ABSTRACT
The electoral result of the M5S in the 2013 general elections has been astonishing. In its first electoral participation at national level, only three years after its official birth, this party obtained slightly less than nine million votes for the Chamber of Deputies (25.6 per cent) and 7.4 million for the Senate (23.6 per cent), gaining 109 and 54 seats respectively. In the competition for the Lower Chamber it was the most voted party, with some 40,000 votes more than the Partito Democratico. 1 This is by far the most successful party entry in the history of post-war Western European democracies. As a point of reference, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, in its first electoral appearance in 1994, a few months after its official birth, ‘only’ achieved 21 per cent of the votes.
