19.05.2016

Scandal hits M5S

As Beppe Grillo prepares to step down, his populist party stands accused of corruption. Toby Abse reports

The Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement - M5S) of Beppe Grillo is facing a serious crisis a few weeks before the June 5 municipal elections, in which the mayoral contests in Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples and Bologna are regarded as being of national importance.

Until now Virginia Raggi, the M5S mayoral candidate in Rome, seemed certain to get through to the second, run-off, ballot on June 19 between the two leading contenders¹ and stood a strong chance of emerging as mayor. M5S regarded the capture of Rome as a stepping stone to forming the national government in the general election due in 2018 - although it could be brought forward if the coalition led by Matteo Renzi’s Partito Democratico (PD) undergoes a major crisis. However, M5S hopes of making major gains in June are now in jeopardy because of developments in the two large cities in which they already hold the mayoralty: Livorno and Parma.

Livorno was the most unlikely prize that M5S ever gained - a predominantly working class port city, which used to have a major shipyard and engineering factories, where the Partito Comunista d’Italia was founded in 1921 and which the Partito Comunista Italiano (as it was renamed after the dissolution of the Comintern) and its various successor parties (including today’s PD) had administered without a break from 1946, when the first post-war municipal elections were held, until 2014. In that year Filippo Nogarin won a surprise victory in the run-off ballot, as a result of a wide range of forces - including the local radical left, as well as most of the centre-right - backing him against the PD.²

The M5S administration has not proved particularly competent and some of its councillors have defected, leaving Nogarin with a very precarious majority of one. Whether fairly or not, its principal claim to national notoriety has been its poor handling of refuse collection - for some years, including during the PD administration, there have been major problems with the municipally owned company in charge of this service. Similarly the municipal administration’s failure to collect its debts and its apparently dubious accounting practices cannot be entirely laid at the door of Nogarin or his M5S municipal cabinet. However, Nogarin’s decision to voluntarily put the company into receivership may not have been the wisest course of action and some have alleged that he only went to such extremes under pressure from the national leadership of M5S, who were very eager to score a political point against PD.

Inevitably this decision led to conflict with the company’s administrators - and with the dustmen themselves, whose understandable industrial action, given the very serious threat bankruptcy posed to their continued employment, led to rubbish piling up in the streets. This is a situation which will strike many British readers as rather similar to that provoked by Jason Kitcat’s deplorable antics during the disastrous Green administration of Brighton council, even if the Livornese may have been far more concerned with the appalling damage to their city’s reputation from unwelcome parallels with the internationally notorious Neapolitan rubbish crisis - one that owed more to the interference of the Camorra, the Campanian organised crime group, than to any genuine industrial dispute.

The decision to voluntarily declare bankruptcy has rebounded on M5S. On May 7 Nogarin himself was charged with participation in fraud - the precise grounds for the charge are a bit unclear, but seem to be related to a payment to 33 casual workers after the declaration of bankruptcy, deliberately ignoring auditors’ objections to this expenditure.³ Of course, given the considerable pressure both from the dustmen and their families and from the wider citizenry anxious to have their rubbish collected, the action for which the mayor is being charged does not appear heinous in itself, even if it was the consequence of a reckless and incompetent course of action. But such behaviour is absolutely typical of an M5S administration that at one stage in the last few months appeared to be about to close Livorno’s main municipal library, as a result of some half-baked idea of separate tendering for the running of each and every library, museum and cultural institution in the city. This seemed designed to favour some small cooperatives close to M5S (which has always posed as the champion of small business), but made absolutely no sense in terms of a coherent, city-wide cultural policy.

It should be stressed that charges have also been brought against Nogarin’s PD predecessor as mayor, Alessandro Cosimi, and against two of his PD cabinet members, as well as against Nogarin’s own M5S cabinet member for finance, whose own office had been subjected to a spectacular police raid earlier this year. Whilst the PD - despite Cosimi’s own involvement in, and very probably much responsibility for, the bankrupt company’s colossal €35 million debt - was overjoyed by the M5S mayor’s humiliation, Grillo rallied to him, saying, “We support you, we are with you - hold fast”.⁴ Whilst Nogarin has made some statements suggesting he will resign if he is not vindicated, there is absolutely no pressure from the M5S national leadership for him to step down. However, there have been demonstrations against him outside the town hall, with former M5S members playing a leading role, as well as very rowdy sittings of the council itself, with the opposition parties making demands that he should resign.

Parma

However, within a week a similar situation affecting Parma’s M5S mayor came to light. Federico Pizzarotti, who had been elected in 2012, before M5S’s national breakthrough in the 2013 general election, had to finally admit that he too had been charged with a criminal offence - abuse of office. He had actually been charged back in February, but the local paper, La Gazzetta di Parma, chose to reveal this on May 12 - timing that suggests that its source was seeking to damage M5S in June’s local elections and capitalise on the Livornese scandal that already was at the centre of a media storm.

The charge relates to the appointment of Anna Maria Meo as director general of the Teatro Regio, the local theatre. There were 30 applicants for this post and seven of the most promising were short-listed, but none were deemed suitable. A week later Pizzarotti and his cabinet member for culture - also charged with a similar offence - nominated Meo.⁵ The reaction of the M5S national leadership to Pizzarotti’s alleged misdemeanour was entirely different to their response to Nogarin’s alleged offence.⁶ Within a day Pizzarotti had been suspended from M5S.⁷ Allegedly, the entirely divergent treatment of the two mayors was a consequence of Pizzarotti’s keeping the matter of the charge against him secret for months instead of informing the central leadership of M5S the moment he was informed he was under investigation. The M5S dogma of transparency was evoked in favour of Nogarin and against Pizzarotti.

However, this line could not be sustained for long when it was revealed that Fabio Fucci, the M5S mayor of the far smaller town of Pomezia, had also been informed he was under investigation in 2013, but had not revealed it until May 13 2016, when he put it on his Facebook page. In actual fact the investigating magistrates had dropped the charge against Fucci in April, but even this had not led the vindicated Fucci to go public; he had clearly waited until the Livorno and Parma scandals placed him in an awkward position if the truth got out.

The national leadership of M5S, faced with the Fucci case, came up with a new line of argument to justify its inconsistent stance on disciplining mayors. This involved a new distinction between allegations of defamation, which M5S claims are commonly and casually made against M5S by political opponents, especially the PD,⁸ and charges relating to holding municipal office. However, the problem is that, whilst this explains the failure to take any disciplinary action against Fucci, it does not really account for the Nogarin/Pizzarotti dichotomy - except on the basis of transparency, which M5S had appeared to retreat from.

Of course, the real reason for the suspension of Pizzarotti, who by most accounts has been a far more successful and competent mayor than Nogarin, at least by conventional standards,⁹ is that, unlike the cringingly loyalist Nogarin, Pizzarotti has probably been the only major figure in M5S who has both stood up to Beppe Grillo and his close associate, Gianroberto Casaleggio, and shown no inclination to leave M5S voluntarily. Pizzarotti’s attempts on occasions to stand up for M5S dissidents, particularly in his own region of Emilia-Romagna (at least until they had either been expelled or resigned), made him an object of hatred for the obsequious loyalists in his area, especially the current M5S mayoral candidate in Bologna.

The use of Grillo’s blog¹⁰ to suspend Pizzarotti by a simple posting, without any semblance of due process - even if only as feeble as that of the Labour Party’s compliance unit - seems, according to Pizzarotti and his allies, to be the work of Davide Casaleggio, Gianroberto’s son. After the death of Gianroberto in April, some had, perhaps naively, assumed that his internet and publishing company, Casaleggio Associati, would become merely a technical support service for M5S and that some sort of democratisation was in the offing - a younger group of M5S leaders, especially the 29-year-old Luigi di Maio, had appeared to be groomed for the succession, as the elderly Grillo faded into the background. However, Davide seems to be proving as autocratic as Gianroberto, even if he is far less weird in physical appearance and apparently less prone to his father’s off-the-wall, science fiction-style visions of the future, eerily reminiscent of David Icke.

It has even been claimed by some that during the last two years of Gianroberto’s life, as his health deteriorated, it was in fact Davide who, as the ruling dynasty’s heir apparent, laid down the law to M5S parliamentarians, councillors and ordinary members. As I have pointed out before, the use of online polls with small numbers of responses on blogs controlled by the Casaleggio family has in fact proved far easier to manipulate than the old-fashioned ballot box primaries of the PD¹¹; the techno-utopians of the Paul Mason ilk are talking self-evident nonsense.

Pizzarotti shows no signs of going quietly; even if the crisis in M5S is contained until June, he is rumoured to have plans to unite many of the M5S dissidents who have already been expelled or resigned into a new, more bottom-up movement, which will lay claim to the founding ideals of M5S’s grassroots supporters.

Notes

1. If one candidate gets over 50% on the first ballot, there is no need for a second round, but such outcomes are relatively rare in a fragmented party system and becoming rarer, as the PD is no longer able to mobilise all of the traditional PCI electorate in cities like Bologna, Siena or Livorno. There certainly will be no outright first-round victory in Rome; there never has been since the essentially mayoral system of local government was brought in during the early 1990s.

2. See my earlier article, ‘M5S takes ex-communist stronghold’ (June 12 2014), for more details.

3. La Repubblica May 8 2016. Whilst this surmise is probably correct, the judicial authorities do not seem to have gone into this kind of detail as yet.

4. Ibid.

5. This account of events relies on La Repubblica May 13 2016 and may be disputed by the accused.

6. Incidentally Nogarin’s Livornese political opponents have accused him of similar favouritism in making cultural appointments in relation to the Teatro Goldoni, Livorno’s main theatre and opera house - although it must be emphasised that as yet no criminal charges have been brought in connection with these allegations.

7. It is widely suspected this is a preliminary to expulsion, but that there is some unaccustomed reluctance by Grillo to adopt this widely used method against the mayor of a major city.

8. Whilst there is some truth in this, it is also true that M5S politicians are very prone to making off-the-cuff accusations without evidence to support their wilder claims.

9. He has reduced Parma’s substantial municipal debt; I do not currently have sufficient information to know whether this was achieved at the price of cuts to services.

10. Or is it now M5S’s blog? There seems to be some ambiguity as to whether it is regarded as Grillo’s personal property, as was the case in the past, or has become the collective voice of the party. That is because, over the last few months, when Grillo has returned to his original profession as a comedian and engaged in a national tour, there have been claims, whether genuine or spurious, that he will be taking a back seat role in future.

11. I would not seek to deny that these have been rigged too. The most recent major case occurred in this year’s Neapolitan primary, in which it was quite clear that in five polling districts bribery and intimidation were employed against Antonio Bassolino in favour of Renzi’s favoured woman for the PD mayoral candidacy.