The showdown that is destroying the 5 Star Movement – Michael Braun

One is worth one: that motto, the guiding principle of the 5-star Movement (M5s), should be rewritten today. Only one is valid, this would be the new version, born from the fierce duel between Beppe Grillo and Giuseppe Conte: it is valid either the guarantor or the former prime minister, Panzer.

It is a conflict that, beyond its dramatic effects on the M5s, but potentially also on the Italian party system, has its comic implications. We could start with the fact that Grillo accuses Conte of having produced a “seventeenth-century statute” and receives as an answer that the one hypothesized by the comedian would be a “medieval” statute. We could continue with the invective of the guarantor according to which the lawyer dreams of a “one-person party”, to which Conte responds with the same coin, stating that he has no intention of stopping his project only at the behest of “a single person” .

And what about Grillo’s assertion that Conte did not understand the character of the M5s, a “horizontal organization”, a “movement created to spread direct and participatory democracy”? It makes you laugh in the face of a showdown that has nothing “horizontal”, in the face of a melee between Grillo and Conte rained vertically from above like a bolt from the blue that reduces ministers, parliamentarians, activists and voters of the five stars to astonished spectators.

What about a “horizontal organization” in which the future leader – Conte – at the end of February was designated not with “direct democracy” mechanisms, but by the guarantor and a few other major players? In which he was given carte blanche to write a statute according to his wishes, in perfect solitude and secrecy? What about the fact that even today, with the five stars on the verge of splitting, no one or almost no one has read the draft of the statute? What about Grillo’s “horizontal” threat against Vito Crimi to chase him badly, like Flavio Briatore in the TV show The apprentice (“You’re out!)”, If he dared to publish the statute? Long live transparency, M5s totem!

At least on one thing, however, the two contenders agree: on the paternity of Grillo. But the agreement ends here: Grillo sees himself as a “good dad” while Conte suffers him as a “master father”.

Haven’t we talked about politics in this article so far? It’s not a casuality. Politics is the great absentee in this nuclear war which seems nothing more than a power struggle or, to put it more elegantly, a struggle for leadership. There is no quarrel over the orientations of the movement, on values, on alliances, on support for the Draghi government. No: there is a fight over a statute that no one knows about. Since the times of Girondins and Jacobins, of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, of the Livorno split in 1921 or that of Palazzo Barberini in 1947 between Socialists and Social Democrats, there has never been a split like the one underway between the five stars: the two protagonists are agree on almost everything.

In fact, we are not witnessing a conflict between orthodox and pragmatists, between governors and movementists. All the choices of recent years have seen Grillo and Conte on the same positions, from the launch of the government with the League to the coalition with the Democratic Party (Pd), from support for the Draghi government in search of alliances with the Pd at regional and local level, from the repositioning of the M5s in a new center-left to the desire to re-accentuate the ecological-social character of the movement. Even the transformation of the M5s from a Vaffà! Force, from a movement that entered parliament, in 2013, to open it “like a can of tuna” into a government force, capable of forming coalitions and expressing ministers, saw the two leaders from the same part of the barricade.

Those articles on pentastellati that still today tell us about the presence of terrapiattisti and no vax in the ranks of the M5s are cutesy. That movement has grown politically and a lot. He can boast of having brought home results such as citizenship income, of having piloted Italy well (with “his” premier) through the pandemic, of having reached the Next Generation EU in Europe that will bring the country the large sum of 191 billion euros.

But at the same time in all these years the movement has not grown at all at the organizational level. He remained firm at the contradiction between his horizontal “direct democracy” (highly questionable), made up of votes on the web, and a vertical, indeed dictatorial, leadership (ultimately that of Grillo), in which the boss gave the orders, decided the coalitions, he chose who to promote and whom to hunt. And he did not disengage from the idea of ​​a charismatic leadership even when he called Conte as future leader: that Count who until now is not even a registered activist of the cinquestelle. This is the tragedy of the M5s: that it risks dying despite always having a notable popular consensus, that it risks dying because it has never shown itself capable of equipping itself with democratic debate and decision-making tools within it. He was born thanks to Grillo’s charisma, he wanted to be reborn thanks to Conte’s charisma. But in the end the charisms were too many.