Grillo and the Vacuum: Understanding the Project of the Five Stars Movement

Abstract

The article investigates the persistence on the political sphere of the peculiar Five Star Movement in Italy. It does so by analyzing how the support base was mobilized on the ground in order to provide important insights on the contemporary Italian (and European) crisis of representation. The 5SM responded to the political vacuum caused by the decline of the traditional mediating role of the Italian party system with another vacuum. The absence of a traditional political plan in favour of a platform whose issues are supposedly decided by the 5SM activists, supported by a complex structure comprehensive of both vertical and horizontal features as well as an original style of communication and an ideology that officially try to capitalize on the participative side of web 2.0, offered the 5SM’s activists the hope of being in control of their future. Such perception made fortunes of the 5SM.