ABSTRACT
The electoral success of the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) has often been interpreted as the result of its ability to occupy the space of radical protest against the forces of the “old politics”, identified first and foremost with the existing parties and their leaders. Tutti a casa! (Everybody home!) is the rallying cry that best states the movement’s ambition to promote a radical renovation of the Italian political elite. The combined effect of this anti-party stance, a (quasi) charismatic leadership and an aggressive electoral campaign, is that the M5S has been, perhaps too simply, labelled as a populist party. Indeed, some specifically populist traits are present in the movement’s rhetoric and political action. In particular, the dualism of ‘we’ (the people) against ‘them’ (the politicians), which basically represents the core of populist thinking (Hermet 2001) – has been widely stressed as a message and as a tool for the party’s propaganda. Thanks to its intrinsic capacity to include movements of all sorts, in the case of M5S the term populism has been used especially by commentators and politicians. After all, the populist tradition has a long history in Italy (Tarchi 2003), but only the recent decline of all the other parties (Lega Nord, Popolo della Libertà) (Passarelli and Tuorto 2012, 2013), which, in recent years, exploited this ‘political capital’, has produced the conditions for a new political and electoral scenario.
