The Five Star Movement (M5S) in Rome: the real life of utopian politics
2021; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1469-8676.12976
ISSN1469-8676
Autores Tópico(s)Foucault, Power, and Ethics
ResumoIn June 2016, the anti-establishment and grassroots-democratic Five Star Movement (MoVimento Cinque Stelle, M5S) won local elections in Rome. Following fundamental opposition, supporters of the Movement now had to demonstrate their ability to govern and deliver on far-reaching promises. This paper explores what happened when the utopian aspirations of the M5S – such as entangling the represented and their representatives in a permanent political dialogue, reshaping civic culture and harnessing new communication technologies for innovative types of participation – encountered political reality. I show that the divergent rhythms and tempos of political practice and bureaucratic reality soon split the more radical M5S supporters from the newly elected officials. Rather than realising utopian democratic behaviour, new technological possibilities and innovation in participation began to fracture the M5S. En juin 2016, le Mouvement 5 étoiles (MoVimento Cinque Stelle, M5S), un mouvement démocratique, populaire et anti-établissement, a remporté les élections locales à Rome. Face à leurs opposants, les partisans du mouvement ont dû prouver leur capacité à gouverner et à tenir des promesses ambitieuses. Cet article examine les évènements qui se sont déroulés lorsque les rêves utopiques du M5S – l’implication des représentés et de leurs représentants dans un dialogue politique permanent, la refonte de la culture civique et l’utilisation de technologies de communication innovantes au service de nouveaux types de participation – ont été confrontés à la réalité politique. Je montre que les différences entre les rythmes de l’exercice politique et de la réalité bureaucratique ont rapidement divisé les militants du M5S les plus radicaux et les représentants nouvellement élus. Plutôt que de concrétiser une conduite démocratique utopique, les nouvelles possibilités technologiques et l'innovation participative ont fragilisé le M5S. It vibrated again. And again. Our conversation stopped. Alessandra picked up her smartphone and studied the display with weary eyes.11 I use pseudonyms for M5S activists, councillors or supporters who do not hold an identifiable position. She showed me her home screen. ‘Over 800 messages’, she drew my attention to the green WhatsApp icon. The number kept going up. 823, 828, 831. We paused our interview; Alessandra insisted she had to respond. Alessandra, a supporter of the Five Star Movement who had only recently left university, had taken up a role in the administration of Rome’s Fifth District (Municipio V), following a landslide victory in the city’s elections of June 2016. Shortly after the vote, she had talked enthusiastically about revolutionary participatory democracy. Horizontal organisation and innovative communication technology would remove barriers between citizens and their representatives, supposedly ending corruption and ineptitude. Offline assemblies and online chat groups were set up to involve activists in the tasks of those who had been elected or staffed the administration. Such platforms were intended to put into practice what enthusiasts, such as Alessandra, identified as the Movement’s distinctive quality: to champion a rupture with previous political behaviour. Six months after the elections, however, by December 2016, the mood had turned. The successful candidates, who had taken up their seats in the district council, were exhausted and frustrated. Some called for the Movement to ‘escape from the communication prison of Facebook’. Others told me that they would not rerun for office. Hyper-communication on social media was turning a utopian project of technology-based democratic possibilities into a nightmare that exhausted officeholders. Elected councillors and administrators faced an impasse: if they did not respond fast to messages from activists and supporters, with whom they had shared phone numbers in the interest of horizontal egalitarianism, they were accused of ‘betraying the Movement’s values’; some faced calls for expulsion. If they did respond to every notification, in real time, their administrative and political work was permanently interrupted. At the end of 2016, the Movement’s utopian project of a renewed political culture was unravelling. More radical members, pushing for a rupture with the past, and those in political or administrative positions struggled to agree on how to practise ‘participation’ effectively. Instead of effortlessly realising democratic horizontality, the Five Star Movement’s Roman experiment revealed crucial limitations for utopian projects of direct-democratic techno-politics. In June 2016, the anti-establishment, grassroots-democratic Movimento Cinque Stelle won the municipal elections in Italy’s capital. Alongside the city’s new mayor, Virginia Raggi, and a majority in Rome’s city council, the Movement claimed victory in 12 of the city’s 15 administrative districts. Across the city, M5S candidates – mostly without any experience in politics – ousted the social democratic Partito Democratico (PD). The Movimento Cinque Stelle (subsequently M5S) could wield significant power through district presidents and majorities in district councils. This article examines the Movement’s first year in office, and analyses how M5S supporters and activists struggled with the shift from anti-establishment protest towards enacting political authority. My analysis is based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rome, which took place between June 2016 and June 2017. During this time, I interviewed M5S activists, civil servants and politicians (even though they rarely chose this term to describe themselves); I also followed activists in the Fifth Municipal District, attending weekly assemblies, working groups, public engagement activities and other meetings. I was interested in understanding how a new political platform, which had grown to national prominence in only a few years, would negotiate the range of utopian aspirations and anger of its grassroots members, on the one hand, with the routines and dynamics of administrative politics, on the other – and how supporters experienced the transformation of a highly critical opposition movement into a responsible political force managing public affairs in Rome. The M5S activists whom I followed regarded themselves as an avant-garde for new democratic practice. In the main, they professed a desire to produce a new civic culture aimed at confronting corruption and selfishness. A key aspiration that many expressed was to blur or abolish the boundaries separating the representing and the represented: instead, the former are expected to become portavoce, spokespeople, who carry the common will, discovered through online referenda and grassroots meetings. Technology-based participatory politics is a key component in M5S visions of a revolutionary democratic practice. As this article suggests, however, the divergent rhythms and tempos of political practice soon produced fault lines and estranged new groups within the Movement – with a division into elected office-holders and their pragmatic allies as one bloc and more radical supporters and Movement members as another. Unelected activists and portavoce (elected office-holders or those with official functions) also clashed about the role of experts in the administration while innovative communication technology simultaneously enabled and undermined a supposed revolution in participatory politics. During the first year in office in Rome, aspirations to involve citizens directly in public affairs met with the sobering reality of increasingly confrontational meetings, slowed down by suspicion and infighting. A commitment to egalitarianism resulted in wearisome hyper-communication and attempts on the part of citizens to use personal contacts for the advancement of private interests. Aspirations for political emancipation, revolution and new democratic vitality met with cynicism and continuity. This analysis details how the synchronicity of hyper-communication inside the M5S soon juxtaposed idealistic views of techno-politics with the pragmatic or realistic imperatives of public administration. While M5S supporters envisioned innovative communication technology as an important component of revolutionary democratic practice, its effect on political life was often destructive efficacy. Visions of turning Italy’s capital into the wellspring of a democratic refashioning that would serve as a global model clashed with the sobering reality of bureaucracy and political process. Instead of using technology to remodel civic culture, divergent views about the role of the bureaucracy in politics and adequate levels of responsiveness on the part of officeholders produced confrontations about the direction of travel for the utopian politics of Rome’s M5S. I suggest that the M5S working groups, assemblies and other ways of enacting a new political culture were intended to constitute what Davina Cooper (2014) has called ‘everyday utopias’. In her analysis of how utopian imaginations can become real, she focuses on ‘promising spaces’, in which innovative concepts linger as the ‘oscillation between imagining and actualization’ (2014: 43). Cooper describes a transgender bathhouse in Toronto, Local Exchange Trading Schemes in Britain or London’s Speakers’ Corner as spaces with an everyday utopian quality, in which alternative social values can be enacted. These places, Cooper writes, have a potential for actualisation that derives from their ‘proximity to mainstream life’ (2014: 221). They are not unachievably utopian, but close to ordinary reality. Everyday utopias straddle the present and a desirable future, which is prefigured through innovative ways of coming together and engaging in collective action. As soon as the M5S had won the elections in Rome, its portavoce and activists opened up spaces for democratic experimentation. The utopian quality of the M5S inhered in two key objectives: a cultural revolution, which would proceed slowly to avoid top-down re-education, and the concomitant activation of citizens into collaborative participation, reshaping relations between Romans and their institutions. What Cooper does not consider, however, is how everyday utopias can unravel, rather than move towards actualisation. In Rome, the political vitality that characterised aspirations and engagement during the election campaign and in the aftermath of the M5S victory soon gave way to mistrust. The utopian project struggled to maintain its élan, by which I refer to a shared willingness to realise new democratic decision-making processes collectively and trust others to share and follow this vision. Whereas radicals’ voices within the M5S expressed a desire for a clean break with the past, those with political responsibilities sought to decelerate the pace of change and urged compromise – which often led to accusations of betrayal. My analysis charts the failures that can befall utopian democratic politics, complicating Cooper’s vision of everyday utopias as promising spaces that push towards actualisation of new forms of social life and imaginations of collective existence. In his analysis of working-class activism in the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez, Matt Wilde describes ‘utopian disjunctures’ as a result of the ‘tension between radical aspirations to establish self-governing democratic institutions on the one hand, and more pragmatic imperatives to obtain state resources and consolidate the gains of the chavista project on the other’ (2017b: 48; also Wilde 2017a). For Wilde, the utopian disjuncture was caused by the emergence of divergent temporalities shaping the expectations of revolutionary activists and the pragmatic constraints of administrators respectively. This divergence produced a clash in political priorities. Wilde’s insight can illuminate the M5S’s failure of performing a utopian rupture in Rome, but his focus is on the discrepancy that divides state-imposed political imperatives from grassroots democratic demands. My ethnographic material from Rome, by extension, reveals how a group of activists fractured internally while pursuing a grassroots-based form of direct digital democracy. In this analysis, I thus emphasise the emergent division into elected office-holders and their pragmatic allies, on the one hand, and more radical supporters, on the other, as a consequence of new technological possibilities, and how, rather than facilitating utopian politics, technological innovation caused disruption. The Five Star Movement came quickly to power. It was founded in 2009 by the comedian Beppe Grillo and the late Gianroberto Casaleggio, an IT expert. Casaleggio – who died in 2016 – early on argued that innovative communication would enable unprecedented forms of associationism, transparency and democratic participation (Casaleggio 2004). He was convinced that the delegation of political responsibility to elected representatives would give way to the continuous involvement of citizens in public affairs (Ponte di Pino 2014: 117). While Casaleggio was instrumental in setting up online platforms and driving the technological side of M5S, Grillo became the Movement’s popular figurehead. As a comedian, Beppe Grillo had turned himself into a household name with scathing attacks on Italy’s political elites in the 1980s (Caracci 2013). After accusing the ruling Socialist Party (PS) of corruption, however, Grillo was no longer able to perform on the state-owned RAI television, and began to tour Italian theatres with political comedy. In 2005, Grillo started a blog intended to expose corruption and mismanagement in public administration (Tronconi 2015). Besides airing anti-elite, and some suggest populist, sentiment (Pedrazzani and Pinto 2015), his work foreshadowed the political themes of the M5S, such as environmentalism and sustainability. Grillo has contrasted the need for reform with the ‘dead’ politics of Italy’s gerontocracy that supposedly fails to modernise the country and tackle new challenges (Vignati 2015: 15). Early on, he outlined a vision of political change, which included limiting the terms MPs could serve in parliament to two, and barring candidates with criminal records from elections (Bordignon and Ceccarini 2013: 433). Following his blog’s growing popularity, Grillo encouraged followers to set up local groups, so-called Meetups (Lanzone and Tronconi 2015: 55), to discuss the themes that would later become the five policy objectives, or five stars, of the M5S: retaining water supply in public hands; environmental protection; improving public transport; internet-based sociality and communication; and sustainable development (Bordignon and Ceccarini 2013: 430). In October 2009, the Movimento Cinque Stelle was founded as a political platform. The Movement’s position on a traditional left–right spectrum is inconclusive. Even though Grillo supported left-wing parties in the past, he and Casaleggio have described the M5S as post-ideological (Vignati 2015: 20). The M5S supporters with whom I spoke usually embraced, at least in theory, a leaderless ideology that favours horizontal processes of consensus formation, even though the pivotal role of Grillo has attracted criticism (Greblo 2011; Vignati 2015). Grillo and Casaleggio distanced the Movement from traditional parties, also because of the negative associations that party politics conjures among many Italians, such as nepotism and corruption (Bull and Newell 2005: chapters 3 and 5). In 2013, only 7.3% of Italians stated that they had confidence in political parties (Newell 2015: 10). Grillo and Casaleggio underlined their intention to create a new political reality that would render parties superfluous, and their project struck a chord with a large part of the Italian public (Passarelli and Tuorto 2015). In its early days, the M5S electorate was quite similar to those supporting the left-libertarian parties that formed across Europe in the eighties, of whom the German Greens are the most studied example. Thanks to its political platform, which is centred around the preservation of the environment and the common good and the promotion of grassroots participation, the Movement was initially able to attract some of the social categories that are usually associated with the new left: young people, mid- and highly educated white-collar workers and students. (Pedrazzani and Pinto 2015: 95) This changed with electoral success, as M5S voters were recruited from across Italian society. The financial crisis of the late 2000s resulted in an unelected expert government (2011–13). Led by the former EU Commissioner Mario Monti, this governo tecnico enacted structural and welfare reforms. The need for another expert government exposed the failure of Italy’s political elites in responding to social and economic pressures, while Monti’s welfare cuts entrenched frustration with mainstream politics in some quarters. When elections were held in 2013, the M5S benefited from discontent; even though the social democratic PD could lead a coalition government without the M5S, close to nine million Italians voted for the M5S – over 25% of the vote share (Tronconi 2015). From its inception, the M5S had a strong utopian component, which focused on web-based communication, innovative information dissemination and transparency, and horizontal associationism (Orazi 2014). In Meetups, activists had practised new political organisation since 2005, but it was not until the municipal elections in Rome in 2016 that the M5S could demonstrate that it was different from other short-lived civic platforms. In Italy’s notoriously chaotic capital, the M5S would have to prove its capacity to govern. Among Italians, Rome has a reputation as a badly governed city, in which ‘endless and timeless beauty persists side by side with urban degradation, pollution, and crime proliferation in some of Europe’s most desolate city areas, often built illegally’ (Clough Marinaro and Thomassen 2014: 1). Romans suffer from insufficient public transport, neglected green spaces, ineffective waste management, overcrowding, haphazard construction, black market economies, decrepit schools, illegal rubbish incineration, homelessness, illegal migration and poverty (Bock 2018; Cervelli 2014; Herzfeld 2009; Mudu 2014). Since 1990, Extraordinary Commissioners had to intervene on five occasions to take over the reins of municipal government, when elected mayors left office prematurely – not always voluntarily. In 2008, Giovanni Alemanno, a controversial right-wing politician, won the mayoral elections (Ilardi and Scandurra 2009). The new administration was beset by accusations of corruption. In 2013, Ignazio Marino, a medical scholar from the social democratic PD, ousted Alemanno. Marino’s mandate came to a premature end when his party withdrew its support in 2015. Marino was forced to resign. The mayor’s supporters accused the then PD leader, Matteo Renzi, of eliminating an internal rival. Snap elections were scheduled for June 2016, and interest rose in the M5S and their candidate for the office of mayor, Virginia Raggi. Virginia Raggi was born and raised in Rome, where she also studied law. She joined the M5S in 2011. Following the 2013 elections, aged only 34, she was elected as one of the M5S city councillors that opposed the Marino administration. Three years later, in February 2016, she became the M5S candidate for the office of mayor in the snap elections, chosen in a M5S online referendum. On 19 June 2016, she won the run-off ballot against Roberto Giachetti from the social democratic PD. Within five years, Raggi evolved from a youthful grassroots activist into a leading Italian politician. The M5S election campaign was concluded in early June on Rome’s Piazza del Popolo. Thousands of supporters cheered on their candidate, interrupting the stage show with ‘Virginia! Virginia!’ chants. Others waved flyers that announced ‘The Future is Now’, demanding ‘A Sign of Change’. The atmosphere was ecstatic. Mismanagement by the country’s mainstream parties, combined with distrust and deteriorating living conditions, induced confidence among M5S sympathisers that the Movement was heading for triumph. Virginia Raggi eventually entered the stage in Piazza del Popolo to thundering applause and reminded Romans that ‘we, the M5S, are just normal people, like you. This normality scares them [the establishment] because they know that our team isn’t just our candidates here. Our team is you. The whole square, the whole city.’ As her supporters waved Five Star flags, Raggi continued: ‘they have ruined our city, left in the hands of criminals. We want efficient trains and public transport; we want efficient accident and emergency units in our hospitals. We believe in the common good and want to strengthen it’. Raggi spoke about a cleaner and environmentally friendly Rome. ‘When I had my child, I realised that it wasn’t enough to complain about the state of the city, but that I also had to do something. We have sacrificed our private lives for this, but politics done this way is a beautiful thing. It serves to create a sense of community’. Raggi emphasised that M5S supporters had written the election manifesto through transparent discussion groups. It was, she suggested, the citizens’ vision for Rome’s future. Raggi countered accusations that the M5S was doing antipolitica by insisting that she was advocating a different type of politics, and thus was antisistema – against the current political and party system. The M5S’s emphasis on a supposed ‘us vs them’ binary and ‘honesty’ must be seen in the context of an Italian political culture that was shaped in the wake of the mani pulite (Clean Hands) scandal of the early 1990s. Then, following investigations by the public prosecution in Milan, an extensive network of corruption, bribery and kickbacks was discovered, crossing the political spectrum and ‘involving top businessmen and party leaders, high-ranking ministers, and civil servants’ (Muehlebach 2012: 37). The extent of the corruption network meant that few members of the Italian establishment and elites in business, politics, the media and beyond escaped accusations – and many were put on trial (see also Salvadori 2018, chapters 15 and 16). One consequence of a process that discredited the old elites and establishment was the rise of a highly successful anti-politician politician: Silvio Berlusconi (Ginsborg 2004). As a result of mani pulite, a cultural political climate emerged that increasingly cast all politicians as ‘the same’ (sono tutti uguali) and corrupt – and which began to posit ‘the people’ as honest, good and decent, in contrast to ‘the elites’ or ‘the establishment’.22 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to make this link more explicit. Subsequent governments, both at the national and local level in Rome, struggled to undo the damage that mani pulite had inflicted on Italian politics (see Tocci 2015). The M5S’s electoral success is connected with these peculiar circumstances, which also help to explain why the Movement’s representatives struggled with the conundrum of having to act as politicians while much of the Movement’s base expected them to be non-politicians, as I show below. Shortly after arriving in Rome in June 2016, I began to frequent a local activist group in the city’s Fifth District. The district is sandwiched between two major arteries, Via Casilina and Via Prenestina, in the city’s east. With 250,000 inhabitants, it is densely populated. The part closest to the city centre, Pigneto, has become a home for Roman hipsters. After a few stops on the old trenino tram, however, the district changes. The area around Torpignattara, formerly a working-class quarter, is known as Banglatown, because of its concentration of Bangladeshi immigrants (Broccolini 2014). The infrastructure used to be poor, but has improved in recent years. Rome’s third metro line was planned to connect these eastern parts with the centre. The original opening, scheduled for the year 2000, was postponed. In 2014 and 2015, parts of the C line were eventually opened, and the final stretch to the city centre is scheduled for completion in 2023. Besides the new underground, old trams connect Via Casilina and Via Prenestina with Rome’s central Termini train station. The district is home to many non-Italians, who travel long distances to their workplaces in city centre restaurants or hotels (Thomassen and Vereni 2014: 30). Most residents live in large post-war condominiums. Despite increasing immigration from abroad, residents are in the main still domestic Italian migrants from Southern Italy and their descendants. There are some green spaces, but they are not well maintained. Planning has been haphazard. Populous quarters sit adjacent to urban wasteland. The district contains quirky corner shops and small family businesses, but the average income is one of the lowest of Rome’s 15 districts (Comune di Roma 2016: 40). The Fifth District contains many of the trials and tribulations of Roman life: inadequate housing, social disadvantage and low incomes, as well as a lack of reliable infrastructure and public services, degradation and pollution. Under such conditions, M5S activists found a supportive echo for their visions of revolutionary and emancipatory politics. Three days after the M5S landslide victory, the new district councillors and the district president, supporters and curious citizens gathered in a district hall assembly room. Over 100 people had pushed wooden tables to the sides in order to display cake and prosecco. Giovanni Boccuzzi, the new district president, entered to enthusiastic cheers. He had previously worked as a financial consultant for a local bank branch, and first joined M5S Meetups in 2007. In his address to the crowd, the new presidente thanked everyone for their hard work and promised that M5S politics would ‘not be a task for the elected and officials, but for all citizens’. There was still confusion about who had been elected to the district council, in which the M5S now had 15 members – the largest group. Boccuzzi admitted to laughter that he still had to learn the councillors’ names. The M5S’s victory had swept dozens of district and city councillors into crucial positions, and most of them had no experience with municipal politics. In her victory speech, one of the new councillors underlined that the M5S ‘are citizens like you’, and ‘we will never become politicians. We want your participation, your collaboration. Everything will be bottom-up, and nothing top-down’. ‘I have never done politics before, and this is an emotional moment for me’, Franco, another councillor, explained: ‘I know well the problems you have, because I live with them every day. We will listen to everyone and heed your concerns.’ The councillors encouraged activists to remain actively involved. They emphasised humility, repeated their commitment to honesty and transparency, and urged participation. Vincenzo, a professional psychologist, would become a key interlocutor for my research. I met him this evening, when he explained to me that he had followed the M5S for many years with sympathy, and recently joined the Movement. He called the M5S’s social and political objective a rivoluzione gentile, ‘gentle revolution’, that would transform civic behaviour and the ways in which Italians conceptualise the relationship with their public institutions. ‘Lots of people in Italy are angry about political parties and the mess we’re in’, he elaborated, ‘but the M5S says to them: “take your anger into our Movement and participate to change something”. So, we’re proposing a revolution, but without arms.’ Vincenzo depicted Romans as cynics who doubted the possibility of introducing widespread civic morality in the wake of disappointing experiences with their fellow urbanites: ‘they park their car wherever they want, even if they block others, don’t clean up after their dogs, don’t pay taxes, and throw rubbish on the streets. They don’t do recycling. They just don’t care about public life. There is no concept of the common good. Many Romans are antisocial and selfish, and that’s what the M5S is going to change’. As Vincenzo put it: The M5S promotes a new ethics for citizens. Some people are afraid of this: a higher ethical code also means that you have to pay your TV licence fee, that you don’t ask your friends for favours, that you pay your taxes, that you don’t throw your rubbish on the street, and that you stop complaining and become involved. This revolution is pushing people out of their comfort zone of apathy and passive criticism. These things are ingrained. Too many Romans don’t care about public space. This needs to change. When we have a M5S meeting in a square, we make sure to clean it afterwards. This revolution will take time, because it’s gentle (gentile). We need to go into the schools and make sure children learn about participation and civic behaviour. This objective of producing a different civic attitude is not new in Italy. ‘The history of Italy since the Risorgimento [i.e. since the late 19th century] has … been dominated, though in different ways, by the question of how the country could be forced (i.e., dragged willingly or unwillingly, and very quickly) out of its state of moral and material decay’ (Orsina 2014: 9). The aim of re-educating Italians and transforming a supposedly defective character through top-down moral modernisation has been a political aim since the country’s unification in 1861 (Patriarca 2010; Graziano 2010). The M5S agenda continues such efforts, albeit with a different focus: it highlights participation, transparency and technology. The M5S places crucial emphasis on the power of horizontal digital democracy and technological progress to connect citizens with their insti
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