Abstract
With 25.5 % of voices obtained at the 2013 parliamentary elections in Italy, the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S or Five Star Movement) has become a central actor of Italian politics. The Movement relies to a large extent on a vision of Internet-driven and -based direct democracy; as such, social media have been the main organizational tools behind its rise of the past few years. At the same time, it is argued that the power of networking, the allegedly egalitarian approach to public debate, and the horizontality of relations typical of social media are not, in fact, the backbone of the Movement, but a primarily discursive device destined to hide the importance of much more “traditional” political instruments of hierarchical authority and opaque management of financial flows, and to legitimize the amateurism of the movement along with its anti-political drive. This chapter provides a portrait of the digital and social “vision” posited by the Movement—its practical, organizational consequences alongside its narrative(s). It aims at showing how the different components of this vision all contribute to the M5S’s status of new force to be reckoned with in the Italian political space—not always, and maybe not primarily, for the reasons the Movement itself provides.
“Are you a grillino? Do you enjoy streaming?”
Italian comedian Maurizio Crozza impersonating a puzzled Giorgio Napolitano, President of the Italian Republic, April 2013.
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Notes
- 1.
Tellingly, Beppe Grillo chose to name “Tsunami Tour” his itinerant political campaign in Italian squares, in the spring of 2013. See his eponymous blog post http://www.beppegrillo.it/2013/01/tsunami_tour.html.
- 2.
In a way that followers of the Movement consider demeaning, because of the reductio ad personam it implies, the press often labels the M5S as grillini (“Grillo’s people”).
- 3.
Blog di Beppe Grillo, http://www.beppegrillo.it/
- 4.
See for example http://scaccoalweb.dotblog.it/2007/09/grillo-distrugg.html
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
BBC News (February 26, 2013). Profile: Beppe Grillo. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21576869
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
A metaphor that has often been used for Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
- 11.
Users that make their tastes, interests, and preferences explicit on the Web; these elements make it easier for third parties to establish their profile, and target them with content they are more likely to follow—content that may be malicious.
- 12.
A merger of robot and network, a botnet is set of computer programs, connected via the Internet, communicating with one another to perform tasks. While not all botnets are illegal, botnets often include computers whose security defenses have been breached, and whose control is now in the hands of a third party. Computers can be co-opted into a botnet to execute malicious software.
- 13.
In the words of Claudio Agosti, director of Hermes—Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights. http://logioshermes.org, on the NEXA mailing list (April 2013).
- 14.
Huffington Post (May 27, 2013) Comunali 2013, Il Movimento 5 Stelle fa flop alle urne. http://www.huffingtonpost.it/2013/05/27/comunali-2013-il-moviment_n_3342376.html.
- 15.
E.g. L’Unità (March 4, 2013). Lombardi scivola sull’elogio del fascismo. http://www.unita.it/italia/capogruppo-camera-alzata-mano-fascismo-casapound-mussolini-cinquestelle-meeting-eletti-grillo-m5s-1.486668.
- 16.
Bordignon and Ceccarini (2013: 21) summarize them exhaustively and concisely: “the ‘rational’ elaboration of political proposals with iconoclastic and anti-political impulses; technical competence with charisma; the party understood as a company that sells a product on the political market with the party understood as a consumer advocacy group; the centrality of engagement and discussion with the leader’s extreme and uncompromising verbal style and propensity for monologue; the inclusive demands of the grassroots with the (democratic?) centralism of the leader; the insistence on the ‘shared’ nature of the political organisation with the ‘proprietary’ mindset that still regulates its functioning; the emphasis on deliberation from the bottom up with the necessity to ‘decide’”.
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Acknowledgments
The members of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, have provided helpful comments on earlier drafts. I am grateful to Patrizia Galletti Musiani for her patient constitution of an impressively complete dossier of Italian press articles on M5S in the spring of 2013.
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Musiani, F. (2014). Avant-garde Digital Movement or “Digital Sublime” Rhetoric?. In: Pătruţ, B., Pătruţ, M. (eds) Social Media in Politics. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04666-2_8
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