The ‘anti-caste’ party has gone from being the most voted party in Italy in 2018 to being irrelevant in the latest municipal elections as it dissolves in internal battles
Reached from 32% in the 2018 general election to between 2% and 4% in the municipal elections held last weekend in nearly 1,000 municipalities. While these are two very different election nominations (the one of four years ago of a national nature, while the most recent called for just 9 million citizens to take part), the comparison between the two makes the Five Star Movement (M5E) tremble. This political force of transversal ideology and populist discourse is on its way to becoming irrelevant and even the “hate” party. The description does not come from one of its many detractors, but from its former leader and foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, who fought an ugly battle with the current M5E president, former prime minister Giuseppe Conte, while he was in the In the ranks of the movement, there is already open talk of a split.
The debacle in the municipal elections, in which the ‘anticastas’ in almost all constituencies voted in alliance with the Democratic Party (PD), the main force of the center left, could be the final blow to a formation that, according to his experience in power, has given him a very bad feeling. Present in the three governments that have succeeded each other in this legislature (the first two led by Conte and the current one led by Mario Draghi), the M5E has lost electoral support by leaps and bounds.
The latest polls give him a 12% voting intent at the national level, a percentage that experts say could collapse due to the combination of the municipal election disaster and the open battle between Di Maio and Conte. While the latter is reviving the party with a critical discourse towards Draghi’s Executive, of which the M5E is a part, Di Maio has a more institutional profile and does not share Conte’s line. The possibility of ending the internal norm that prevents the formation’s positions from repeating in front of more than two legislatures has also created friction, an issue raised in an internal vote at the end of the month via internet will be decided.
“It’s never been this bad for us. You can’t always blame others. I think we have to take responsibility for a self-referentiality that has to be overcome,” Di Maio said of the recent municipal elections, an analysis that sickened Conte, who he also accused of having “unclear” ideas. The latter replied by saying that he would not accept “lessons in internal democracy” from him. Both had already openly disagreed over the shipment of weapons to Ukraine to defend against the Russian invasion, something the president of the “anti-caste” formation disagrees with, who openly shows Di Maio the exit door. “We’re not throwing him out, but he’s leaving,” Conte told La Stampa. Before long, Di Maio replied, “I fear the M5E is at risk of becoming a political force of hatred.”
Francesco Cancellato, director of the informational website ‘Fanpage’, believed that “we are in the final stages of the M5E” and explained its collapse as a result of the tensions generated in the movement by the combination of its ” populist idiosyncrasy” with the responsibilities of government during this term. The fight between Conte and Di Maio, in his opinion, is just one of the problems facing the M5E, which is in a phase of “total dissolution”, he stated on “Radio 24”.
While the party’s chairman is flirting with the idea of leaving the coalition backing the Draghi government to get an opposition speech back, a possibility Matteo Salvini’s League also appreciates, the reality is that there is already another one. political force that has united is the populist vote. It is the Brothers of Italy (HdI), whose leader, the far-right Giorgia Meloni, has managed to make her formation the first vote intent by refusing to be part of the government alliance and remaining alone in opposition in parliament. The polls put HdI above 22%, which beat the League by a large margin in the recent municipal elections as a benchmark for conservative voters.
Source: La Verdad
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