left. In Padua, 46% came
from the right-wing populist Northern League (Lega Nord). In Reggio
Calabria in the south, 49% came from Berlusconi’s PDL.
The movement has a programme,
voted for online by its members, but the pronouncements of Grillo in the
piazzas and, in particular, posts on his blog, the most widely read in
Italy, hold considerable weight. He also has a million followers on
Twitter. The use of the internet and social media is central to the way
in which the movement is organised, with ‘horizontal’ democracy seeking
to replace the normal ‘vertical’ forms of democratic structures of
elected committees, delegate conferences, etc. The 163 grillini MPs were
selected online, with 20,000 people participating.
Grillo launched his blog with
Casaleggio in 2005, and the first ‘friends of Beppe Grillo’ began to
discuss online and organise local ‘meet-ups’ (they use the English
word). Things really started to take off in September 2007 when Grillo
organised his ‘V.Day’ (V standing for an Italian expletive), when tens
of thousands of people queued for hours in piazzas around the country to
sign a petition calling for politicians with a criminal record to be
banned from holding office. The movement spread via internet and social
media, and the first Five Star councillors (30) were elected in local
elections in 2008. In autumn 2009, the Movimento 5 Stelle was officially
launched, going on to get more councillors elected and its first mayor
of an important city (Parma, in Emilia Romagna). In anticipation of what
was to happen later in the national elections, M5S became the biggest
party in elections in Sicily in November 2012.
Awash with corruption
The corrupt political ‘caste’
and political system are the main targets of the movement. Grillo’s
comedy routines have always had a political edge to them. In the 1980s,
he railed against corrupt politicians. In 1986, he was banned from
public TV after a joke about the then prime minister, Bettino Craxi, who
eventually fled the country to avoid charges during the Tangentopoli
scandal. Tangentopoli lifted the lid on a sewer of kickbacks and
corruption spanning the political spectrum, leading to the collapse and
disintegration of most of the main bourgeois parties. It was against
this background of political crisis that Berlusconi was ushered to
power, and the Northern League began to grow, both claiming to be ‘new’,
‘fresh’ untainted forces.
Now, once again, Italy is
awash with corruption scandals, undermining virtually every institution
from football to the Vatican. In an international corruption league
table, Italy is ranked 72nd, below Botswana, Chad and Rwanda. At
national and local level, politicians of all the establishment parties,
including the Northern League, and in particular Berlusconi’s PDL, but
also the PD, have been found guilty of, or are under investigation for,
taking bribes to give favours to friends and family members, creaming
off millions of euros of public funds to finance lavish lifestyles, and
a myriad of other charges. The idea, already extremely widespread in
society, that they have all got their snouts in the trough, that they
are all thieves, has been reinforced by these latest scandals.
This partly explains the
success of the grillini. Grillo uses revolutionary sounding phraseology
about sweeping away the current MPs, parties and political system. This
strikes a chord, especially with young people who hold the traditional
parties in contempt and see no credible, mass left/anti-capitalist
alternative among the existing parties and political formations. Fifty
per cent of under 25s voted for the M5S (67% in Sicily), and 60% of
students.
In reality, however, the
movement is proposing not revolution but democratic reform of the
existing political system. This would include cuts to parliamentary
salaries and expenses – the grillini representatives will only take half
of their salaries, possibly less. In Sicily, the remainder of their
salaries has gone to help local micro-businesses. The M5S calls for a
change in the electoral law, halving the number of MPs, and abolishing
the state funding of political parties, etc. The money saved, it claims,
would go towards financing the rest of the M5S programme. The remainder
would be financed from scrapping military spending on wars in
Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Voicing deep discontent
Before the economic crisis,
Grillo only really ever touched on two main issues: the political caste
and the environment. The problems faced by workers in the workplace,
cuts in health, education and public services were barely if ever
mentioned. Even now these economic and social issues take second place
to political reform. But the impact of the economic crisis has been
severe both on working and middle-class people. Nearly 40% of youth are
unemployed and tens of thousands of workers are on ‘cassa integrazione’
(short-time working or at home with part of their salary paid). The
overwhelming majority of Italian companies are small, often family-run
businesses struggling to obtain credit from the banks. A company closes
down every minute.
In his ‘tsunami’ election
tour of 77 piazzas, Grillo began to give voice to the deep discontent at
economic crisis and austerity. ‘Borrowing’ demands from the
anti-capitalist left, he called for the nationalisation of the banks, a
shorter working week and a ‘citizen’s income’. He spoke about
restructuring the debt and called for a referendum on the euro. The M5S
programme opposes cuts in education and supports a totally free health
system. It is against the privatisation of water and is for the
renationalisation of telecoms.
In a context where the
parties of the ‘radical left’, like the PRC (Rifondazione Comunista),
have become invisible both in struggles and in elections, the fact that
these issues are being raised and discussed is a positive development.
The PRC stood in the elections as part of a heterogeneous electoral
alliance (Rivoluzione Civile) dominated by magistrates which got a mere
2% of the vote. However, while the M5S’s reformist agenda has reflected
and channelled the anger in society, it is entirely inadequate as a
response to the crisis. Even if the political reforms were enacted and
military spending cut, it is estimated that this would provide barely €2
billion, nowhere near sufficient to finance the proposed reforms in the
M5S programme.
There are many on the left
who say that the vote for the M5S is a reactionary vote. This is based
primarily on comments that Grillo has made about the trade unions,
public-sector workers and, in particular, CasaPound, a neo-fascist
organisation. It is important that these comments and the vote for the
M5S are put into context. A distinction has to be made between Grillo,
the M5S and those who voted for the grillini.
A breakdown of the vote for
the M5S shows that some of its best results came in areas where there
have been important local struggles. In Taranto, for instance, where
thousands of workers face losing their jobs due to the closure of ILVA,
the biggest steel factory in Europe, the M5S got the highest vote of any
party. In Carbonia Sulcis, Sardinia, where miners occupied the last pit
in Italy with dynamite strapped to their bodies to stop it from closing,
the grillinis got 33.7%. In Bussoleno, Val di Susa, centre of the mass
No TAV campaign against a high-speed rail link, the M5S obtained a
massive 45%.
Undoubtedly, in the Veneto
region in the northeast, many of the grillini votes came from former
Northern League voters, including small-business owners. But some of
these would have voted for the left in the past and, as Grillo has
shown, could be won over to a programme which included the
nationalisation of the banks and low-interest credit for small
businesses.

An eclectic mix of policies
If a credible anti-capitalist
alternative had been on offer there is no doubt that many of the votes
which went to the grillini could have been channelled in a leftward
direction, as has been the experience in Greece with the rapid rise of
Syriza. But this is not the case in Italy. The historic weakness and
collapse of the left has created a vacuum which the M5S has filled
rapidly and spectacularly. This is most definitely a complicating factor
in the development of a new mass left workers’ party. But, in the
absence of a viable alternative, the vote for the M5S marked an
important break from the parties of austerity and a searching for
radical change.
The programme of the grillini
is a confused, incoherent, eclectic mix of policies reflecting its
middle-class make-up. Grillo’s comments are often ambiguous and open to
different interpretations. They also express clumsily the genuine
feelings of many middle- and working-class people. His comments on
CasaPound were not an open endorsement of fascism but a recognition of
the reality that some of CasaPound’s policies overlap with those of the
M5S (and even with the anti-capitalist left), and that some youth
attracted to fascism could be won over to the M5S. However, many on the
left interpret Grillo’s comments as being sympathetic to fascism.
The question of the character
of fascism needs to be addressed – the grillini group leader in the
lower house has also made comments revealing an ignorance of its real
nature. So do some of the comments Grillo has made regarding immigrants:
saying that Italy cannot take on all the world’s problems, and that the
children born in Italy to immigrants should not be given the right to
citizenship automatically. However, this needs to be done not by
labelling the M5S as ‘fascists’ or in a moralistic way, but by putting
forward a programme which explains how it is possible to fight for an
extension of jobs, workers’ rights and quality public services for all,
and how this entails challenging the economic base of society.
When Grillo called for trade
unions to be ‘eliminated’ because they are ‘old structures’ like the
parties, some interpreted this as an attack on unions in general.
Others, including many organised workers, saw it as a welcome attack on
the union bureaucracy, especially as Grillo said that, if the unions
were like the FIOM (the more militant union of engineering workers) or
COBAS (union of the base), things would be different. In the same speech
he went on to declare that companies should belong to those who work in
them.
This is consistent with the
grillini support for ‘direct democracy’ over a democracy which requires
intermediaries such as parties. The real issue here, however, and which
has been expressed in Grillo’s praise of workers’ participation in
Germany, is a denial of class conflict and the promotion of the idea
that workers and bosses have a common interest in working together for
the good of the economy, a position which flows from the M5S’s
middle-class composition and outlook.
Conflicting pressures
In the very short term, the
movement is likely to grow both in terms of members and electoral
support. But very quickly the political and organisational
contradictions are likely to intensify, leading to its decline and
fragmentation, especially if it enters or forms a government at national
level. Some reforms will be possible. In Sicily, the grillinis have
blocked the building of a controversial US satellite ground station, and
the same could happen with the TAV. But the weakness of the Italian
economy and the ongoing crisis mean that these reforms will be very
limited. The movement will come under conflicting pressures from the
capitalist class, on the one hand, demanding austerity and labour market
‘reform’ and, on the other, from the working- and middle-class people
who voted for it in the hope of real political and economic change.
The limits of the M5S’s
reformist policies and the methods of the movement can be seen in Parma,
where the mayor, Federico Pizzarotti, is a grillino. As a legacy of the
previous corrupt administration the mayor inherited a budget deficit of
almost €1 billion. Already the administration has started to increase
charges for local services and impose cuts ‘because the money isn’t
there’. The grillini were elected in Parma partly in opposition to the
building of a local incinerator which, they claimed, would go ahead
‘over their dead bodies’. The incinerator has now been activated and
cannot be stopped, they say, because of the crippling compensation that
would have to be paid.
There is no concept of
building a mass campaign among local people to demand more money for
local services from central government or to stop the incinerator. While
individual councillors have recently begun to go to factories faced with
closure, and individual members are involved in local environmental
struggles, like that of the No TAV in Val di Susa, the main M5S campaign
initiatives have been limited to the question of democratic political
reform.
The absence of party
structures in the M5S means a lack of accountability and democratic
control over elected representatives, especially at a national level.
The unrest among members in Emilia Romagna and the expulsion of two
councillors, including the first ever elected M5S councillor, who
criticised Grillo for undemocratic methods, is a foretaste of future
rebellions against the political and organisational dominance of Grillo
over the movement. Already, Grillo has threatened around ten to twelve
senators with ‘consequences’ for the ‘betrayal’ of voting for the PD
candidate (an anti-mafia magistrate) for president of the Senate,
causing uproar among the movement’s members in blogland. As the
political and organisational contradictions emerge this will open up
space for discussion about the need for an anti-capitalist political
party based on the workers’ movement and on struggle.
The M5S represents a new and
important factor in a situation of political, economic and social
crisis. An analysis and understanding of the character and the
weaknesses of this movement is necessary but is not, in itself,
sufficient. Those on the left in Italy need to engage politically with
the grillini and their ideas and, most importantly, with those
radicalised workers’ and youth who voted for them as part of the process
of building a real working-class alternative to the capitalist system.