Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). With the vote out of office of Giuseppe Grillo, who founded the Five Star Movement (M5S) in 2009, 80% of the party’s voters have said goodbye to their guru, under whom the ‘Grillini’ ini’ lived for a decade and a half in a blatant contradiction politically, writes Hartmut Heine, co-editor with Marcella Heine of the bulletin “Aus Soge um Italien” (From the Pull of Italy), in the online December issue. 1Originating from many local initiatives against corruption and local environmental sins, it wanted to differ from all conventional parties and called ‘participation from below’ constitutive for it, according to which ‘all should be equal’ in the movement, but Grillo stood above it all as a ‘guardian’, in 5-star jargon the ‘sublime’ (Elevat”), and defended the “values” to which the “movement” had committed itself based on his (!) higher insight. Grillo differs from Jesus in one not insignificant way: he is a rich man. His current fortune is estimated at $185 million, which he has invested primarily in villas in Italy, Switzerland and even Africa. He owes his special status in Italian politics to the fact that he never quite descended into its lower reaches. This included a tragedy for which he was mainly responsible at the age of 33: in December 1981, in the mountains of Piedmont, he negligently ignored warnings of black ice, lost control of his newly purchased car and, after getting out at the last moment, killed three of his passengers, driving himself to safety.
The boundaries to a cult leader were fluid, as when he unleashed a campaign against the journalists of major left-wing liberal newspapers in his blog, implicitly calling on people to only read his blog in their place. In order to turn his 5-Star Movement into a champion of ‘direct democracy’, Grillo allied himself with the PC entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio, whose utopia was a global democracy in which everything could be decided at the push of a button without the many intermediaries of representative democracy. It was a mixture of faith in technology and esotericism, with the individualised world citizen as the subject, that fascinated his young supporters. The 5-Star Movement was to become the testing ground where this direct democracy could be tried out. It took a few years before it became clear that the old problems of direct democracy were also returning through the digital back door: Who sets the rules, who formulates the questions, who interprets the results.
The second idea that Grillo used to plague the ‘movement’ was its location in the given Italian political spectrum. ‘Neither left nor right’ was the directive called “progressive”, although the difference initially remained unclear. However, it quickly became clear that it concerned the relationship to the social-democratic Partito Democratico (PD): the better their own election results were, the more decisively they rejected the offers of alliance that came from that side. This policy reached its peak after the national elections of 2018, when the big surprise winner was the 5-Star Movement, which immediately joined forces with Salvini’s Lega as a junior partner for a coalition government led by the ‘Movement’.
But it was not the ‘Movement’ that benefited most from this alliance, but Salvini: he became Minister of the Interior and in this capacity did what he had been preparing for years through a relentless smear campaign against the ‘invasion of drug dealers and rapists’ from Africa: he staged himself as the saviour of the fatherland by blocking the ports, and was thus successful with the electorate.
The right-left arbitrariness that Grillo had prescribed for his movement became clear a second time when, a year later, Salvini, after a resounding victory in the European elections, believed he could force new elections from which he hoped to achieve a kind of autocracy. When he broke the coalition with the 5SB to do so, the ‘movement’ showed a degree of agility that even Salvini had not reckoned with: with the same nonchalance with which it had entered into the alliance with Salvini, it now chose the PD, the political opposite, as its new coalition partner. In her reappraisal of her Salvini adventure, she replaced analysis with outrage: Salvini was a ‘traitor’ who had to be punished.
Grillo’s conflict with Conte
Ultimately, it was Giuseppe Conte, the self-proclaimed ‘people’s advocate’, a blank slate in both the movement and the public eye, who became Grillo’s opponent. Conte owed his rise to the electoral victory of the ‘Grillini’ in 2018, who held a relative majority in both chambers for four years and had to conjure up a prime minister from the tandem between Di Maio and Salvini, and in the process, as it seems, rather accidentally fell back on Conte. He was able to consolidate his position when he succeeded in getting the ‘Reddito di cittadinanza’ project through parliament in early 2019, which introduced a kind of basic income for the socially disadvantaged, especially in the south, and when he relatively successfully guided Italy through the horrors of the pandemic in the following years, although there was also a lot of resistance and charlatans in the miracle-believing country. Salvini’s failed ‘betrayal’ of 2019 did not bring the 5-star into calmer waters, especially since the PD’s hope of now being able to cultivate a ‘structural’ ‘ ally in the 5Stelle proved to be an illusion: at the beginning of 2021, Matteo Renzi left the PD with a small group of MPs, depriving the centre-left government of its parliamentary majority. Conte saw himself cheated of the 2018 election victory for a second time and joined – apparently grudgingly, as many members left the 5SB – the PD, the Lega and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the national coalition around Draghi.
The power struggle
The power struggle between Grillo and Conte began in the summer of 2021. In the previous years, in which Conte acted as a kind of managing director of the ‘movement’, his support among its activists had grown, while Grillo’s role began to be seen more critically, especially on the issue of the third mandate, which Grillo wanted to abolish at all costs – since for him it was a matter of identity. The dispute began to escalate for the first time: both accused each other of wanting to dominate the movement. Grillo let it be known that Conte was neither able to organise nor capable of innovation, and Conte, emboldened by the support he had gained in the movement, said he would only agree to lead if Grillo’s role was ‘better defined’, i.e. reduced. Fearing another split, a final compromise was reached at the end of 2021: Conte became ‘president’ of the party, while Grillo ceded some of the powers associated with his role as ‘guarantor’. Grillo’s party made a mistake that was not entirely unimportant for his reputation: the movement reimbursed Grillo €300,000 as compensation for the past efforts.
The compromise lasted three years, then the conflict erupted again. The activists continued to struggle with Grillo’s taboo on a third mandate and also increasingly questioned the underlying concept of democracy. In the summer, Conte threw down the gauntlet: he called for a ‘constituent assembly’ of all members to decide the question. And at the same time, he broke yet another taboo: does the movement really need a ‘guarantor’ who stands above everything as an ‘exalted one’? Are we not all equal, and should we not affirm that through a joint vote?
At the same time, the 5SB fell again in the voters’ favour. The landslide victory of 2018 (32.7%) was followed by a slump to 17.1% in the 2019 European elections and to 15 .6%, with one comparison being particularly important to the 5SB strategists: with the PD, the ‘left-wing competition’ that seemed to have pushed the 5SB into marginality in 2018. But with a new leadership (Elly Schlein), the PD not only managed to recover, but also to turn the gap between it and the 5SB into a clear lead again.
Problems with the united front policy
What caused the most trouble for the 5SB, which was fighting for its independence, was the PD’s united front policy against the right: when the 5SB accepts offers of alliance, it reaps joint successes (as it just did in the regional elections), but it is ultimately the PD that benefits. What therefore determines the relationship between the 5SB and the PD is the desire to repeatedly seek out unique selling points, in addition to occasionally accepting alliance offers – it was the 5SB that took the initiative to overthrow Draghi in 2020 against the will of the PD (the stated reason being the construction of a waste incinerator in Rome). But now it was the question of peace. Apart from Salvini, whose Lega has since become an open auxiliary force of Putin, Conte’s 5SB became the only party in Italy to advocate peace in Ukraine without arms deliveries. It is burying its head in the sand on the question of what impact this would have on Ukraine’s continued existence, knowing full well that it is advocating surrender. 2.
Grillo has parted company with the 5-star movement, which also represents an opportunity for the party, especially since it has also freed itself from the shackle of the two mandates. But Grillo’s other legacy has not yet been lost, especially his almost pathological search for distinction. It could perpetuate the hegemony of the right.
Notes:
1 The contribution, which does not take into account important facts in some statements – for example, that Grillo never questioned the capitalist system – nevertheless gives an interesting overview of the role of M5S in the period in question.
2 Here it becomes clear that the author supports the war against Russia in Ukraine led by NATO and the EU.
