Beppe Grillo has postponed his trip to Rome until next week. Whenever it is said that the founder and “guarantor” of the Cinque Stelle is coming to Rome from his Genoa, it means that the need is great, that a settlement has to be made, that the party needs the comedian’s sheer immeasurable wisdom. At least that’s how his followers see him, not for nothing also called “Grillini”. But now Grillo needs some time to collect his thoughts, something outrageous has happened.
Luigi Di Maio, one of his favorite pupils, has left the party and is founding a new one. It’s called “Insieme per il futuro”: Together for the future. The five stars, says the Italian foreign minister, no longer have any future in them. Some media call Di Maio’s people “Futuristi” for the sake of simplicity. Her rupture is a hard, if not entirely surprising, blow to the movement. Since its founding in 2009, the party has experienced many turmoils, but no real splits.
Di Maio is taking a bunch of parliamentarians with him: 51 MPs and 11 senators are said to be there, with more likely to come in the next few weeks. The result: The Cinque Stelle, winners of the 2018 parliamentary elections with 33 percent of the votes, are no longer the largest party in parliament. The right-wing populist Lega has more seats in the House of Representatives than they do. In figures: At the beginning of the current legislative period, the Five Stars had 227 MPs – after departures, sackings and the split, there are still 104; in the Senate they were 112, now 61. Di Maio also withdraws half a dozen state secretaries, deputy ministers and ministers, including himself, from the party, as well as commission presidents.
Giuseppe Conte is the big loser
The bloodletting for Giuseppe Conte, the new head of the party, is particularly bitter: he stands there as a loser. His power lever suddenly loses a nice part of its effect. Conte’s entourage insists that the “Presidente”, as they call him since he was the country’s prime minister, is “calm and calm” because he has long considered Di Maio to be “ballast”. But is that really the case?
Conte always seems remotely controlled by the party pullers, who sometimes advise him to do this or that in order to lead the Cinque Stelle out of its dramatic low in the polls. In the end, that often seemed erratic and confusing. For example, his attempt to correct the government’s foreign policy line on the war in Ukraine – or at least the practice and decision-making processes involved in arms deliveries to Kyiv – was due to despair at the fact that nothing had been successful so far. Conte also failed across the board. Personally, he lost a lot of the glamor and goodwill that he had earned through determined government in the first phase of the pandemic. There was no upswing with Conte, the operation was a flop.
The question now is what he intends to do with the truncated party. Will he keep them in the national unity coalition, as it first appeared? Or will he break soon to reprofile her?
He’ll probably have to talk to Grillo about that when he stays at the usual hotel near the Imperial Forums and holds court. The personality of the party leader himself should then also be an issue. From the outset, Conte appeared as an unlikely leader of party orthodoxy, the ecological, system-critical primal movement. As a left-wing Christian Democrat with close ties to the Vatican, he was a poor fit. His style, fashionable and rhetorical, also contrasted with the habitus of the Cinque Stelle. Is he the right man for a U-turn a year before the elections?
Is “Che Guevara from Rome North” coming now?
Many in the party believe that participation in power has changed its nature. Their proper place, now and forever, is in opposition – against the elites, the caste, the system. The familiar pattern. Only a return to the old soul, they say, offers any chance of survival. And for that, some rely on the still boyish man who, in recent years, has preferred to travel the world and write reports instead of participating in power: Alessandro Di Battista, also known as “Dibba” and as “Che Guevara from North Rome” smiled at, 43 years old.
It is considered by his family to be pure, unspoiled, and also unused. Di Battista was something like Di Maio’s rebellious, somewhat loud twin brother in the party, for a long time they were heart and soul. Now Dibba says Di Maio has “vilely betrayed” the party. That’s the pitch, shrill and direct. Many “Grillini” also long for it.