The Bright Side of Populism: Beppe Grillo As Promoter of Political Change and Reform

XXVII Convegno della Società italiana di Scienza politica Università di Firenze 12 - 14 September 2013 The bright side of populism: Beppe Grillo as promoter of political change and reform Jana Edelmann. Research Assistant at Universität Siegen/ Ph.D Student at Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität München First Draft – please do not cite or quote, comments are welcome Abstract With his irresponsible simplifications and unsustainable political demands, populist Beppe Grillo poses a serious danger for the Italian democracy and its institutions, as the widespread opinion goes. However, this negative interpretation falls short of taking into account two crucial aspects: Firstly, Grillo and his MoVimento 5 Stelle are caused by, respond to and intend to change the political system’s and its actors’ uncontested inefficiencies and encrusted structures, woes that the established political elite – so far unsuccessfully – has been trying to change for decades. Secondly, populism as a neutral analytical concept indeed allows for its potential to positively influence the political system, namely by addressing taboo subjects and putting them on the political agenda. As argued in this paper, Beppe Grillo’s populist approach provides Italy with a variety of well-founded stimuli for political and institutional change as he and his movement openly address, expose and criticize structures and procedures that lie at the very heart of the Italian political system’s difficulties. I. Introduction: Beppe Grillo - political clown and democratic catastrophe? This year’s Italian national parliament’s election provided the political system with a clear and unexpected winner: Beppe Grillo’s MoVimento Cinque Stelle (M5S), campaigning for the first time on the national level and founded just around three and a half years before (2009), from scratch achieved 23.79 per cent of the votes in the Senato and 25.55 per cent in the Camera, by this becoming the most successful single party (cf. Ministero dell' Interno 2013a; Ministero dell' Interno 2013b) of February’s national election. Concordantly, this remarkable electoral success story of the political newcomer was looked upon from a highly sceptical point of view, with political commenters interpreting the rise of Grillo’s M5S as a highly distressing event for Italian democracy. One easily became the impression that this election result dramatically marked the end of even the slightest future possibility of a rational decision-making process and of content-driven politics whatsoever: A commentary piece in the left-liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung opined that “Italy appears to be ungovernable” 1 (Ulrich 2013), the political magazine Cicero titled that “Grillo’s earthquake makes Italy ungovernable” (Graeber 2013) and The Economist judged in equally harsh terms that “[t]his result is a disaster for Italy and for Europe” (The Economist 2013). Also the French Le Figaro ran the headline “Ungovernable Italy unsettles Europe” (2013a), with the Spanish daily El País joining in this judgement by equally heading with the title “Ungovernable Italy”. Similarly, when it came to assessing Beppe Grillo’s individual qualities as new political key figure in Italian politics, negative and deprecatory characterisations prevailed – be it with regard to his style of communications, his outward appearance or his political demands’ alleged voidance of content. As regards Germany, the conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung simply called him a “squaller” (Bremer 2013) and the highly reputable public broadcasting service Deutschlandfunk described him as “an angry, stamping, torrents of hatred spouting volcano” (Hausen 2013). Austrian daily Der Standard evaluated Grillo’s political programme as simply being “anarcho-politics” (Wallisch 2013) and a commentary in Süddeutsche Zeitung similarly reviewed M5S as „an anarchical counter-movement” (Kornelius 2013). The Economist called Grillo “a genuine comedian” and further asserted that he would “threaten the future of Italy and the euro” (The Economist 2013), French daily Liberatión noted that he was the “sinister clown of the Republic” (Sergent 2013), whilst The New York Times described him as “Italy’s gadfly […], throwing Italian politics into a logjam. 1 In the following, all quotations will be stated in English in order to assure a homogenous style of writting 1 ”(Povoledo u. Alderman 2013). All these media examples impressively show that Beppe Grillo is rated in highly negative terms and that the key media’s reports are either devaluating his position to that of a political clown not worth having a closer look at when it comes to serious politics, or even depicting him and M5S as a populist danger for the Italian democracy. When taking into consideration that, according to the uncontested assessment among political scientists and active Italian politicians as well, the incrusted Italian political system for years has been and still is in urgent need of profound overhaul and fundamental reforms (cf. for the analysis of the failed reform efforts during the first and second republic Bull u. Pasquino 2007; Bull u. Rhodes 2007; Pallaver 2003; Pasquino 2002; Vassallo 2005; Vassallo u. Hine 2002; cf. for this legislative period’s striving for reform ANSA 2013; Il Fatto Quotidiano 2013a; Il Fatto Quotidiano 2013b; Il Messaggero 2013; Rossi 2013), the distinct rejection of the only substantial new actor within the Italian political system since Silvio Berlusconi’s ‘discesa in campo’ in 1994 gets yet another interesting turn: Obviously, the established parties and their politicians so far repeatedly failed in reforming the political system and could not generate the institution’s performance being satisfactory for neither the civil society nor the business world or the political actors themselves: The convocation of altogether three parliamentary commissions on constitutional reforms – with yet another pending commission’s establishment under the current grand but troubled coalition –, the previous reforms of the electoral law in 1993 and 2005 and the Berlusconi III government’s passed constitutional reform package which then was rejected by referendum in 2006 all bear witness to the established political elite’s striking inability to carry out lasting structural changes as regards the widely requested more efficient and less troublesome performance of the country’s central political institutions. Relating that recurrent topic of numerous reform efforts carried out in vain by the traditional political elite to the initial subject of Beppe Grillo entering the Italian political stage as a complete outsider with a drastically different approach to politics as well as to the electorate, one cannot but wonder if this political newcomer could not exactly represent the long needed fresh breeze being able to provide Italy with the window of opportunity for change the country so long unsuccessfully tried to implement. Instead of either not taking Beppe Grillo serious, devaluing his political activities as mere show events or dooming him as a dangerous populist threat to the entire Italian political system, the research interest in the following will therefore concentrate on the possibility of effects of profound political change generated by Beppe Grillo and his M5S. In any case, 2 change exactly is what he and his movement is all about: Grillo not only explicitly locates himself and his movement outside the established political elite’s system, but also repeatedly stated the intention to radically overhaul it: „Today, bureaucracy has replaced democracy. The community of citizens needs to become the state. […] The old parties are finished.[…] We are at the beginning of a new era, but they don’t notice”, as he declared in an interview with the German Handelsblatt earlier this year (Kort 2013). And in yet another of his rare interviews, he claimed that, in contrast to the corrupt traditional political elite, “We [M5S] are the ones who are saving Italy’s democracy right now. […] When we will enter the parliament, we will bring down the old system. Not because we are enjoying it, but because the system is rotten.” (Reski 2013) What is more and as briefly pointed out above, there is no doubt – not even among the Italian politicians being active for decades – that there is a strong need to introduce an entirely reformed institutional setting. But this necessity of change so far has not been successfully dealt with by the traditional party actors. It shall therefore be elaborated whether the entry of the political newcomer Beppe Grillo into national politics could exert influence as regards stimulating substantial and profound political change and breaking open established structures. In short, this paper aims at addressing the following question: Could Beppe Grillo, ever since his Movimento 5 Stelle achieved national parliamentary representation, provide an impetus for overhauling the often complained about incrusted traditional political landscape of Italy? II. Theoretical considerations and hypotheses: populism’s bright sides Referencing to Beppe Grillo’s political activities, one cannot escape the fact that his down-to- earth way of behaviour, his provocative, direct and at times even aggressive communication style as well as his continuous requests to radically renew the alleged deeply corrupt political system and its gerontocratic actors seem to perfectly fit into populism’s definition criteria. Therefore, the research question will be analysed referencing to the theoretic concept of populism,

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