The italian's five star movement (m5s): a ?cybercratic' party?
| Autor | Lorenzo Mosca |
| Páginas | 338-363 |
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Breaking a bipolar dynamic which was in place since the inception of the "second republic" (Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2014), the Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle - M5S) represented an important novelty in the Italian party system. Many are the features that make this political actor particularly remarkable: its postbureaucratic organization, its post-ideological identity, its anti-establishment and populist discourse, its democratic conceptions, and its reliance on digital technologies for organization, communication and identity building (Mosca, 2014). This chapter will focus in particular on the last two aspects, which are toughly intertwined. After a brief summary of the M5S' history, I will focus on its democratic visions and practices, with a special emphasis on the use of digital technologies.
The identity of the M5S is strongly based on the idea of direct democracy made possible by online participation. Throughout its history, the internet has been used by the party as an instrument for involving members in internal
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decision-making through online voting, for organizing activists (through the Meetup platform), for communicating with voters and sympathizers and for creating and diffusing a cyberutopian narrative presenting the web as the very solution for contemporary 'corrupted' democracy (Mosca et al., 2015).
My aim is to reconstruct the cyberdemocratic vision of the party not limiting my attention to the two leaders (as other studies have done until now - see Floridia and Vignati, 2014; Caruso, 2015; Mosca et al., 2015; Treré and Barassi, 2015) but also looking selectively at the discourse of elected representatives.
The discursive production of M5S' leaders (particularly Grillo) is extremely rich: from speeches in public rallies such as electoral campaigns and national meetings, to books and posts published daily on a very successful blog. Since the M5S changed greatly since 2009 I will mostly focus on the discursive production that followed the entrance into the national parliament (February 2013). The analysis of movement's democratic conceptions will center on leaders' speeches in national meetings (i.e. '5 Stars Italy') as well as on the most important books and posts (mostly, political communiqués) published on Grillo's blog. Such information will be complemented with quotations from interviews to elected representatives either realized by myself or taken from pieces of research on the topic.
The analysis of M5S' digital democratic practices will be concentrated on two different aspects of the platform used by the Movement: a) the consultations taking place online on the same blog which are limited to registered users, b) the possibility to participate in the amendments to draft laws elaborated by M5S' MPs (restricted to registered users as well).
In the second section of this article the history of the M5S will be briefly summarized, in the third section the democratic visions of M5S' leaders and
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elected representatives will be presented, while the fourth section will describe online democratic practices. In the concluding section I will critically discuss the M5S organizational model in relation to the use of digital technologies.
Beppe Grillo is a well-known Italian comedian who became famous with his television shows at the end of the seventies. Banned from public television during the 1980s because of satire against the governing Socialist Party, he decided to move his shows to squares and theatres (Vignati, 2015). His performances have always been a mix of political satire, social and environmental campaigns, consumer defence, and other topics.
Before establishing his own party, Grillo had supported countless events, initiatives, and grassroots campaigns, as well as groups, associations, and social movements (Mosca, 2013). A meeting with the communication expert Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2004 was essential to realize the importance of the internet and start a blog in 2005 that promptly became very successful. After a series of trials and errors, in 2009 he decided to create a political party. The unexpected rise of the M5S since 2012 was related to a particularly favourable context characterized by the formation of a bipartisan government, the economic crisis, and widespread corruption scandals involving all parties, including the former supporters of the moralization of politics (Mosca, 2014). The M5S is very loosely organized, building its very identity on a distinct organizational model very far from traditional political parties in terms of membership, funding, and participatory instruments (della Porta et al., 2017).
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The party label is even rejected in the very name of this political force, which self-presents as 'a movement'. Lack of formal organizational processes and bodies makes Grillo's creature extremely dependent on leaders' resources and decisions, while the organizational evolution - particularly since its entrance in the national parliament - appears as a sudden (often incoherent) reaction to internal or external shocks.
As such, M5S' history can be roughly divided into five phases: 1) latency on the web (2005-07); 2) visibility through mass protests (2007-08); 3) entry into the electoral arena (2008-12); 4) electoral boom (2012-2014); 5) organizational change (see also Ceccarini and Bordignon, 2016).
Phase 1: Latency on the web (2005-07)
The latency phase started when Grillo set up his blog in January 2005 and invited his fans to create groups on Meetup called 'Beppe Grillo's friends' (Amici di Beppe Grillo) in the same year. While the blog was the Movement's unique voice, the Meetup groups served as its territorial backbone (Lanfrey, 2011). In this phase, Grillo gradually put aside his role as a comedian and became a political entrepreneur. Politics moved from the background to the foreground of his discourse and his fans were quickly transformed into activists (Biorcio and Natale, 2013). Meetup provided a locus for the aggregation of Grillo's fans, for staying in contact, and for promoting projects of active citizenship in the local domain (Lanfrey, 2011). These groups were the basic cells that facilitated the emergence of the M5S a few years later. Public visibility and media coverage were still limited at this stage, and the new (pre)political creature was mostly known to the limited circuit of supporters and activists.
Phase 2: Visibility through mass protests (2007-08)
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Before considering the option of creating a political party, Grillo tried to find interlocutors within the existing party system. In the 2006 general elections, he supported the centre-left coalition headed by Romano Prodi against Berlusconi's centre-right, as the lesser of two evils. Soon after Prodi's victory, however, Grillo expressed his disappointment with government's inertia; repeatedly criticizing members of the government and their reforms.
During this phase, Grillo's fans moved from the web and the local domain to the squares, and their mobilization acquired national resonance. Two massive public events (called 'V-days') were organized through the internet, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people. These protest events served to build a sense of solidarity among participants beyond the local level, also by pointing to the 'enemies' of the embryonic movement: above all, traditional parties and the mainstream media. In both initiatives hundreds of thousands of signatures were collected for popular law initiatives and abrogative referenda, delivering them to the parliament and expecting reactions from political parties that never arrived. After the success of the first V-day, Grillo proposed that his supporters set up civic lists 'certified' by him and his staff to participate in local elections. This decision paved the way for the creation of the M5S and its entry into the electoral arena.
Phase 3: From the squares to the electoral arena (2008-12)
On the occasion of the election day in 2008, Grillo adopted a double strategy: endorsing 5-star civic lists in local elections, while repeatedly stressing the similarities between the main competitors in general elections and defining abstention as the only possible answer and 'the only democratic weapon left'.
The creation of the M5S - until then a 'meta-organization' networking autonomous local groups under the coordination of an organizational core of
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limited size (Lanfrey, 2011) - was preceded by some important events. First, the approval of the 'Carta di Firenze\ a common program drafted in a meeting held in Florence on 9 March 2009 by people drawing up the certified electoral lists, Grillo's supporters, and members of Meetup groups. The charter identified the main issues expected to drive local government's action - the so-called five stars: water, environment, mobility, development, and energy. Second, after its defeat in the general elections of 2008, the PD announced primaries for the selection of a new secretary. In July 2009, Grillo provocatively proclaimed that he would run in PD's primary. Although it is not clear if he really wanted to participate in the primaries of the centre-left party, the PD's board did not accept his candidature. The (encouraging) results of the first tests of local lists, as well as what appeared as a political system extremely closed to outsiders, facilitated the decision to create a political party.
On 10 October, the M5S was officially born in a public assembly in Milan, and two months later a 'non-statute' regulating its functioning was made public...
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