The most striking political development in Italy arising from the 2007-08 financial crash was the rise of the populist Five Star Movement. Described as ‘a new way of doing politics’ based on a digital ‘direct democracy’ model that allegedly empowered every ‘citizen member’, it was launched by comedian Beppe Grillo, speaking to mass meetings of tens of thousands of people. It defines itself as “independent progressives”, following an online membership vote in November last year, with the party’s representatives sitting in the Left group in the European parliament alongside Spain’s Podemos party and France Insoumise.
In 2018, the Five Star Movement emerged as the biggest single party with over 10.7 million votes, a 32.7% share. But from that position it led coalition governments that failed to resist the demands of capitalism and the Five Star bubble burst, falling to 15.4% in the 2022 election and paving the way for the election of an entirely right-wing populist government under Giorgia Meloni.
Here we are reprinting an abridged version of an article written by CHRISTINE THOMAS, which was first published in Socialism Today issue 238, May 2020, about the rise and fall of the Five Star Movement, as a contribution to the current debate about what form a new party should take in Britain.
The precipitous electoral rise and fall of the Five Star Movement (M5S) graphically illustrates the political volatility ushered in by the post-financial crisis period in Europe and world-wide. Populist parties in their different forms – right, left, nationalist, or ‘neither right nor left’ (as the M5S claims to be) – were propelled into political voids created by a dramatic collapse in confidence in the established parties across the spectrum; in particular, the social-democratic and communist parties that once had a mass electoral base among working-class people.
Even before the 2007-08 economic crisis, the Italian economy had suffered 20 years of stagnation and high public debt. As elsewhere, the world crisis further reinforced mistrust in political parties, as well as capitalist institutions and processes, including parliament and elections. With all the traditional parties seeking to administer an economic system in crisis in the interests of the capitalist ruling class, offloading the cost onto the working class and sections of the middle class, a space was created for the rapid growth of parties promoting an anti-establishment message.
With their main emphasis on ‘honest politics’ and ‘cleaning up’ the political system, Beppe Grillo and the M5S were able to channel the disgust that growing sections of Italians felt towards politics and politicians, and their strong desire for change. All corrupt MPs would be ‘sent packing’. The crooks and swindlers who evaded their taxes would be imprisoned. Its programme, initially, was quite limited, concentrating on attacking the political caste, with a few environmental and social demands tagged on. Nonetheless, it was a message that came to resonate more and more with alienated voters looking to voice their opposition. For many, the details of what the M5S proposed were secondary, the most important thing was to shake up the system.
How it all began
It all began in 2005 with a blog, beppegrillo.it, which became one of the top ten most read blogs internationally. Two years later, on V-Day (referred to by Grillo as ‘Fuck-off Day’), 8 September 2007, over two million people packed into squares up and down the country to hear Grillo, a very popular national comedian, berate the corrupt political caste. They queued for hours to sign a petition to ban candidates with criminal records standing in elections.
Grillo’s online followers came together in local ‘meet-ups’ and, in 2008, the ‘Friends of Beppe Grillo’ decided to stand candidates in local elections, with 30 being elected. With the official launch of the Five Star Movement in 2009, it stood first in regional and, eventually, national elections in 2013. Tens of thousands again greeted Grillo’s ‘Tsunami Tour’ of the country’s cities, culminating in a real electoral tsunami of 109 MPs and 54 senators.
Grillo and co-founder Gianroberto Casaleggio, an entrepreneur and web strategist, presented the M5S as superseding specific class divisions and interests. In a ‘post-ideological’ world, they were on the side of the ‘citizen’ against the corrupt and powerful elite. At the same time, they promoted a ‘new way of doing politics’, which rejected traditional party organisation in favour of internet-based direct democracy.
‘Digital democracy’ has not been confined to the M5S but has also been central to the Pirate parties in countries such as Sweden, Iceland and Germany, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, and Momentum in the Labour Party. The idea of movements based on horizontal, ‘non-hierarchical’, internet democracy has been particularly attractive, at least initially, to a section of youth, alienated by the political degeneration and bureaucracy of the traditional parties, which has turned its back on the concept of party structures.
The Five Star’s electoral support has been very heterogeneous – cross-class and drawn from all parts of the political spectrum. However, different social layers have been attracted at different stages of its evolution and there have also been some regional variations.
In its early days, the radicalism of the Five Star Movement appealed to many disillusioned former left-wing voters, youth, and those who had never voted. In the 2013 general election, when it made its first national breakthrough, winning more than a quarter of the votes cast, it managed to mobilise over 25% of those who had not voted in the previous general election. It had the support of a majority of under-24s and was the most voted for party among industrial workers, the unemployed and self-employed, with over 40% support from these categories. From 2014 it began to win over more voters who had previously backed ‘centre-right’ parties. The 2018 general election was the peak of its electoral success. In some parts of the south – wracked by poverty and extremely high levels of unemployment, especially among the youth – its vote reached 40% (in Puglia and Sicily, for example), and even over 50% in some parts of Naples and Campania.
From protest to institutions
At various times, Beppe Grillo was capable of mobilising tens of thousands of people in the various squares of Italy. According to the M5S, however, radical change was to come about not through collective struggle but through ‘honest’, ‘competent’ people entering parliament and state institutions – replacing the crooked, self-seeking, inefficient politicians and officials who were corrupting the system – and managing them efficiently and fairly for the good of ordinary citizens.
Individual Five Star members have been involved in, and given support to, local campaigns, especially around environmental issues. In some cases, the M5S has reaped the political benefits – such as in the Piedmont region where its opposition to the TAV high-speed rail link between Turin and Lyon was a factor in Chiara Appendino being elected mayor of Turin in 2016. This was not, however, the main emphasis of the movement, and the more electoral success the M5S achieved, the more the ‘institutions’ took precedent over local activism.
It did not take long for reality to puncture the illusion that meaningful change could be brought about through infiltrating the system with well-meaning citizens and reforming it from the inside. In 2012, Frederico Pizzarotti became the first elected M5S mayor of a sizeable city, Parma, in the Emilia-Romagna region. Along with the corruption of the previous administration, opposition to the building of a local incinerator had been an important factor in Pizzarotti’s election.
Once in office, however, he declared that the cost of decommissioning the already activated incinerator was too high and it would continue to function. Moreover, having inherited a budget deficit of almost €1 billion, he promptly set about cutting services and increasing charges, “because the money isn’t there”. There was no thought of mobilising local citizens to refuse to make cuts and demand that central government make up the shortfall.
An even bigger test came in 2016, when Virginia Raggi became mayor of the capital Rome, winning 67% of the vote in the run-off ballot, her highest support coming from the poorest peripheral areas of the city. Rome had been rocked by the Mafia Capitale political scandals exposing a corrupt network of power, linking politicians, criminals, big business, speculators and financiers in a votes-for-favours exchange. In addition, the city had been plagued by a severe rubbish and transport crisis.
Without a programme for directly challenging the economic and political structures of capitalism – the power and control at the root of the crisis – Raggi was incapable of resolving any of the most important issues facing working- and middle-class people in the capital. What is more, her administration became tainted by corruption scandals. In the European elections in May 2019, the M5S vote collapsed in Rome, most spectacularly in the poorest areas where Raggi’s initial support mainly came from. On 25 October 2019, workers in transport, waste collection, schools and other sectors took city-wide strike action against poor services, degradation and working conditions. For all its denials, the M5S was discovering that the class struggle does, in fact, exist.
Digital democracy
From the beginning, the M5S founders, Grillo and Casaleggio, had an almost religious faith in the democratising force of the internet – its ability to take power away from the elite and place it into the hands of the ‘citizen’. For them, direct online democracy was far superior to representative democracy and the party structures, mediated through conferences and delegates, that the social-democratic and communist parties had traditionally been organised around. By doing away with those structures, bureaucracy would be eliminated and grassroots participation increased – everyone, they argued, ‘is of equal worth’.
The M5S is officially a movement, not a party, organised around ‘non-statutes’ and with a ‘non-leader’. In a country in which political corruption has been so endemic – rooted in an historically weak central state – and the disconnect between the political caste and ordinary people so great, these ideas have understandably had a certain echo.
In reality, the organisational basis of the M5S has been empirically modified to take account of changing circumstances and the interests of the ‘non-leaders’, and there has been a constant tension between democracy and centralisation. Through Casaleggio’s enterprise, Casaleggio Associati, and a complex and opaque legal network, Grillo and Casaleggio (who died in 2016) were effectively owners of the Five Star Movement which has been run just like a company.
In the early days, when Grillo was the main spokesperson or ‘megaphone’, he would often unilaterally make policy announcements on his blog. For a period, members would get together in local meet-ups to discuss ideas and sometimes plan initiatives. But their activities and autonomy have been increasingly curtailed and policed from above – losing control over communication, for example. In 2015, power became increasingly centralised, as the ‘non-leaders’ attempted to manage the serious contradictions and divisions that were emerging as more M5S representatives were elected, especially at national level.
Online consultation of members over controversial issues has taken place, candidates have been approved via the web, and members have on occasion even been able to propose policy initiatives and amendments. Nonetheless, the final decision over what will be accepted has rested with MPs and senators. There has been no real opportunity for the kind of thorough debate and democratic accountability that can take place in branch meetings and conferences. Instead, initiatives and proposals have mainly emanated from above, with the membership merely asked to accept or reject in a plebiscitary manner with a mere click of a mouse, without the possibility of proposing or debating an alternative.
With the election of councillors, MPs and senators the limitations of online ‘democracy’ became clear. Who were the elected representatives accountable to? On what basis would they vote on measures proposed in the council chamber or in parliament? How could they be kept in check? The M5S tried to get around this problem by obliging elected representatives to sign up to a set of rules and principles governing their behaviour. Mandates would be limited to two terms (since extended to three), and representatives would be obliged to forgo part of their salary. Non-compliance with these conditions has resulted in several expulsions.
But political dissent has been dealt with in the same way, too, with elected representatives, individual members and groups being summarily expelled. In addition to expulsions, there have been innumerable resignations by disillusioned elected representatives and online members, and lack of internal democracy has been an important factor in this. Without an elected collective leadership, subject to democratic control by the members, leadership has effectively been seized either by the ‘non leaders’ or the councillors and MPs who have appointed themselves as spokespeople for the movement.
Participation in online votes has steadily declined. While average turnout in ballots was 60% of the registered membership in 2012, it had fallen to 14% in 2017. Once all political discussions were live-streamed but that has since been abandoned.
Towards government
However, the local and regional inconsistencies of M5S representatives, the splits, expulsions and limited democracy, initially, did not have much of an effect on its electoral support nationally. Italian workers, and a big section of the middle class, were so desperate for change, especially as the consequences of the economic crisis really started to bite, that they were prepared to give the M5S a chance to govern. Everything else had been tried, it seemed, and now was the time for ‘something new’: 75% of those electors who voted for the M5S in 2013, did so again in 2018.
When Grillo took a step back and separated the role of ‘guarantor’ and ‘political leader’ in 2017, paving the way for the election of Luigi Di Maio as political leader, it was part of a broader strategy for gaining political power. The movement underwent a makeover as the young, besuited and telegenic Di Maio courted business leaders in an attempt to assure them that they had nothing to fear from a M5S government. Attacks on the EU, for example, were toned down as the party prepared to become an even greater part of the very establishment it had so vocally condemned.
At the same time, the M5S widened its political programme, pushing limited social welfare measures as an answer to the acute poverty and unemployment that had worsened as a consequence of the age of austerity. For some time, the ‘citizen’s income’ had been one of the measures closely identified with the M5S. Originally, it had been intended as a universal basic income paid to everyone, whether rich or poor. In the end, it became a time-limited, conditional unemployment benefit for the very poor. But even this limited proposal helped to secure the M5S huge support in the south, especially, where unemployment was sky high and the welfare system virtually non-existent for many, particularly the youth.
The M5S went into coalition after the 2018 general election as the dominant force in terms of the votes behind it and the number of MPs. But Di Maio as labour minister (the non-party law professor Giuseppe Conte became prime minister), did not get the economic resources for the welfare policies he wanted to promote, and had no strategy for fighting to secure them. This would have required taking on the EU and its imposed spending restraints and decisive measures against the Italian capitalists – the M5S has backed off from adopting such a stance at every stage.
Even though the citizen’s income was eventually introduced, its restricted form did little to reduce poverty and, crucially, nothing to create jobs, which was what many M5S voters so desperately wanted. The ‘government of change’ appeared to change very little in people’s day-to-day lives and it was the M5S that paid the political price.
Born from economic, social and political crises and with no coherent ideology or class base, populist parties like the M5S are inherently unstable and volatile. Italian workers will be forced onto the offensive at a certain stage. Politically, they will be compelled to look away from populism towards building independent political representation with a socialist programme that reflects, not the interests of a mythical classless ‘citizen’ – which, ultimately, means those of the ruling capitalist class – but their own specific class interests.