April 12, 2018. Italy's Five Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio attends a press conference at the Quirinale Palace in Rome. Jin Yu/Xinhua/Press Association. All rights reserved.The Europeanisation of politics meant that Italians thought this election would bring them their Le Pen. However, they are more likely to be getting a Macron instead. How did the Five Star Movement become so mainstream, beneath its veneer of populism, that it can now get ready to implement its own technocratic agenda?
Since its creation in 2009, Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement has been an unmistakable feature of the Italian political landscape. For some, it offers the promise of a renewal of the political elite freed from corruption; for others, it is the label which houses a populist, Eurosceptic, anti-rational movement. Not only has Beppe Grillo’s blog led to personal accusations of fascism, but his gang of deputies and senators (a troop of unknown soldiers who entered the Italian Parliament by miracle one night in 2013) have come under fire for their lack of political experience. This is a euphemism. One of them attracted attention criticizing a project to implant microchips under people’s skin to control the population, another when she claimed that mermaids exist and more have been accused of believing in conspiracy theories.
While it is true that Italy is a corrupt country, a country in the middle of a geopolitical game of power and influence due to its strategic position in the Mediterranean and a country now more than ever witnessing major dysfunctions caused by capitalism, the Movement has never offered a coherent discourse to explain these diverse phenomena. As a result, it has succeeded in channelling the anger of a large part of the Italian population, above all, the anger of the young. But what is this anger being channelled into? And on whose behalf?
