On a gently curving street lined with furriers and antiquarians sits a yellow building with a tinseled fake Christmas tree in the foyer. But unlike the real estate agents and lawyers working above and below, the employees in the second-floor offices are busy managing online elections, spreading fake news and fomenting a political revolution.
The employees work for the firm of Casaleggio Associates, the unlikely nerve center propagating the bare-knuckle message of Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement. Once a fringe curiosity, the Five Star Movement is now something very different — possibly the first populist party with a serious chance to win power in one of Europe’s most important countries.
“We are the political force of the future, and we have a competitive advantage on the traditional parties that still struggle to understand,” Davide Casaleggio, the Milan firm’s president, wrote in an e-mail. “When they realize that it will be too late.”
Illustration: June Hsu
The son of Gianroberto Casaleggio, a founder of the Five Star Movement who died in April, the younger Casaleggio is as studiously behind the scenes as the party’s other founder and leader, the gleefully vulgar comedian Beppe Grillo, is public.
However, in a rare, albeit electronic, interview, Davide Casaleggio said his company’s software, platforms and tools had played a key role in Five Star’s changing of Italy. The other parties, he added, were “light-years behind” while “we are at the crest of the wave.”
Italy, often considered behind the times, has become a laboratory for a new strain of European populism, in which a next-generation political party, born and bred on the Internet, is less interested in ideology or the standard models of left versus right than in using the Web as a platform and weapon of anti-establishment anger. Unlike populist parties in France, Germany and Britain, the Five Star Movement has less of a hard-right, anti-immigrant edge. It also is not imbued with the ideological socialism of leftist groups in Greece or Spain.
Few are certain what the Five Star Movement is, except that its popularity is rising, especially since the stunning resignation of Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi last week after voters rejected his proposed constitutional changes in a referendum.
“We’re not of the left or the right,” Luigi Di Maio, the Five Star party’s potential candidate for prime minister and the deputy leader of the lower house of parliament, said in his Rome office. “We don’t recognize ourselves in these ideologically motivated parties.”
In the days after Renzi’s defeat in the referendum, party leaders crowed about a coming Five Star government. They have demanded early elections, even as Parliament seems likely this week to approve a new government under Italy’s foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, using much the same majority that Renzi had.
The Five Star members have reiterated their intention to hold a referendum on abandoning the euro currency and held a meeting in Rome to iron out simmering differences between the party’s orthodox and pragmatic wings.
At the same time, many members fretted that the party was drifting away from its founding ethos — of voting on policies and candidates through direct, online democracy — and toward a centralization of power by Grillo, Casaleggio and Di Maio.
“We must be united and unanimous. Only one body, one soul,” Grillo wrote in his blog on Thursday, apparently worried his movement was troubled by traditional party problems. “We need shared ideas, not divisive opinions.”
The party, founded in 2009, tapped into the anti-elite resentments of those Italians who feel forgotten by the EU and damaged by the introduction of the euro. It called for civic engagement, disdained corruption and, with its leaders’ willingness to indulge in invective and conspiracy theories, earned a profile as angry, webby and a little bit wacky.
For a while, the party was eclipsed by Renzi, a reformist, but having tied his fate to the referendum on constitutional reform — and losing badly — Renzi resigned. Italy’s electoral law is under court review, so it may take months or longer before Italians can vote for a new prime minister, but Five Star is eager to hold immediate elections, as it is polling at 30 percent in a multiparty race.
Whether the party has the maturity to govern is becoming an ever more pertinent question with consequences for the Continent’s fourth-largest economy and beyond. What is clear is that the party has replaced its early innocence with a killer instinct, with Grillo reversing his views on positions that his party once denounced as an undemocratic invitation to authoritarianism to improve his party’s electoral prospects.
And Casaleggio Associates, administrator of Grillo’s wildly popular blog, uses its affiliated Web sites to spread fake news that has damaged the party’s political enemies.
Former Five Star members said the firm disciplined members who broke party lines and controlled the online process of selecting the party’s candidates, including a coming vote to choose its nominee for prime minister. Marco Canestrari, a former Casaleggio employee who is writing a book about his time there, said employees regularly ran Italian Web sites that produced slanted or fake news discrediting Renzi or other opponents.
Critics of the party, from Renzi to former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia party, to leaders of the liberal left, depict the Five Star Movement as an “Animal Farm 2.0”, complete with a politburo-style directorate, pro-Vladimir Putin sympathies and a requirement that candidates sign a contract agreeing to pay a fine of 150,000 euros (US$156,773) if they betray the movement’s principles.
Italian economists have been vexed by the party’s mostly unexplained, but wildly popular, proposals to cut taxes and increase spending, including a proposal to guarantee struggling Italians what is being called a citizen’s income of 780 euros a month, but supporters of Italy’s role as a critical EU member are most threatened by the Five Star Movement’s lack of clarity on staying within the eurozone.
During a speech at Rome’s Circus Maximus in 2014, Grillo announced a collection of signatures to demand a referendum on staying in the eurozone. His blog subsequently called for the printing of non-euro currency to cut the public debt.
Alessandro Di Battista, the party leader, who campaigned against Renzi’s proposed constitutional changes while driving his scooter around the country, has expressed interest in leaving the eurozone, the EU and NATO. (He later softened his position on NATO.) Moderates in the party’s leadership are noticeably noncommittal.
Former members say the party is purposefully vague on the issue to keep its anti-establishment bona fides without alienating the more mainstream Italian voters needed to win an election.
Federico Pizzarotti became a star in the party in 2013 when he became mayor of Parma, but has since become a critic. In an interview last week, he said the party had expressed disapproval when he had gone on television, which it considered corrupting to the party, and then complained that he had not worn a Five Star Movement lapel pin on the air. The disapproval came in anonymous emails from the general inbox operated by Casaleggio Associates, usually in a postscript, he said.
“In Five Star parlance, people say, ‘When you get a PS, it’s never a good thing,’” Pizzarotti said.
He received such correspondence, eventually signed by Grillo, after it was revealed that Pizzarotti was under investigation for mishandling the appointment of the head of the city’s opera house, an allegation that was later proved groundless. However, the party suspended him for not informing it of the investigation, a violation of one of its many purity rules.
Pizzarotti’s offers to explain in person to party leaders went unanswered, he said. He eventually left the party.
“They say transparency, but it’s one thing to say and another to do,” Pizzarotti said, adding that the party had effectively silenced critics by threatening expulsion. “It’s not possible to know who is making decisions. And so you don’t know who has responsibility.”
In Milan, Matteo Ponzano, who helped build La Cosa, the movement’s popular YouTube channel, in the party’s early days, said he still believed in Five Star’s principles, but expressed disappointment in its “becoming another thing.”
He said the senior Casaleggio had explained to him in 2014 that La Cosa, which Ponzano had developed as a place for members of Italy’s Parliament and voters to discuss issues, would become “a general channel that has to get clicks” to generate ad revenue. He was dejected, but nevertheless ran for the European Parliament.
As the popular face of some of the movement’s largest rallies, Ponzano thought he had a good chance in the party’s internal online election to select Parliament candidates, but in the middle of the vote, a message appeared on Grillo’s blog barring collaborators of Casaleggio Associates, like himself, from running.
“During the vote!” Ponzano said.
Asked about the accusations of electoral meddling, Casaleggio said, “You have been misinformed.”
The infighting is not surprising, given the movement’s origins as a protest party. Some former members are disenchanted precisely because the movement is acting like a more traditional party, capitalizing on opportunities to seize power as it tries to broaden its appeal, among working class Italians who feel removed from the EU and betrayed by their country’s elites.
Writing on his blog on Thursday, Grillo told his millions of followers that despite all the polemics over Renzi’s resignation, the Five Star Movement would “choose online the candidate for prime minister, the governing team and the candidates for Parliament.”
He concluded that the party would continue to “follow its road.”
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