When the Huffington Post decided last year to demote Donald Trump’s campaign to the entertainment section, I advised my friends there to take a look at Italian politics, where the second largest party in the country, the Five Star Movement, was founded and is headed by a standup comedian, Beppe Grillo. Yesterday, Virginia Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer who is the Five Star Movement’s candidate for mayor of Rome – one of the top political jobs in the country – came in first with 37 percent of the vote and has a good chance of winning a runoff on June 19.
Grillo’s Five Star Movement is part of a wave of populist, Euroskeptic movements in southern Europe. Grillo was inspired by Howard Dean’s campaign and Moveon.org to
develop a movement that was based on meetups and social media. In 2007, Grillo staged huge V-day rallies across Italy – “V” standing for “vaffanculo” or “fuck off”) — to protest against Italy’s rampant political corruption. In 2009, he founded the Five-Star Movement. The five stars are universal internet access, sustainable transportation and economic development, publicly owned and not privatized water supplies, and environmentalism. The movement also backs a referendum on whether Italy should leave the Eurozone, a guaranteed annual income, and more effective border controls against illegal immigration.
In the 2013 parliamentary elections, the Five Star Movement came in second to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party, which is trying to revive Italy’s economy while adhering to the draconian fiscal rules of the European Central Bank. The next national elections must come no later than May 2018. In Rome, the Democratic Party mayor Ignazio Marino had to resign last October when he was accused to using public funds for personal expenses. That revelation came on top of reports that past administrations had rigged contracts to pay off criminal organizations. Since then, the city was ruled by a commissar appointed by Renzi. Raggi’s election would be a big “V” to Renzi and the Italian political establishment.
