The Joker's Wild
By Stephan Faris / Rome
The comedian Beppe Grillo, the leader of the party that won the most votes in Italy's February election, sits in his beachfront villa in Tuscany as Italian journalists crowd outside, desperate for a sound bite. "They film me while I eat, while I fart," says Grillo, with characteristic vulgarity. "They point their cameras at me 24 hours a day. If I need to pick my nose, I first need to go hide."
Nobody, least of all Grillo, expected his Five Star Movement to do so well. Campaigning on a radical platform, the 64-year-old satirist led what he dubbed a Tsunami Tour, visiting 76 towns in 45 days to urge Italians to vote for a slate of candidates who had never before held office. He triggered, if not a tsunami, then a sizable wave. Almost 26% of the vote flowed to M5S, as the party is widely known on social media, giving its wild-haired, foulmouthed founder significant influence over the fate of the euro zone's third largest economy. "This thing here, it's like a virus," Grillo says of his movement.
(MORE: Italy's Beppe Grillo: Meet the Rogue Comedian Turned Kingmaker)
Viruses flourish when patients are weak, and Italy, by some measures, has been at death's door for years. In the decade from 2000, the only countries that grew more slowly were Haiti and Zimbabwe. The austerity measures, forced down Italy's gullet by Mario Monti, the outgoing technocratic Prime Minister, came too late to offer a cure.
Across Europe, populist parties are benefiting as voters take revenge for decades of mismanagement. Italy's political class is especially weak, especially venal. But Grillo isn't just the beneficiary of public anger. In this most interconnected of ages, Italian politicians no longer know how to connect. Leveraging his celebrity and playing the Internet like a maestro, Grillo has shown them how it's done.
The election results sent world stock markets tumbling and Italian borrowing costs rocketing. Italy's Parliament appears deadlocked, with no party or coalition commanding a majority substantial enough to form a government. But as panic has subsided, a curious hypothesis has emerged that sees in Italy's predicament not just a threat, but also an opportunity. Old-style politics practiced by old-style politicians has failed again and again. Maybe, just maybe, the anarchic comedian with a penchant for the unprintable will shock Italy into real change.
A Web of Influence
In 2000, Grillo stood on a stage with his computer. "I thought it would help me save paper, books, paper, trees, the Amazon, my God!" he wailed. "And instead, I print, print everything." He ended the performance — one of the stand-up shows that made him famous — by taking a sledgehammer to the computer. "I was still analog," he says.
Grillo would not go digital until 2005, when he met a reclusive Web entrepreneur named Gianroberto Casaleggio. "He told me, 'Let's start the biggest blog in the world.' I didn't know what a blog was," recalls Grillo. Soon his blog ranked among the 10 most read blogs
globally.
(Viewpoint: Why Italy's Election Is a Joke)
In 2007, he used it to organize a nationwide demonstration called Go F — - Yourself Day, collecting, in a single afternoon, 350,000 signatures in favor of electoral reform. Two years later, he launched the Five Star Movement. "I've gone from comedy to antipolitics, and now into politics, the real thing," says Grillo.
His foray into electoral politics may be recent, but his campaign is not very different from the comedy he's been performing for more than 30 years. In 1986, Grillo ended an appearance on one of Italy's public television channels with a joke about a recent visit to China by Italy's Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. An aide to Craxi asks of the Chinese, "If they're all socialists, from whom do they steal?"
Grillo's reward was the first of several periods of exile from Italian TV screens, but he was vindicated when Craxi was investigated for bribery and corruption.
He has often proved prescient. "He had this ability to mix irony and rage and unite it with information," says Andrea Scanzi, author of a 2008 book on Grillo. The comedian built a rapport with his fans, who sometimes fed him tips. In 2002, he included in his comedy routine the accusation that dairy conglomerate Parmalat had amassed secret debts.
When, a little over a year later, the firm collapsed, Grillo received a visit from the financial police, eager to discover his sources.
In 1994 corruption scandals brought down the Christian Democrat Party that had governed Italy for 41 of 48 postwar years. Its implosion made space for Silvio Berlusconi, who went on to govern Italy for 10 of the 18 years until he resigned in 2011 amid a welter of scandals and economic turbulence. The media mogul looked like a busted flush ahead
of the election. Instead he did almost as well as Grillo. A master of traditional media — not least thanks to his ownership of a slew of TV stations and print publications — Berlusconi pulled in almost 22% of the vote.
Despite tarnished reputation and looming lawsuits, Berlusconi actually started the election season with a hidden advantage over Grillo.
Italy's campaign-financing rules and electoral system favor incumbents. And it's a system that benefits coalitions. Berlusconi's party won fewer seats in Italy's lower house than M5S but controls more votes through its alliances. The center-left Democratic Party led by Pier Luigi Bersani finished with nearly three times as many seats as M5S, despite winning fewer votes, because of a mechanism that allocates additional seats to the largest coalition.
MORE: How Berlusconi Upends the Italian Elections
These hurdles make the success of Grillo's party all the more startling. The movement's slogan — a typical Grillo aphorism — was "Better a leap in the dark than assisted suicide." Close to 9 million Italians proved ready to make that leap. Grillo, banned from standing
by his party's own rules against candidates with criminal convictions (he was found guilty of manslaughter after a fatal car crash in the 1980s), cannot participate directly in any new government and has made clear he expects M5S members elected to Parliament to stay aloof from any alliances with mainstream parties that might be on offer.
As he sits on the sidelines, issuing decrees, observers wonder if he is any more accountable than the political veterans he despises. "He decides everything," says Giovanni Favia. Once Grillo's most prominent protégé, he was expelled from the party last year after being caught on camera criticizing Grillo. The selection process for the national ticket was less than transparent. A little more than 20,000 people voted online, on the basis of candidates' résumés and short videos.
And the measures meant to inject grassroots democracy into the movement — term limits, rotating leadership positions — also prevent Grillo's colleagues from eclipsing him. "They're very weak," says Favia. "The day that they turn against Grillo, they disappear."
(MORE: Italy's Elections: Split Vote Yields No Clear Winner and an 'Unholy Mess')
In a video, in which he compared his party's campaign to a war, Grillo urged those who criticized his democratic credentials to leave the movement. When Federica Salsi, elected to Bologna's town council for M5S, ignored Grillo's dislike of Italian media to appear on a television talk show, Grillo expelled her from the party. Salsi says she received death threats on her Facebook page in the days after the clash. "The leader of this movement has his strength in the Internet," she says. "It wouldn't take much for him to urge his followers to use it more ethically." Grillo, who was not involved with the death threats, says Favia and Salsi were expelled for not following the rules of the party.
The Change They Need?
Grillo's ringtone is the rock classic "Bad to the Bone," but he meets Time barefoot, in a T-shirt emblazoned with the words of Mahatma Gandhi ("Be the change you wish to see in the world"). The change he wishes to see is causing deep concern in financial institutions across the world.
Grillo rejects the belt-tightening that helped calm the euro crisis.
His platform, if implemented, would leave the rescue strategy for Europe's embattled single currency in tatters. He proposes to put Italy's membership of the single currency to a referendum at a later date.
That kind of talk might be expected to send the entire European economy into seizure. But Italian bond yields have stabilized after their upward surge immediately after the elections. One reason is that political turbulence in Italy is not an exception but the rule, and markets have already priced it in. "Italy's default state is to have a bewildering succession of governments, none of which change fiscal policy very much," says Paul Donovan, London-based managing director of global economics at the Swiss investment bank UBS.
(MORE: Italy's Political Mess: Why the Euro Debt Crisis Never Ended)
In that sense, Grillo, though a new player, appears to fit neatly into the continuum of Italian political leaders with influence but limited power. If M5S were to win a workable majority at the next election — which could be as soon as this summer if mainstream parties fail to cobble together a viable government — the markets would prove far less sanguine.
Even if Grillo's movement fizzles, he may have already achieved more than generations of conventional politicians, by galvanizing Italy out of inertia. In Rome, there is a scent of revolution in the air. M5S's newly minted parliamentarians are an unknown quantity. The old guard is on its guard. "The Italian political class took too much time to make the necessary changes," says Enrico Letta, Bersani's deputy. "The only possible answer is to make representative democracy work better."
"Something big needs to change," wrote Jim O'Neill, the outgoing chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, in a note days after the poll. "Maybe this election outcome and the peculiar mass appeal of the Five Star Movement could signal the start of something new?"
Grillo will find it easier to disrupt than to build, but M5S has already helped vent anger through the ballot box that in other austerity-ridden countries has flared into riots or swelled support for far-right, anti-immigration parties. "We fill a void," says Grillo. "I channel all this rage into this movement of people, who then go and govern. [Our critics] should be thanking us one by one. If we fail, [Italy] is headed for violence in the streets."
Italy's battered Establishment is unlikely to thank a man who has showered it with invective and says he is now contemplating taking his scabrous routines to a wider audience through a world tour. Though Grillo plans to stay on as the Five Star Movement's leader, he still considers himself a comedian, he says — "an extraordinary one." Not even his opponents would disagree with that.
Stephan Faris
www.stephanfaris.com
http://twitter.com/stephanfaris
Nessun commento :
Posta un commento