Europe | Charlemagne

The decline of the Five Star empire

Italy’s quirkiest party goes from hero towards zero

THE 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 inventory of Italian brainwaves, from double-entry book-keeping to radio, is impressive. In politics, too, Italians have repeatedly anticipated 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 Silvio Berlusconi. Like Donald Trump, that priapic property developer used TV to launch himself into politics and successfully marketed an idiosyncratic brand of personalised conservatism.

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So it was tempting to believe that Beppe Grillo, a politicised comedian in the mould of America’s Michael Moore or Britain’s Russell Brand, was ahead of the curve when he founded the Five Star Movement (M5S) ten years ago. The late Gianroberto Casaleggio, the internet executive who inspired him, certainly had some original ideas. One was that the internet would do away with representative 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. Another 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 draconian 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 September, with the centre-left Democratic Party. But although some of M5S’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 government, a regional election in Umbria on October 27th, the Movement’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 online 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, M5S could still pick up around 17% of the vote. But that is barely half what it won last year.

Although the M5S defies 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 abstained in previous elections. Even they may now be deserting.

The M5S won 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 measures 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 corruption had wriggled free. The M5S 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 M5S can 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 nevertheless 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 crucial part in diverting into peaceful, democratic channels much of the rage in Italian society after two decades of economic stagnation. But if the M5S is 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 movement: the League. That process is already well advanced. In Umbria, where it won only 14% of the vote in 2015, the League took a stunning 37% in October.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "The decline of the Five Star empire"

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