17.11.2016
What sort of populism?
Toby Abse reviews: Filippo Tronconi (ed) 'Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement: organisation, communication and ideology', Ashgate Publishing, 2015, pp250, £67.99
The rapid emergence of the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement - M5S) as a nationwide electoral force in Italy has few parallels in recent European history. Indeed, the editor of this book, Filippo Tronconi, argues: “No parallel can be found in post-1945 Europe of a new party obtaining a similar success in its first electoral participation” (p1).1
Even in the Italian context, where the cold war party system completely collapsed in 1991-94, M5S’s 25.6% score for the Chamber of Deputies in 2013 exceeded the 21% obtained by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in its initial outing in the 1994 general election, and involved no coalition with other parties of the type Berlusconi cobbled together.
Secondly, parties led by professional comedians do not usually make it into the mainstream; when the Monster Raving Loony Party beat David Owen’s Social Democratic Party in an English by-election, it was an indication of the latter’s decline, not of any surge of support for Screaming Lord Sutch. Whilst Rinaldo Vignati sees the French comedian, Coluche, as “the protagonist of a political adventure that in many ways was a forerunner of Grillo’s own exploits” (p13), Coluche’s 16% polling ratings in the French presidential contest of 1981 were only hypothetical, since he withdrew his candidacy.
Thirdly, M5S is the most conspicuous example of what Piergiorgio Corbetta - one of the contributors to this volume - has called “web populism”. Although pirate parties have made some relatively minor gains in some Northern European countries, no other party claiming to be based on the internet has become the second force in a national parliament in the way M5S has.2
These distinctive features have earned M5S a fair amount of media attention in the United Kingdom, even if Grillo’s alliance with Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party in the European parliament may well have played some role in such coverage. Regrettably, Grillo’s most ardent British fans outside Ukip circles - where Arron Banks has actually suggested Ukip needs to copy M5S - have been the staunch Brexiteers of the New Left Review, a journal that in happier days popularised continental Marxism, and once even published an entire issue devoted to Tom Nairn’s challenge to the Europhobic anti-European Economic Community consensus of the British left in the 1970s.
Given this level of interest in British journalistic and, in some peripheral cases, political circles, it is surprising that Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement is the first book-length publication in English on M5S. Moreover, this work is not a British or American response to the Grillo phenomenon, but the product of a team of 12 Italian scholars, nine of whom have posts in either the University of Bologna or (in one case) the Bologna-based Istituto Carlo Cattaneo, the institution which sponsored the research project on M5S from which the book originated. Although one of the authors - Cristian Vaccari - also holds a lectureship at Royal Holloway, University of London, it seems rather implausible that all of the other 11 contributors to such a work of academic political science could have written their pieces (chapters or sections of co-written chapters) in fluent English, so it is odd, and perhaps somewhat reprehensible, that nobody is credited with any translation of any part of the texts in the acknowledgements.
The Istituto Carlo Cattaneo seems to be the centre of serious academic study of M5S, since a similar book came out in Italian with a Bolognese publisher in 2013 (going to press before M5S’s dramatic entry into the national parliament in February 2013, even if its completion may well have been hastened by the forthcoming general election). This earlier book - Il partito di Grillo3 - also had 12 authors, 10 of whom contributed to Tronconi’s English-language collection. This Bologna-based group of social and political scientists seems primarily motivated by intellectual curiosity within the confines of their discipline, and should be clearly distinguished from the Milan-based academic duo of Roberto Biorcio and Paolo Natale, whose book cover proclaims: “In this book the Five Star Movement comes to be analysed for the first time, with rigour and political scientific competence.” But to a considerable extent Biorcio and Natale act as M5S’s intellectual defence counsel, albeit in a more nuanced way than, for example, the novelist and literary critic, Robert Caracci, in his much more biographical work Il ruggito di Grillo: Cronaca semi-seria del comico tribuno,for whom Grillo, throughout his career as both comedian and politician, is a hero who can do almost no wrong.
Movement or party?
The contributors to Tronconi’s volume, most of whom also contributed to the earlier Il partito di Grillo, have no time for Grillo’s absurd pretence that his organisation is a movement and not a political party. An organisation with members, a leader and a programme that regularly selects candidates and fights elections is bound to be perceived by any objective political scientist as acting like a political party. Although they are all far too tactful to say it, no expert on Italian politics could be unaware of the precedent set by the Movimento SocialeItaliano (MSI - Italian Social Movement), which used the word ‘movement’, but was in reality a neo-fascist party anxious to circumvent the law which prohibited such a reconstitution after 1945. This point about M5S being a party may seem blindingly obvious, but the Biorcio and Natale volume referred to above goes along with the ‘movement’ rhetoric of the ‘Grillini’ themselves, not just in its subtitle, but throughout its text, showing that there is still some debate on this issue, even amongst the mainstream of Italian political scientists.
The more serious debate with which the writers of the Tronconi volume, and political scientists in general, have to engage is what sort of party M5S is, since ‘scientific’ classification in terms of political families is crucial to political science methodology. The two options that these authors find themselves torn between are ‘left-libertarian’ and ‘populist’. What they mean by ‘left-libertarian’ is a party like the German Greens (arguably - in my view - the German Greens of the 1980s), with a programmatic emphasis on ecological issues and a relatively horizontal organisational structure, drawing its support from certain specific social groups (students, highly educated unemployed, people employed in state bureaucracies). In contrast, ‘populist’ parties in their definition are ‘catch-all’ parties, with a more heterogeneous social base, anti-establishment rhetoric and more authoritarian leader figures.
The authors acknowledge that populism is not always rightwing, since no Italian political scientist can ignore the rise and fall of the left-populist Italia dei Valori party led by Antonio Di Pietro. But they see most successful European populist parties of recent times as being on the right (often the extreme right), and marked by anti-immigrant and anti-EU stances in their programmes. The problem with M5S for political scientists is that it fits neither category particularly well. Its original programme - the Carta di Firenze of 2009 - claimed that the Five Stars of its title stood for “[public] water, environment, [public] transport, [sustainable] development and [renewable] energy”. However, whilst the original 2009 programme has never been repudiated, the absolute centrality to the party of Grillo’s blog has meant that he has shifted M5S to the right by repeated ex cathedra pronouncements on that blog about such topics as immigration. As Vignati points out (p19), “In 2000, Grillo criticised the ‘natural racism’ of Italians”. Regardless of whether Grillo’s recent anti-immigrant stance - particularly his opposition to the granting of Italian citizenship to the children of immigrants born in Italy - is due to electoral considerations, as Lorenzo Mosca suggests on p159, or to the influence of Gianroberto Casaleggio, as Vignati seems to imply on p19, it does make it impossible to define M5S as ‘left-libertarian’ in programmatic terms. Casaleggio’s assertion in a 2013 text - that “M5S sees the word ‘leader’ as belonging to the past; it is a dirty word, perverted” - is unceasingly belied by its practice, for, as Vignati rightly observes, “its ‘leaderist’ character prevails over the ‘leaderless’ rhetoric with which it is imbued” (p11). Given the emphasis on political families for classificatory purposes, it is rather surprising that none of the contributors comment on Grillo’s lash-up with Farage in the European parliament.
Once on the left?
There is some disagreement amongst the contributors as to whether the M5S electorate could ever have been categorised as predominantly leftwing, although there seems to be broad agreement that its current constituency is very heterogeneous. Andrea Pedrazzani and Luca Pinto in chapter 4 - ‘The electoral base: the “political revolution” in evolution’ (pp76-98) - see the 2012 local elections as a watershed. Before then, “more than half of Five Star voters expressed preferences ranging from extreme left to centre left (52%) and the rest were divided between respondents who refused to be placed along the left-right dimension (21.6%), centre voters (13%) and rightwing voters (13.4%)” (p94). After the 2013 general election, “the percentage of leftwing voters in the M5S was just 38.4%; rightwing voters almost doubled, increasing to 22.3%; and people who refused to be placed along the left-right divide reached 27.7%” (p95). Or, to quote the same authors’ less statistical summary, “In its early days, the M5S was quite similar to those supporting the left-libertarian parties that formed across Europe in the 80s” (p95), but “Grillo’s anti-system stance has led to a relevant change in the composition of the Five Star electorate, which has gradually become more heterogeneous” (p96).
Pasquale Colloca and Piergiorgio Corbetta in chapter 9 - ‘Beyond protest: issues and ideological inconsistencies in the voters of the Movimento 5 Stelle’ (pp195-211) - interpret the evidence differently. They argue: “In conclusion, those who voted for the M5S in February 2013 cannot be defined as being either on the left or on the right” (p209). Although Colloca and Corbetta seem sceptical of the notion that what they call “consistent leftist” voters (whose consistency is defined by their views on a broad range of issues, not by their voting pattern over time) were ever at the core of M5S, given that all their interviews were done later, in 2013, they cannot really prove a negative about an earlier period (2009-12). Nonetheless, the authors are not themselves enthusiasts for a ‘neither left nor right’ position of the sort M5S leaders often propound, and they conclude by saying that “the ideological uncertainty of the M5S is the clearest example of the fact that populism can be dressed in any political colour” (p209).
Whether intentionally or not, Lorenzo Mosca in chapter 7, ‘The Movimento 5 Stelle and social conflict: between symbiosis and cooptation (pp153-77), tends to give the impression that M5S, and even Grillo, are part of the left, stressing that “a significant proportion of elected M5S representatives in parliament and local assemblies originates from the social movement milieu, and also from leading positions in local mobilisations” (p171). Whilst he claims that “the M5S has captured activists, grievances, claims and action forms from social movements of the past decade” , he admits it has done so “in a fuzzy, contradictory and inconsistent way” (p171), and stresses M5S’s unwillingness to participate in campaigning coalitions, and its tendency to substitute itself for independent activists (p172).
However, even using Mosca’s criteria, 62.6% of M5S parliamentarians had no social movement links. Mosca’s criteria for linking parliamentarians with social movements are multiple memberships of civil society groups and “unconventional forms of action”. Since Mosca includes a wide range of civil society organisations, including Amnesty International and those connected with blood donations, his statistics for “multiple membership” probably overestimate genuine social movement radicalism, and his “unconventional forms of action” include peaceful mass demonstrations - an activity that millions of Italians have been involved in at some point in their lives.
No comparison is made with any other set of Italian parliamentarians, either in the present or in the past, and it is likely that the social movement credentials would look less impressive in the wider context of parties with clear links to Italian protest movements. Indeed, one wonders how M5S might compare with Matteo Renzi’s Partito Democratico, a fair proportion of whose parliamentarians would have had some links with trade union activism. Moreover, given that this information about M5S is derived from blogs, CVs and videos produced by the parliamentarians themselves, it seems reasonable to conjecture that many of them would have exaggerated their own role in campaigns in the way present-day British Labour Party parliamentarians so frequently do.
In conclusion, the Tronconi volume provides a great wealth of useful information about M5S activists, parliamentarians and voters not previously available in English. Given the superficiality of much British journalistic coverage around such events as the 2016 Roman mayoral elections, and the misinformation peddled by the New Left Review, this book is worth reading, even if its price will deter many.
Notes
1. The phrase, “first electoral participation”, requires some qualification. Civic lists endorsed by Beppe Grillo and often labelled ‘Amici di Beppe Grillo’ first emerged in municipal elections in a few localities in 2007, and M5S as such contested five regions in the 2010 regional elections, as well as municipal elections in 2011 and 2012 (and most spectacularly the Sicilian regional elections of October 2012). However, until May 2012, when it captured Parma, its low scores meant M5S got little media or academic attention, and its votes tended to be submerged in the ‘others’ category in any general listing of parties’ electoral performance.
2. Whilst the chapter by Lorenzo Mosca, Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani (pp127-51) is probably the best treatment in English of M5S’s relationship with the internet, the most knowledgeable study is not by a political scientist, but by the blogger turned journalist, Federico Mello, entitled Il lato oscuro delle Stelle (Reggio Emilia 2013).
3. Piergiorgio Corbetta and Elisabetta Gualmini (eds) Il Partito di Grillo Bologna 2013.