In 2012, Beppe Grillo asserted that it was thanks to his party that there was no movement in Italy comparable to Golden Dawn in Greece. The success of Matteo Salvini’s Lega in 2018 – which, among its campaign promises, proposes the mass deportation of illegal immigrants – paired with the rise in xenophobic violence across Italy have proved Grillo wrong. The news that a Senegalese man was murdered by an Italian national the day after the election – a story right out of Camus’ The Stranger – hasn’t had much airtime in a country where Grillo is often considered a leftist despite having defended the “sanctity of borders” in 2007.
Since then, Beppe Grillo has stepped away from the party and the Movement has undergone significant change. Its slate for the March 2018 elections was fronted by the more reassuring image of Luigi Di Maio, a 31-year-old activist from Naples, presenting a manifesto and a list of technocratic ministers mostly drawn from the centre-left. The Movement therefore finds itself to be the party of the anti-vaccine activists as well as that of the cult of experts: a seeming contradiction which perhaps isn’t one at all. As opposed to the narrative in the foreign press that paints this election as an ‘anti-liberal chaos’, in the words of the New York Times, we are proposing an alternative reading, which is no less troubling. [...]
Grillo, believe it or not, was the very first to use V for Vendetta in a political context. The movie ends with a spectacular explosion of the Palace of Westminster in London and this particular image was a perfect metaphor for what Beppe Grillo wanted to achieve with the Italian Parliament. Shortly before the Movimento’s victory in 2012, he declared that he will “open the Parliament like a can of tuna”. Some commentators drew a parallel with a similar statement by Benito Mussolini in 1922. But what is most interesting is how the spectacular rhetoric of a Hollywood movie infiltrated political reality, feeding a strictly post-ideological vision of both power and counter-power. A pure political myth created by the American cultural industry. [...]
Underneath its veneer, the Movement seems to be getting ready to implement a technocratic agenda which will fit into the ordoliberal scheme which governs the European Union. Grillo’s first objective has always been to radically cut public expenses. As for his position towards the Euro, it has kept changing over the years and yet there is a temptation to take seriously his declaration in 2014 according to which the national scale is obsolete and that Italy should be “divided into macro-regions”, just as Gianfranco Miglio used to advocate.
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