The decline of the Five Star empire

THE QUINCENTENARY of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, which is being marked this year, is a fine moment to savour the Italian talent for walking a step or two ahead of everybody else. The inventory of Italian brainwaves, from double-entry book-keeping to radio, is impressive. In politics, too, Italians have repeatedly anticipated trends and innovated—though not always happily, as with the invention of fascism. In 1968 students in Rome were rioting two months before ever a cobblestone was thrown in Paris. And if today’s right-wing populists have a spiritual father, he is surely Silvio Berlusconi. Like Donald Trump, that priapic property developer used TV to launch himself into politics and successfully marketed an idiosyncratic brand of personalised conservatism.

So it was tempting to believe that Beppe Grillo, a politicised comedian in the mould of America’s Michael Moore or Britain’s Russell Brand, was ahead of the curve when he founded the Five Star Movement (M5S) ten years ago. The late Gianroberto Casaleggio, the internet executive who inspired him, certainly had some original ideas. One was that the internet would do away with representative democracy and replace it with a form of direct democracy in which the electorate could decide on legislation at the click of a mouse. In his view, the Five Stars’ main mission was to facilitate the transition.