A waning star?

SOMETHING quite abnormal has happened to the Five Star Movement, arguably Europe’s most abnormal political and electoral phenomenon. It has lost support.

For the past 12 months, opinion polls have shown backing for the movement (its activists scorn the word “party”) growing inexorably. By late June the Five Star Movement (M5S), had overtaken Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative People of Freedom party, which is embroiled in yet another scandal (see article), to become Italians’ second most popular choice. But surveys carried out since the end of the August holidays have returned sharply lower figures. One gave M5S only 13.4% of the vote.

The movement’s rapid rise is still remarkable. M5S was founded just three years ago and as recently as March the movement was polling less than 5%. Even its current, diminished performance, repeated at the general election that has to be held by next spring, would give M5S about 80 of the seats in the 630-seat lower house Chamber of Deputies and, perhaps, the balance of power.

M5S grew out of the equally remarkable success of an anti-establishment blog written by Beppe Grillo, a comedian (pictured above). The strategist behind both the blog (the most widely read in Italian) and the movement is a bushy-haired internet-marketing and communications executive, Gianroberto Casaleggio. He and Mr Grillo launched M5S on the feast day of St Francis, whose disinterest in money Mr Casaleggio sees as a counterpoint to the rapaciousness of Italian parties and politicians. And together they presided over the rapid proliferation of M5S groups, linked through the website www.meetup.com.

Since July, the movement has suffered several setbacks. First, there were claims, denied by Mr Casaleggio, that large numbers of Mr Grillo’s followers on Twitter were generated by web robots, or bots (accusations subsequently levelled at other politicians inside and outside Italy). Then one of M5S’s municipal councillors in Genoa was arrested for peddling drugs. And finally, a regional councillor for the movement in Emilia Romagna was filmed complaining of a lack of internal democracy and depicting Mr Casaleggio as a shadowy, ruthless manipulator.

The councillor is not the only person with qualms about an anti-party with two unelected leaders. A poll in Genoa, Mr Grillo’s home town, found less than one in six respondents thought his movement had “real internal democracy”. Mr Casaleggio says he is at a loss to understand such views. He notes that M5S’s programme, which stresses environmental commitment and political reform, but which has little or nothing to say about entire areas of policy, was defined by its supporters online; that the movement’s candidates for local elections in May were chosen in regional assemblies, and that its candidates at the general election will be selected by a vote on the web.

As for the view of him as a kind of digital Cardinal Richelieu-cum-Aleister Crowley, he says, “the real problem is that these people don’t understand the internet and believe to be magic something that is not.” Indeed, the biggest doubt now hanging over M5S is whether its progress so far might not have been due largely to the crisis in the euro zone and its impact on Italy. If the crisis now goes into abeyance, M5S’s fortunes could wane too.

Mr Casaleggio remains optimistic. The movement’s position is that it will not go into coalition with any other party to help it form a government. “But,” he says, “since anything can happen in this life, we are hoping to win the election.”