On paper, and taken at face-value, much of the M5S programme sounds appealing. Testament to this is the sheer variety of their public supporters including alt-right commentators, radical left intellectuals like Dario Fo and Bifo Berardi (the latter retracted his support), and even Bill Emmott, ex editor of the Economist, who despite some reservations was surprisingly enthusiastic about M5S when I interviewed him in the run up to the vote. Few indeed could argue with the idea that that Italy’s notoriously corrupt republic needs a new force to clean up the system, to “drain the swamp” in Trump’s words. What M5S have done so cleverly is to occupy this space with an additional commitment to tackling all the other things that the incumbent parties have failed on: environmental commitments, democratic participation, technological innovation to name just three. As for the economy, meanwhile, while un-costed, M5S has campaigned in favour of a basic income as a measure to protect an increasingly precarious working class that has been abandoned by the system. Looking at the strong support in the country’s impoverished southern regions like Sicily, Campania and Puglia, as well as with the chronically unemployed young, this gamble seems to have paid off.
The appeal is easy to understand, at least in theory. So why has the movement been so criticized? And why, following their most recent success, are so many in a state of panic? First, of course, are the realities behind these pretty words. It is hard to take M5S’s remarks on direct and internal democracy seriously when candidates have historically been forced to tow the party line to such an extent that members have been expelled for ‘crimes’ such as talking to the ‘fake news’ on mainstream TV. Then there is the question of ownership. For a movement that prides itself on transparency, the non-profit organization that manages the M5S digital platform, Rousseau, is remarkably cagey about where the presumably vast advertising revenue ends up. More tangibly still the movement has seemed on the back foot thanks to the unambiguous ineptitude of several local representatives. In the past year alone Virginia Raggi, the Five Star mayor of Rome, has presided over several corruption scandals and a dramatic worsening of public services, from transport to the now infamous garbage crisis. None of this however has affected their anti-political appeal at the national level.
One of the most important aspects to note about M5S, however, leaving aside all superficially attractive aspects of their programme, is the movement’s gradual but definite shift towards the right. In reality glimpses of this were visible from the very beginning, in what were passed off as occasional rhetorical gaffs as when one candidate likened gay sex to bestiality, or, more recently when the movement’s leader Luigi Di Maio made the bizzare claim that Italy is importing 40% of Romania’s criminals. More recently this kind of talk has translated into actual policy. Under Raggi there have been several evictions of shelters hosting refugees in Rome, as well as widespread talk of deportations at a national level, not to mention consistent fear mongering about rising crime due to immigrants (in fact, as ISTAT data shows, crime in Italy is actually decreasing and there is no easy correlation with areas of dense immigration.)
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