The Five Star Movement - between Direct Democracy and the Role of the Party in Central Office

From Barcelona en Comu’ to Emmanuel Macron, from Donald Trump to the 5-Star Movement, new leaders and political organizations are replacing traditional mainstream parties and centres of power. They may be the realization, probably in an unexpected magnitude and political variety, of the anti-establishment reaction to the cartelization of politics foreshadowed by Katz and Mair (1995; 2009). While, on the one hand, these parties propose, at least in their rhetoric, to represent the people against the corrupted and inefficient ruling elites, some of them (for example, Barcelona en Comu’, the 5-Star Movement, Podemos, the Icelandic Pirate party) go further and propose to replace these elites with the people through direct democracy. Their leaders describe these new organisations as bottom-up, bureaucracy-free movements where “uno vale uno” (one is worth one) and decisions are taken by party members and not by party elites. The birth and early life of the Italian Five-Star Movement (FSM) is the empirical case study that I analyse in this paper. Other studies have previously analysed the FSM and its intra-party organisation (see, for example, Tronconi 2015, Corbetta and Vignati 2014, Bordignon and Ceccarini 2014). However, I have adopted a mixed methodology (combining virtual and real participant observation with semi-structured interviews with party elites and ordinary party members) that allows me to shed light more directly on two central and yet not totally explored issues of the organisation of the FSM: first, the role of FSM' founder and guarantor Beppe Grilling and, second, the quality and characteristics of FSM's online primaries. My findings reveal that within the organisation of the FSM coexist elements of verticality and horizontality. From the one hand, Beppe Grillo founded the party and behaved simultaneously as the guarantor and the leader of the party. On the other hand, online primaries tend to provide ordinary members with large decisional power. In addition, I discovered a sort of local anarchy, where local representatives and virtual branches tend to be substantially free to manage local issues without the interference of the party in central office. I therefore conclude that the FSM does not have the organisational and democratic characteristics of any of the traditional party models, making it a hybrid post-cartel organisation where elements of stratarchy, participation and cartelisation coexist.