Matteo Renzi. Flickr/European Parliament. Some rights reserved.The Five Star Movement (M5S) is the real winner of the referendum on constitutional reforms that took place on Sunday 4 December in Italy and the Democratic Party (PD) is certainly the biggest loser. Yet their leaders – Matteo Renzi, the outgoing prime minister, and Beppe Grillo, the former comedian who established M5S – may need each other, paradoxically, in order to move beyond a political stalemate that poses a serious challenge to both their careers.
Matteo Renzi should, in fact, avoid the trap of an agreement between the PD and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, who together may pursue electoral reforms, whose mechanisms would condemn the centre-left and the centre-right to govern together for the foreseeable future with the sole objective of keeping the M5S at bay. This situation could kill the entire agenda of a politician who has promised from the start to make a difference by scrapping (rottamare) the political elite – the bottleneck to any serious change.
Beppe Grillo would have the same interest. The biggest danger for him is a limbo in which his movement would be left to act as a permanent opposition, benefiting from the weaknesses of a coalition government but firmly trapped in the adolescence of a 'protest without a proposal', which over time may make M5S irrelevant to most citizens.
