The Five Star Movement (M5S) is dying a slow death; perhaps undeservedly so. It’s done a lot to revive a political conscience in many Italians. But, regional elections in Italy are significant steps towards a general election; and if the latest are anything to go by, then the yellow party is affected by an infirmity worse than polling jaundice.
On 26 January, in both Emilia-Romagna and Calabria, M5S came third; its share of the vote was respectively 4.7% and 6.3%. This was an especially bad showing. The starred movement received considerably less support than the Democratic Party (PD), the junior member in Italy’s M5S-led government: it trailed behind the social democrats by a jaw dropping 30% in the northern region (PD won there with 34.7%) and a striking 9.4% in the deep south, where PD, despite receiving the most votes for a single party (15.2%), still lost to the centre-right alliance commandeered by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
No wonder no one followed M5S’s example in Europe; it felt doomed from the start. That’s clear now. Stubbornly refusing left or right definitions and courageously portraying itself as above political over-simplifications is a fruitless exercise in an age of strong polarisations: you come across as neither fish nor fowl, whether you actually deserve to be told that or not.
