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“The People” Against “The Élites”: the Political Discourse of the Five Star Movement in the Italian Parliament

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“The People” Against “The Élites”: the Political Discourse of the Five Star Movement in the Italian Parliament “The people” against “the élites”: The political discourse of the Five Star Movement in the Italian Parliament By Flavio Chiapponi Introduction According to a number of scholars, the Five Star Movement (M5S) is the late comer in the family of populist parties now acting in the Italian political system (Corbetta and Gualmini, 2013; Zanatta, 2013; Tarchi, 2015; Tronconi, 2015; Woods and Lanzone, 2015). However, this qualification is not undisputed, as scholars such as Biorcio (2013), Biorcio and Natale (2013), Diamanti (2013), and Ceccarini and Bordignon (2016) have argued that the concept of “populism” is a bit unfit to describe the party, as it does not take into account its “originality” and “complexity”. In their opinion, it is not possible to catch its whole newness by labelling the M5S as “populist”. Following this thought, many authors have argued that the main source of M5S’s innovative profile lies in its successful attempt to maximize the mobilizing potentialities of the Web and the social networks (Corbetta, 2013; Woods and Lanzone, 2015). Led by the former comedian Beppe Grillo, the Five Star Movement has in Grillo’s blog (www.beppegrillo.com) its main “central office”, which exerts a key role in mobilizing the followers and voters, even offline. Since personalisation and mediatisation of politics have become crucial phenomena in any democratic polity (Blondel et al., 2012; Kriesi et al., 2013; Esser and Strömback, 2014), it was not unexpected that experts paid much more attention to M5S’s web communication or its leader’s political discourse (Cosenza, 2013) than to other communicative resources and media, inside or outside the party. For example, notwithstanding the slow but unchallenged emersion of a (partially) new M5S’s parliamentary leadership, academic literature still lacks any scrutiny of MPs political language and discourse. This is rather surprising, as in 2013 the Movement participated its first national election time and succeeded in electing 109 deputies and 54 senators (25.6% of popular vote at the Chamber of Deputies). Taking the state of art that I have rapidly summarized as a major premise, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, I am interested in showing why we can properly consider the M5S as a populist party; then, my second interest lies in focusing the political language spoken by M5S’s MPs, when they participate in the parliamentary debate about the vote of confidence to new governments. This means that I will investigate all the speeches that Five Stars MPs delivered at the Chamber of Deputies during the debate, justifying their strong opposition against the governments led by Prime Minister Enrico Letta (2013) and Matteo Renzi (2014). The two points go together, since we expect that parliamentary communication will reflect the main traits of M5S’s populist “mentality” (Tarchi, 2015), especially its ethical exaltation of the people or “the citizens” as well as its denigration of mainstream political élites. More specifically, I will proceed as follows. In the first section, I discuss some contributions about the political identity of the Five Star Movement: after having highlighted the roots of the disagreement about its populist nature, I argue that the concept of “populism” is actually quite apt as to describe the party. In the second section, I introduce two hypothesises that drive my empirical research on MPs speeches, respectively delivered at the Chamber in 2013 (Enrico Letta’s cabinet) and in 2014 (Matteo Renzi’s cabinet), along with the simplified content analysis methodology that I will adopt. In the third section, I show the main results obtained in both cases. In the fourth section, I scrutiny one speech delivered at the Chamber of Deputies in 2016, against the executive led by Paolo Gentiloni, just to appreciate whether the trends extracted still shape parliamentary M5S’s speeches. Finally, I conclude with some remarks about a rough explanation of our findings. 1. The Five Star Movement as the late comer in Italian populist family There are authors who maintain that M5S is not (wholly) a populist party, owing to its multifaceted organization and political thought. In my opinion, those scholars are not well equipped enough in order to provide this statement with persuasive empirical data. It seems to me that their argument allows room for a couple of critical objections. In the first place, among these contributions, some show to be too open to a comprehensive “a priori” orientation, by which scholars prove to believe in a sort of “Italian exceptionalism”: i.e., they incline to affirm that in Italy any political occurrence possess an alleged and irremovable originality. Owing to these characteristics, in Italian politics it would be impossible to apply ordinary analytical tools with the purpose of naming, classifying and accounting for political facts. For example: «Finally, [from M5S’s description] we can obtain some suggestions, but any conclusive definition. Because this object … slips away, changes its profile as soon as we try to fix it or resume it in a definitive way» (Diamanti, 2013, p. 4). «The Five Star Movement exhibits some analogies with a number of various political actors and experiences, but it is actually important to grasp those features that make it an original political organization, which is very difficult to copy» (Biorcio, 2013, p. 44). Here, we indeed observe a hypostatization of the original features ascribed to the M5S, much more than an empirical investigation of those characteristics. It is not possible to label the party as populist because it is too much “original”: but we do not have any theoretical or empirical evidence of this qualification. As Marco Tarchi has correctly pointed out, the second set of critical observations have to do with many elements affecting those approaches. Actually, some leave too much room to value orientations, inhibiting a neutral and scientific understanding of the topic. There are also scholars who are not clear about the object of their scientific interest (party or leader? or both?). Finally, some are sceptical about the explanatory power of the concept of “populism” itself – even if the latter has proved to be a good instrument in order to connote political parties similar to M5S (Tarchi, 2015, p. 335-36). The theoretical weakness of these positions soon unveils, once that one looks to those scholars that conceive Beppe Grillo’s party as a populist party. In his exploratory survey about the Five Star Movement, Corbetta (2013) deals with its placement along six analytical dimensions (or properties): appeal to the people, enemy’s identity, leadership, style of communication, “hyper-simplification” of complexity of politics, employ of the media. From his point of view, the party’s political behaviour reveals all those properties, so it is not difficult to state that «This strange political animal can be attributed to populism, not only for its essential appeal to the people-élite dichotomy and its radical opposition to representative politics, but also for all the adjunctive and essential characteristics that we have listed and scrutinized» (Corbetta, 2013, 211). Tarchi affirms that in the case of M5S, we face populism in its “purest form”. He grounds this statement on a close analysis the party’s and its leader’s political propaganda, speeches and online posts, thus enucleating some key features. According to Tarchi (2015, 335-356), Five Star Movement is willing to represent the political needs that the whole people requires and refuses to locate itself on the right-left continuum, believing that the left-right cleavage is obsolete. Moreover, it shows a high level in the personalization of leadership and the antagonistic stance towards a number of élites (the political “caste” and mainstream parties, intellectuals, bureaucracy, lobbies, banks and so on). Owing to these, and other, characteristics, the populist qualification does properly apply to M5S. Even if we turn to classical contributions dealing with populist parties in contemporary democracies, the populist nature of M5S does not seem to change. In Italian democracy, it appears to embody a perfect declination of “protest populism”, which mobilizes people against the powerful élites, no matter if those are “political, administrative, economic or cultural. This anti-elitism is inseparable from the affirmation of confidence in the people, as the whole ensemble of common citizens […] this form of populism appears to be a kind of hyper-democracy, which idealizes the picture of the active citizen and rests sceptical towards the representative system, as the latter would spoil him from his power” (Taguieff 2003, p. 131). The breakthrough of Five Star Movement in Italian political system – and its electoral success between 2009 and 2013 – adheres to the profile of “populist mobilizations”, as described by Mény and Surel (2000). More specifically, in its populist identity emerges the salience of its peripheral groups as well as the personalisation of political leadership, which is one of its most important structural characteristics, along with the “focalization” of a restricted range of issues – yesterday, above all immigration, now chiefly the polemical attack aimed at the “political caste”. Once that we have definitively assigned the Five Star Movement to the populist family, we need to clarify what it means. In other words, what analytical consequences stem from the qualification of M5S as a populist party? In order to answer effectively to this answer, it is necessary to provide for a parsimonious definition of “populism”, which also could be successfully applied to a number of empirical cases. For instance, Cas Mudde defines populism as « an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people» (Mudde, 2004, p. 543). I have proposed a (only slightly) different definition: after a systematic scrutiny of the literature dealing with various manifestations of populism, I have come to a triadic definition of populism, as it emerges in a democratic system.
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