Post-Crisis Populism

The Five Star Movement first established itself as an archetypal “populist” critic of the (neo)liberal political systems that were the architects or passive spectators of the 2008 crisis. Founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, M5S categorically rejected the left-right divide, proclaiming it outdated. The thrust of its attacks was directed against the political “caste,” with no special focus on those economically responsible for the crisis.

M5S made its first electoral successes when Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister. But after the outbreak of the 2008 crisis, Berlusconism began to decline, thanks to both the tycoon’s faltering leadership and his right-wing alliance’s inability to resist the austerian pressures imposed on Italy by supranational bodies like the EU, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

The broad left, led at the time by the Partito Democratico’s Pierluigi Bersani, seemed destined to reap easy electoral successes on the back of a timidly social democratic program. But it committed suicide by refusing to force elections and instead supporting the government led by technocrat Mario Monti. Supporting this cabinet of unelected austerians (also backed by Berlusconi’s party) the Democrats became complicit in attacks on welfare and wages not seen since the immediate postwar period. Their popularity soon headed downhill.

During Monti’s government, the M5S emerged as an electoral alternative, scoring more than 20 percent in its first general election bid in February 2013. While the center left nudged ahead of the center right (but could only govern aided by a split from Berlusconi’s party) the next five years were squandered on new Democrat leader Matteo Renzi’s neoliberal agenda, ripping up labor rights. The M5S grew further and emerged as the absolute winner in the 2018 elections, with over 30 percent support. This was, however, a highly composite vote, inflated by both working-class and popular protest against austerity and the traditional anti-state and anti-tax demands of the Italian middle classes.

Paradoxically, M5S began to gain a more distinctly left-wing profile during the so-called yellow-green government from June 2018 to early September 2019. In this period, M5S (of yellow branding) governed together with a party that had shifted to the hard right, namely Matteo Salvini’s Lega (traditionally green in color). The first government headed by Conte, initially himself an independent, introduced a basic income and the so-called dignity decree, the first labor law to reduce precarity after two decades of policies to the contrary. The features of a nonaligned foreign policy also began to emerge, as Italy joined China’s “New Silk Road” project. Yet the Interior Ministry, headed by the Lega leader, pursued strongly anti-migrant policies, building up a right-wing vote for Salvini’s party. On the strength of this rise, the Lega brought down Conte’s government in summer 2019 as Salvini clamored for the snap election that could give him “full powers.” Conte, meanwhile, became a key target of attacks by Confindustria employers’ association president Carlo Bonomi and almost the entire Italian press, close to the business lobby’s interests.

Yet there would be no snap election, as M5S instead made a pact with the Partito Democratico in September 2019, in the second government led by Conte. During the COVID-19 pandemic, M5S’s leftish profile was strengthened by the declaration of a freeze on layoffs — the only such measure passed by a Western government during the pandemic, later imitated by the broad-left coalition in Spain. Conte’s charismatic leadership also grew, and with it the attacks from Confindustria and its media outriders. Right-wingers accused his government of adopting the “Venezuela model,” especially when it started discussing the nationalization of the motorways (a response to a spell of private management that led to the deadly collapse of the Ponte Morandi bridge in Genoa). But soon the same accusations were taken up by outlets traditionally close to the center left.

These attacks owed less to the substance of the government’s measures than to the fear that an alliance between the M5S, a party without socialist identity but with strong support among lower-income groups, and the Democrats, a party of left-wing historical roots but a more middle-class, educated electorate, could give rise to a classically laborite social alliance. Former prime minister Renzi, a former Democrat who now had his own separate party, Italia Viva, was in charge of giving political heft to these attacks. At the start of 2021 he brought down Conte in favor of a technocratic government led by former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi.

The M5S’s attitude toward Draghi remained cautious, but the situation began to deteriorate when Conte opposed Draghi’s bid to move from the prime minister’s office to the presidency of the republic. At that point, it seemed almost as if the former JPMorgan representative Draghi sought to direct his government policy against the M5S, even though most of the MPs backing his cross-party coalition in fact belonged to M5S itself. Conte drafted a series of demands to Draghi, which included a more cautious stance on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the introduction of a minimum wage. The demands were rejected, and the government fell in July 2022.

This also shaped the campaign for the September 2022 general election, which produced the current right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni. Partito Democratico leader Enrico Letta did not want to continue the alliance with the M5S in the run-up to the elections because of its lack of reliable “Atlanticist” credentials, and the right-wing alliance had an easy time winning a majority in both houses. During the election campaign, the M5S heightened its social democratic profile, losing any remaining “right-wing” voters from its earlier all-populist phase but recovering to around 15 percent of the vote.

From the Left With Conte

That election campaign saw a notable transfer of votes from the historical left to the M5S. Pina Fasciani, daughter of a communist family from the Abruzzo region and herself a former MP for the 2000s postcommunist party Democratici di Sinistra, was among the first to join Conte’s M5S: “I am struck by the fact that I found in M5S the same seriousness that I used to see in Communist branch offices as a child. Beginning with the way you sign up, as the leadership first have to scrutinize who is coming in.” But most important to this rapprochement, Fasciani continued, were Conte’s “pacifist positions and the Keynesian thread running through his program, starting with the minimum wage proposal.” Moreover, even amid a thousand difficulties, given the M5S’s initial “anti-political” attitude, she found that Conte had strengthened “the credibility of the leadership groups,” even if the party still lacked “broad anchoring across local territories.”

Opening the way for a left-wing turn toward M5S was Stefano Fassina, a former Partito Democratico economic chief and former deputy economy minister. On the sidelines of the M5S’s last assembly — which saw Conte’s line finally trounce the founder Grillo, who headed toward the exit —Fassina embraced this “progressive” turn. In this choice, he sees a repositioning tempered by the realization that we are no longer dealing with the kind of liberal progressivism hegemonic since the 1990s: “For large swaths of the people, that progressivism has become unbearable on a material and spiritual level.” M5S, despite its general decline in support since its height in 2018, is still either first or second placed among the blue-collar, unemployed, and poorer segments of the population. Fassina sees in this a Gramscian-inflected “national-popular progressivism” and hopes for closer ties with Sarah Wagenknecht’s party in Germany.

Stefano Bartolini heads the foundation Valore Lavoro, close to the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) union confederation. He told me about M5S’s development from the point of view of its structures and political culture:

This movement emerged around the time of the 2008 crisis, answering indignation at the center-left leadership’s inability to respond. The 2011 crisis [the downfall of Berlusconi] and its political handling by the center left, choosing the Monti government as the way forward, heightened this indignation. The rise of blogs and social media also provided the basis to build — at the level of theory — the mirage of a newer, more democratic form of political participation, taking up the idea, present on the Left already in the late 1990s, about the Internet as the global democratic agora, the space of democratization.

Onto this was grafted the idea of disintermediation, drawing on two strands. There is the “populist” one — the leader’s direct relationship with the masses — and a more distinctly left-wing one that sees the challenge to established organizations as key to releasing the revolutionary forces present in the population. But with the test of government, the whole first historical phase of the M5S dissolved and a new, initially outside figure emerged, namely Conte. He did not come from M5S but has a background as a law professor — so a figure much more attentive to the importance of structures, superstructures, and intermediate bodies. More generally, the new phase in the M5S is characterized by a return to the material dimension of politics [and not just questions of representation].

Samuele Mazzolini, a researcher in political theory, agrees that there is a democratic socialist shift in the M5S but also captures some underlying limitations. In particular, there is a widespread perception of the M5S’s unreliability, which limits its ability to win over “chunks of the urban progressive electorate” and make a “breakthrough in the north of the country.” Another problem is Conte’s “overly personalistic management” of M5S, which “though proving fruitful during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic,” in the subsequent phase “failed to sufficiently widen the circle of those to whom the M5S speaks.”

Welfare Chauvinism?

Finally, it is worth noting the M5S’s relationship with the historical radical left. If M5S has managed over the years to win the votes of large swaths of the working and even parts of the “progressive” electorate class by way of left-wing measures such as basic income, the fight against precarity, the minimum wage, and pacifism, it still faces a more or less latent hostility from the traditional left. Indeed, M5S’s record stands in contrast with those of radical left forces, which have been unable to expand their base beyond the limits of the educated middle classes.

Most of the center left, identifying with the Partito Democratico, still sees in the M5S’s positions an implicit criticism of its own efforts since the 1990s as an uncritically pro-NATO and pro-business force. But even the most radical public opinion often resents the M5S’s “usurpation” of left-wing causes.

We can dismiss accusations of “nationalism” leveled at the M5S, a claim owing to its historic lack of enthusiasm for the European project. In truth, the openly Eurosceptic polemics of the M5S’s early days have long since been blunted. Yet it is also absurd to call “nationalist” the criticisms raised against an EU integration process that is indeed irreparably compromised by neoliberal and Atlanticist orthodoxy. That such a miscued identification with “European integration” is so common in the recent history of the Italian left only reveals its wider poverty of analysis.

Yet more worthy of attention is the left-wing criticism of M5S’s positions on migration. In the first Conte government together with the Lega, M5S members did little to oppose the clampdown on immigration promoted by Interior Minister Salvini. Even the social measure most emblematic of M5S, the establishment of a basic income, was aimed only at Italian citizens, not all living and working (or seeking work) in Italy. M5S could thus be accused of a certain kind of “welfare chauvinism.”

Still, recently Conte has repeatedly been self-critical about the securitarian policies that resulted from the M5S-Lega coalition of 2018–19, and has under the Meloni government been the opposition leader most critical of its “security decrees.” In the debate on migration and the granting of citizenship, M5S rejects the principle of birthright citizenship (jus soli), which does not exist in Italy. To this it counterposes “jus scholae,” which means giving citizenship to all those who complete a period of studies in Italy. This would, in practice, mean remedying the situation of the children of migrants born in Italy once they have attended school, and would mean no longer conceiving of rights and benefits on the basis of ethnic belonging, as today.

More probably, the rupture between M5S and much of the radical left on this point (not only in Italy) concerns the identification of the migration question as the real litmus test for left-wing identity. With the class struggle in the great Fordist factory now seen to have had its day, many on the Left identify both their own camp and the enemy one principally on the basis of who is for and against welcoming migrants — thereby taken for the new “general class.” Surely this is a controversial definition of left-wing identity, though M5S’s refusal to identify itself in these terms ought not be taken to imply an automatic “right-wing” positioning or its having a preconceived hostility toward migrant reception.

M5S has preferred to pivot its identity on themes such as peace, labor, and anti-corruption (classic “twentieth-century” issues, even if the movement is known as “postideological”) rather than on migration. This choice places M5S outside the radical left typical of the past twenty years, yet also distinguishes it from Wagenknecht’s party in Germany, to which it is often compared (and similarities do exist). Yet in defining its identity BSW has assigned a prominent role to opposing illegal immigration, while M5S has not done this. This is not just about its communications: the M5S has clearly opposed the Meloni government’s anti-immigrant policies, while BSW has already joined right-wing parties in votes regarding foreigners’ rights.

A realistic analysis of today’s Italian political arena would suggest that the presence of M5S has acted as a major last barrier to the class dealignment that Jacopo Custodi recently discussed in Jacobin. A crisis of its working-class vote would not create golden opportunities for the “real left” but likely cause many such people to fall back into political apathy, if not into the arms of the reactionary right. A mass political mobilization against the right-wing government is yet to be built. It is unlikely to have a truly popular substance without the presence of the M5S’s social and pacifist agenda.