16.06.2016
M5S is not a leftwing party
Why are elements within the left recommending a vote for Beppe Grillo’s party? Toby Abse points to its links with the far right
Any notion that the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S - Five Star Movement) is a leftwing party has to be exposed, as a matter of extreme urgency, for the complete nonsense it is.
Such a notion is being peddled in the United Kingdom by the very same people1 who are pushing what I can only call a Schlageter line2 in relation to the referendum on the European Union, so they are probably utterly indifferent to the widely known fact that M5S leader Beppe Grillo has as his principal ally at the European level none other than Nigel Farage, the man whom even David Cameron - no slouch when it comes to dog-whistle racism, as his remarks about Sadiq Khan during the London mayoral contest revealed - finds too openly bigoted for defending the use of terms such as “Chinks” and “fags” by a UK Independence Party candidate.3
As Farage has proclaimed in a very recent full-page interview with Corriere della Sera,
Grillo and I will destroy the old European Union. On June 19 the Five Stars candidate will be elected mayor of the capital and change Italy. On June 23 Great Britain will leave the EU and change Europe. We shall have a domino effect. After us the northern countries will leave one after the other. First Denmark, then Holland4, Sweden, Austria. This referendum is the most important event since 1957. The EU is about to collapse. Disintegrated into so many pieces.5
It is not just that Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right, racist Lega Nord, has called for a vote for M5S mayoral candidates Virginia Raggi in Rome and Chiara Appendino in Turin in the run-off second ballots on June 19. The links between M5S and both the racist, right-populist Lega and the neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy - FdI) go much, much deeper. A recent opinion poll amongst M5S voters, published in La Repubblica on June 9, showed that 60% of M5S voters were sympathetic to a party of the right. By contrast only 15% had such a sympathy for the left. This cannot be explained purely on the basis of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ - ie, hostility to Matteo Renzi and his Partito Democratico - since most of those polled specified the extreme rather than moderate right. To some extent, this sympathy is reciprocated - most markedly amongst Lega voters, 28% of whom are sympathetic to M5S. Indeed, 18% of Forza Italia and 17% of FdI voters have such sympathies for M5S.6
At the ideological level, the racism of the leading figures amongst the new generation of M5S leaders needs to be underlined. Raggi, the Roman mayoral candidate, said in relation to gypsies: “The camps have to be removed. We need an economic and social census of those who live there.” Not only does this display visceral hostility to the Roma and Simti, but the very idea of such a census has sinister undertones, given the way censuses of Jews in places like Vichy France or indeed fascist Italy paved the way for the Nazi genocide, even if the census-takers had a milder version of persecution in mind. And, of course, in the Roman context it is very reminiscent of the fingerprinting of all gypsy children advocated by the neo-fascist mayor, Gianni Alemanno (the man whose victory was famously greeted by fascist salutes in central Rome), with whom Raggi has greater links than her official, doctored curriculum vitae acknowledges.
Nor is this racism some idiosyncrasy of Raggi’s and nor, for that matter, is M5S hostility to non-Italians confined to one ethnic group. Luigi Di Maio, the probable M5S candidate for premier at the next general election,7 has said: “The migratory phenomenon is an enormous phenomenon. It is for this reason that we want a citizens’ income for the Italians. We must think first about making our country secure.”
Thus the much bruited-about ‘citizen’s income’, about which many trade unionists all over Europe have grave doubts, as something weakening workers’ collective bargaining power by blunting the intensity of class struggle, is in fact linked to ethnic criteria of a kind that is characteristic of a wide array of European far-right parties. That includes the Front National in France, which does not currently advocate extreme neoliberalism, but a welfare state confined to the ethnically pure.8 The implication that the door must be firmly barred to all refugees and that all foreigners are terrorists, murderers or rapists needs little underlining - such is what ‘law and order’ has always meant from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.
Alessandro Di Battista, another leading national figure within the younger generation of M5S, has boasted about how Lega founder Umberto Bossi - second to none in his prime, when it came to making racist remarks - gave him a pat on the back and Di Battista affectionately described Bossi to the press as “an old lion”. Moreover, the same applies at the regional level. In the Veneto, the Lega’s traditional heartland in north-east Italy, Jacopo Berti, the group leader of M5S in the regional assembly, has on many occasions supported resolutions from the Lega, beginning with those calling for the repeal of the law protecting Roma and Simti.9
Potential mayor
Let us turn now to some little-known facts about Virginia Raggi, the 37-year-old lawyer standing for the Roman mayoralty, whom the world’s press has glorified both for her youth and for her gender - many mainstream articles have waxed lyrical about her becoming potentially the first female mayor of Rome.10 Her support for Lazio - the football team with the most violent neo-fascist hooligans anywhere in Italy, whose players have been known to give fascist salutes and whose supporters have frequently brought banners with disgusting references to the holocaust into the ground - is hardly endearing and not something fashionable liberals refer to. However, it is not the worst of her defects by any means.
In her official curriculum vitae it is stated that between 2003 and 2007 “she appeared in court for a well-known legal firm specialising in civil law”. Significantly it is not mentioned that the firm in question was that of Cesare Previti - at the time a Forza Italia parliamentarian and a former minister of defence, who in 2003 suffered his first conviction for corrupting magistrates. That does not appear to have worried this latter-day hammer of corruption, who worked alongside him for another four years! The second extremely significant omission in this thoroughly bowdlerised CV is that she had the role of president in a company administered by the secretary of Franco Panzironi, former head of the municipal enterprise, AMA, and secretary general of the foundation set up by the neo-fascist mayor, Gianni Alemanno, currently on trial in relation to the Mafia Capitale scandal. “It wasn’t a job in the company - only a duty linked to the legal practice in which I was working,” she has unconvincingly explained to Fabrizio Roncone, a Corriere journalist. As another Corriere writer, Sergio Rizzo, points out, “But why omit this from her electoral curriculum? And why omit it from the one published on the council website?”11 One suspects because it would link her, however indirectly, to corruption, criminality and hard-line neo-fascism.
In the light of all this evidence about the attitudes and record of M5S, it is saddening that their mayoral candidates are getting a free ride - not only in Britain from the Tariq Alis and Susan Watkins mesmerised by any force that aims to destroy the European Union, but in Italy, from many on the radical left. They include those who define themselves as communists - the most saddening instance being no less a figure than Paolo Ferrero, the leader of Rifondazione Comunista, somebody who started his political career in Democrazia Proletaria and whose Protestant Valdese religious faith has generally made him much less forgiving of the corruption and compromises of Italian politics than a Catholic like Nichi Vendola of the soft-left Sinistra Ecologia Libertà. Disgracefully, Ferrero has given his backing to Chiara Appendino in the second round of the Torinese mayoral election. Whilst Dario Fo may now be drifting into senility, his avowed support for the right’s mayoral candidate in Milan - a Forza Italia man, but one backed by the neo-fascist FdI - makes little sense, in view of what his late wife, Franca Rame, once suffered at the hands of such neo-fascist characters.
Ferrero certainly must bear full responsibility if he hands Turin over to the racists of M5S. Appendino, its candidate, has publicly reiterated her willingness to accept the enthusiastic support of the Lega Nord’s Mario Borghezio, its most notorious and open racist, about whom Farage has recently said: “I was in the Lega group at Strasbourg. I did not ever have any problems except with Borghezio. I am not a politically correct type. However, Borghezio is too much even for me.”12 All that makes Appendino beyond the pale. It would be comprehensible, although in my view mistaken, if Ferrero had urged abstention, given PD candidate Piero Fassino’s enthusiasm for the TAV (high-speed railway) and so forth, but to ally himself with somebody publicly supported by such a character is to betray the values of the Italian resistance and everything that the communist tradition has ever stood for.
Notes
1. In particular Tariq Ali of New Left Review, the lead speaker at an anti-European Union rally in London on June 13 2016. Although the lead article, ‘Oppositions’, in New Left Review (March-April 2016) was written by his wife, Susan Watkins, it is hard to imagine that comrade Ali did not have a serious input into its general line.
2. Leo Schlageter(1894-1923) was a German Nazi, who, after participating in murderous anti-Polish violence in Silesia in 1921, was executed by the French in 1923 for sabotage during their occupation of the Ruhr. Karl Radek of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) made a notorious speech praising him to the skies. A later, but related, episode in the history of the KPD came at the time of the Nazi-initiated plebiscite against the Social Democratic government of Prussia in 1932, which the KPD called the ‘Red Plebiscite’ - the parallels with the proclamations of the supporters of the mythical left exit in the United Kingdom, with their refusal to acknowledge that this EU referendum has become a vote about immigration, are too obvious to need much elaboration.
3. See Cameron’s interview in The Observer June 12 2016.
4. Since this Farage interview, Geert Wilders, the leader of the Netherlands far-right Freedom Party - a powerful force in Dutch politics - has called for a ‘Nexit’.
5. Corriere della Sera June 11 2016.
6. See La Repubblica June 9 2016 for detailed figures. This article was written by the respected political scientist, Ilvo Diamanti, one of the greatest academic authorities on the Lega Nord, about which he was first to write a serious monograph.
7. Whilst perhaps the ageing Beppe Grillo - a mere youngster compared with Silvio Berlusconi - is tiring of front-line politics more quickly than Forza Italia’s leader, the principal reason for needing another candidate for premier is that Grillo’s manslaughter conviction for careless driving (killing two passengers in his car) bars him from such high office.
8. See my review of the timely and illuminating book edited by Fred Leplat, The far right in Europe: ‘Populism, nationalism and racism’ Weekly Worker April 21 2016.
9. These damning instances of hostility towards gypsies and immigrants by leading members of M5S are reported by Annalisa Cuzzocrea in La Repubblica (June 9 2016).
10. See, for example, The Observer June 12 2016.
11. Raggi was elected to the Roman city council in 2013. Details taken from Corriere della Sera June 12 2016.
12. Corriere della Sera June 11 2016.