The EconomistDecember 7th 2019 Europe 41T
he quincentenary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, which is
being marked this year, is a fine moment to savour the Italian
talent for walking a step or two ahead of everybody else. The inven-
tory of Italian brainwaves, from double-entry book-keeping to ra-
dio, is impressive. In politics, too, Italians have repeatedly antici-
pated trends and innovated—though not always happily, as with
the invention of fascism. In 1968 students in Rome were rioting
two months before ever a cobblestone was thrown in Paris. And if
today’s right-wing populists have a spiritual father, he is surely Sil-
vio Berlusconi. Like Donald Trump, that priapic property devel-
oper used tvto launch himself into politics and successfully mar-
keted an idiosyncratic brand of personalised conservatism.
So it was tempting to believe that Beppe Grillo, a politicised co-
median in the mould of America’s Michael Moore or Britain’s Rus-
sell Brand, was ahead of the curve when he founded the Five Star
Movement (m 5 s) ten years ago. The late Gianroberto Casaleggio,
the internet executive who inspired him, certainly had some origi-
nal ideas. One was that the internet would do away with represen-
tative democracy and replace it with a form of direct democracy in
which the electorate could decide on legislation at the click of a
mouse. In his view, the Five Stars’ main mission was to facilitate
the transition.
For a while, the Movement’s headquarters was a website. Its
parliamentary candidates, who were chosen online by their fellow
members, usually had no experience of politics. One of the many
temporary jobs held by the young man who now leads it, Luigi Di
Maio, was as a webmaster. And these digital natives have created a
programme that has something of the internet’s wildness. Anoth-
er of Casaleggio’s contentions was that the fall of the Berlin Wall
had made meaningless the old division between right and left. The
Movement would be neither. It espouses a mixture of progressive
and conservative policies. It is pacifist and environmentalist, yet
protectionist; socially liberal, yet wary of immigration; keen on
Putin’s Russia, but only intermittently Eurosceptic. It favours dra-
conian anti-corruption laws, boosting internet connectivity and
slashing the cost of politics by, among other things, reducing the
size of parliament.
This heterogeneous, even eccentric programme helped the Five
Stars win a third of the seats in the legislature at the last general
election in March 2018, more than any other party. That enabled it
to govern first with the hard-right Northern League and, since Sep-
tember, with the centre-left Democratic Party. But although some
of m 5 s’s ideas have been taken up by other new parties such as Vox
in Spain and the Brexit Party in Britain, the idea that it offers a
glimpse of the political future looks ever less convincing. In the
first real test of public opinion since the fall of the last govern-
ment, a regional election in Umbria on October 27th, the Move-
ment’s share of the vote slumped to a mere 7.4%. That result
pitched the party into its worst crisis since its foundation. Such
has been its loss of self-belief that the leadership proposed it
should not contest the next two regional ballots, lest it be further
humiliated. Members decisively rejected that proposal in an on-
line vote that has further discredited Mr Di Maio.
So are the Five Stars in fact a cluster of meteors, doomed to burn
out in the political atmosphere? The party has never fared well in
regional elections. In these, the focus is on the rival merits of the
candidates for regional governor. The m5s’s contenders are usually
unknowns. Polls suggest that in a general election, m 5 scould still
pick up around 17% of the vote. But that is barely half what it won
last year.
Although the m 5 sdefies easy classification, that is not always
true of its voters. “When the Five Stars allied with the right, they
lost those on the left; then when they allied with the left, they lost
those on the right,” says Antonio Noto of Noto Sondaggi, a polling
firm. That leaves the party’s hard-core devotees, many of whom ab-
stained in previous elections. Even they may now be deserting.
The m 5 swon support by being uncompromisingly hostile to
the establishment. Since taking office, it has become part of it. No
one reflects the change more than Mr Di Maio, with his dark suits
and sober ties. Some of his own lawmakers were appalled when,
discussing next year’s budget on social media, he suggested that
measures to curb tax-dodging be postponed to make life easier for
shopkeepers and professionals. And the movement has suffered
from its own success. The last government enacted several mea-
sures it had promised, such as an income-support benefit for the
poorest, legislation to limit short-term employment contracts and
the closure of a loophole through which many convicted of cor-
ruption had wriggled free. The m 5 s having delivered on those
pledges, voters see little reason to continue supporting it.Time out
Piergiorgio Corbetta, research director of Istituto Cattaneo, a
think-tank, believes the only way the m 5 scan recover its oomph is
by returning to opposition. He sees its future as not unlike that of
the defunct Radical Party, a similarly unconventional movement
(its lawmakers included the porn star Cicciolina) which neverthe-
less played a vital role in politics, snapping at the heels of the
mainstream parties and lobbying tirelessly for a more socially and
economically liberal Italy.
Mr Grillo has often argued that his movement has played a cru-
cial part in diverting into peaceful, democratic channels much of
the rage in Italian society after two decades of economic stagna-
tion. But if the m 5 sis to be reduced to such a role at the edge of the
political stage, it follows that a large part of that discontent will
flow to Italy’s other, more extreme, Eurosceptic populist move-
ment: the League. That process is already well advanced. In Um-
bria, where it won only 14% of the vote in 2015, the League took a
stunning 37% in October. 7Charlemagne The decline of the Five Star empire
Italy’s quirkiest party goes from hero towards zero