Abstract
The Five-star Movement owes its success to, among other things, its capacity for breaking political taboos. It has been doing this through the nature of its communication styles, with its tendency to question the basic assumptions underlying the political game itself. The Movement became a party or rather, while remaining a ‘movement-party’ it reinforced the party element. This transformation has led it to break many of its own taboos, to question the traits that had made it distinctive when it first emerged. The need to present itself as a potentially governing actor drove the M5s to redefine the nature of its internal organisation and its relations with the mass media, to revise the substance of its political message and its approach to democracy. Finally, its success at the 2018 elections has since led it to question the ultimate, and potentially the most insidious, taboo: the taboo against the formation of alliances, which was broken in the aftermath of 4 March with the contract for government agreed with the League.
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Notes
- 1.
Thanks are due to Dario Quattromani (Università di Roma Tre) for having gathered and made available these figures, which will be analysed in depth in a forthcoming publication.
- 2.
A reliance on technocrats was not entirely foreign to the thinking of the M5s which had already, during the period of its emergence, conceived that political decisions could be made, online, through a combination of the common sense of ordinary people and the competence of experts (in their turn lacking political expertise). After the birth of the Monti government (2011–2013), however, this feature of the Movement’s populism was abandoned.
- 3.
The case of the city of Parma is particularly significant in this regard. It was the first provincial capital won—in 2012—by the M5s: a victory which initiated the Movement’s period of growth. After a lengthy period of conflict, the mayor, Federico Pizzarotti, was first suspended and then resigned from the M5s. In 2017 he again won the municipal elections, this time as the leader of his own list of independent candidates. The Movement’s official candidate, in contrast, ended up coming fourth.
- 4.
Prior to the national turn imposed on the party by its new secretary, Matteo Salvini, the League had always been an entity championing regional autonomy and at certain times it had even been a secessionist party.
- 5.
He was the founder of a consultancy firm—Casaleggio Associates, offering advice to companies on web-based marketing strategies—which passed to his son, Davide, following his death in April 2016.
- 6.
The Movement’s internal regulations stipulate that its parliamentarians must make over a part of their remuneration to a fund for the support of small- and medium-sized enterprises.
- 7.
This section reproduces a lengthier discussion that the authors have published elsewhere (Ceccarini and Bordignon 2018).
- 8.
The Movement’s internal regulations continue to limit terms of office to two—a limit reached by Di Maio in 2018 as he was then elected to Parliament for the second time.
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Bordignon, F., Ceccarini, L. (2019). Five Stars, Five Years, Five (Broken) Taboos. In: Ceccarini, L., Newell, J. (eds) The Italian General Election of 2018. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13617-8_7
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