The Italian left has seen better days.

The country once boasted the West’s largest Communist Party, saw the vibrant social struggles of the 1968 and ’77 generations, and served as a laboratory of Marxist thinking that still informs European labor and feminist movements today. But today, the popular response to the crisis seems more muted in Italy than in countries like Spain, Greece, or Portugal.

The decline of the old Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the rise of the eclectic Five Star Movement (M5S) have together driven anger against Matteo Renzi’s governing Democratic Party (PD) in right-populist and xenophobic directions.