As Five Star Party Risks Implosion, Italy Fears the Fallout

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/world/europe/italy-five-star.html

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ROME — Its poll numbers are plummeting. Its members of Parliament are defecting. Its leaders complain about back-stabbing while supporters flee to the left and the right.

And it runs the Italian government.

Italy’s Five Star Movement, the anti-establishment party born on the internet that was supposed to revolutionize Italian politics, increasingly looks to be on the verge of cratering, only two years after winning the largest vote in national elections.

With Italy’s economy essentially stuck and its power waning, there is rising clamor that the party’s dysfunction and identity crisis may not just bring down the government but drag Italy down with it.

Five Star is not likely to collapse tomorrow. But its new governing coalition with the establishment, center-left Democratic Party, which was supposed to put Italy on track after Five Star’s rocky divorce from Matteo Salvini’s hard-right League party this summer, is already clearly deeply troubled and has done little more than extend Italy’s malaise.

Analysts foresee a slow, but potentially irreversible, burn for Five Star that will keep Italy distracted and unstable for some time to come.

Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs, a Rome-based research institute, said the fragmentation of the party would ensure that its leaders focused on their own survival.

“It does not put the government in the frame of mind for long-term strategic thinking,” she said.

As Five Star limps along, Mr. Salvini, the anti-immigrant former interior minister who remains the dominant force in Italian politics, is circling his rivals, applying immense pressure on the campaign trail as he racks up victories in regional elections.

In recent weeks, three members of Parliament fled Five Star to join Mr. Salvini’s League, which polls suggest has a brighter, and longer, future. Six other Five Star members quit and joined the “Mixed Group” — a catchall for electoral orphans in the Parliament. Italy’s education minister from Five Star quit the government and the party. Others have been expelled over internal divisions. More of the same is expected.

“The cultural revolution Five Star had promised did not happen because of a lack of experience,” said Gianluca Rospi, one of the lawmakers who left the party.

Many analysts agree that the party has failed to transition from an angry and vague protest movement into an effective governing party willing to alienate some voters by taking positions, assuming a clear identity and embracing core competencies.

“The moment they entered the government, they entered an explosive contradiction,” said Piergiorgio Corbetta, a sociologist at the University of Bologna who has extensively studied Five Star. He called the party’s descent entirely predictable.

“Protests can be of any color — making proposals is hard,” he said. “It requires you to make people unhappy.”

The new Italian governing coalition was essentially fused together to prevent a government collapse and national elections that would result in Mr. Salvini taking what he has called “full powers.”

For now, neither Five Star or the Democratic Party is in a rush to go to early elections, but the calculus could change if their polls keep falling or if other power brokers decide the time is ripe for elections.

The Democratic Party, which is going through its own existential crisis, is warning that it might not abide Five Star’s frustrating ambiguity and anti-politics politics much longer.

“If they continue to have this anti-political flare they will destroy themselves,” Andrea Orlando, a top Democratic Party official, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper this week.

He added that Five Star’s agita weakened the coalition’s ability to address the country’s problems.

“It reflects negatively on the work of the government,” he said.

Five Star was founded more than a decade ago as a protest movement by Beppe Grillo, a comedian, and Gianroberto Casaleggio, an entrepreneur and futurist. The movement soon disrupted the country’s traditional left-right spectrum by stoking broad anti-elite resentments.

It steadily grew from blog posts to the most powerful party in the country. In March 2018 it took 33 percent of the vote and ultimately formed a nationalist and populist coalition with the League that struck fear into the European establishment.

But governing has not come naturally to Five Star. In opposition, its leaders condemned major infrastructure, industrial and energy projects as disastrous for Italy. But once in power, they let those projects go forward, while simultaneously trying to appease their supporters by dragging their feet and complaining. The bold proposals they did follow through on, such as eliminating poverty, have fallen far short.

Mr. Salvini made a meal of Five Star’s inexperience and incoherence and ultimately the marriage ended with his failed bid to take over.

Five Star’s support has at best halved while the League’s has at least doubled.

Five Star’s polling is now so low in Emilia Romagna and Calabria, two regions set to vote at the end of the month, that it considered not running a candidate and taking “an electoral break.”

“They betrayed their fundamental idea, which is that they were born against the system,” Mr. Salvini said in an interview after a day of campaigning in Emilia Romagna, where he is hoping to put a stake in the government’s heart.

Mr. Salvini predicted his former ally would receive less than 5 percent of the vote in the region. His rivals had destroyed themselves, he said, by aligning with the very Democratic Party that had been the target of their invective for years.

“It’s clear that their people and many of their electors don’t accept it,” Mr. Salvini said.

Five Star has even kicked out some of those who refuse to stomach the new alliance.

“I have been expelled from nothing,” Gianluigi Paragone, a right-leaning former media personality said on Facebook after his expulsion this month, suggesting that the party was now less than zero.

But some of Five Star’s more liberal supporters also have had a hard time accepting the coalition with Mr. Salvini, who took a hard line against migrant landings and pulled the nebulous Five Star clearly to the right.

Rebellions are breaking out all over the place. In December, members of Parliament refused to pay their dues into a party fund, prompting the party to threaten more expulsions. A couple days later, Davide Casaleggio, the son of the party’s co-founder, defended himself against accusations that he used the party’s digital platform, upon which internal votes are cast, for personal profit.

Critics have long made such allegations, but now some party members are raising concerns as well.

Five Star has called for a general assembly in March to sort out its problems, some of which were raised in a “manifesto” circulated this month among party members. (“First problem, political direction.”) But the letter also aired concerns about the workload of Luigi Di Maio, the party’s political leader and Italy’s foreign minister.

“All his attention should be focused on foreign policy,” said Emanuele Dessì, a parliament member with Five Star and co-author of the manifesto.

Five Star has long maintained an ambiguous foreign policy. It started out critical of Vladimir Putin’s Russia for human rights abuses. Then in recent years, it drew close to Russia, opposing sanctions imposed for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The party’s positions on the euro and the European Union have been all over the place.

Mr. Di Maio, previously known for lending support to France’s Yellow Vest protesters and gaffes such as calling Chinese President Xi Jinping “President Ping” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “Secretary Ross,” is in a difficult position. He and his government must articulate a policy on the Libyan civil war as Italy’s own interests in the area are in flux. The reviews haven’t been kind. “Diplomatic Flop,” the newspapers read.

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Mr. Di Maio’s focus has often been on internal politics, especially on what he has called back-stabbing.

“Of this, I’m a little tired, but I’m not tired of the movement,” Mr. Di Maio said on the Tuesday night program. “So whoever hopes that I’ll get tired of the movement has made a mistake.”

But Italy clearly seems to be tiring of Five Star.

Mr. Corbetta, the Five Star scholar, said that given the way things were going, he saw a future for Five Star that looked more like its past.

“The future route for Five Star is to be out of the government,” he said, “as a check on the government.”

Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Rome.