The Italian election was a litmus test on whether social media campaigning and support can translate into actual votes. The result is a resounding yes.
“REVIVAL” by Steve Bell
“The mainstream parties are finished! They won’t survive for long”, announced Beppe Grillo, in typical style, on his Five Star Movement’s online television channel late on Monday night. For a long time political scientists have predicted that the internet would lead to the decline of formal political parties – and Beppe Grillo is showing how.‘Nine months ago, the comedian-blogger (Beppe Grillo) was polling at 5% nationally. Yesterday he took over 25% of the vote: a rise practically unprecedented in modern European politics. It has taken a lot of people by surprise, including the pollsters.’
Nine months ago, the comedian-blogger was polling at 5% nationally. Yesterday he took over 25% of the vote: a rise practically unprecedented in modern European politics. It has taken a lot of people by surprise, including the pollsters.
What accounts for this meteoric rise? Two weeks ago, Demos released a report based on a survey of almost 2,000 Facebook fans of Grillo and his Movimento 5 Stelle [M5S] movement. The answer is a fascinating and powerful mix of anti-establishment rhetoric, new technology and old-fashioned rallies and local action. Head on the internet, and feet on the ground, as Grillo himself puts it.
His message is a simple one – that Italian politics is corrupt, elitist, and closed – and it is striking a chord. His supporters come from across the spectrum; they are neither clearly left nor right. They are all, however, angry about the state of democracy in Italy and Europe. Our survey showed only 2% trust parliament and only 11% trust the press.
Grillo appears to be an authentic, straight-talking alternative, even if he is policy-lite in certain areas, including on the economy. In a shrewd move that demonstrated his apparent lack of self-interest, he ruled himself out of standing for election, by banning those with a criminal record – he describes himself merely as the spokesman or “guarantor” of the movement. Movimento’s new parliamentarians are a remarkable mix of teachers, housewives, unemployed, young, old and much else. Ordinary people like us.
His skill has been to channel Italians’ general frustrated apathy into a powerful political movement, spurning mainstream media to talk to them directly through Twitter and Facebook. Grillo has, by an enormous margin, the largest social media following of any politician in Europe: he has more than one million Facebook friends, and a similar number of Twitter followers – Bersani has about a quarter of that (as does David Cameron). His blog is the most widely read in Italy.
Crucially, he uses this to make things happen offline, encouraging his virtual supporters to meet and discuss the issues he raises on his blog in real world “meet-up groups” – and there are hundreds of them. Feeling part of something, his supporters are motivated: while 51% of Italians said they would “never” participate in a boycott, only 9% of Beppe Grillo’s supporters say the same.
According to my estimates, he has around a quarter of a million supporters who consider themselves members of the movement: an army of volunteers and door-knockers that would previously have taken years to recruit. The medium and the message fit hand in glove: the media is a racket, so circumvent it. Politics is closed – especially the party list system – so elect members online.
That is why his election rallies have been by far the most well attended of all the candidates, and why the pollsters didn’t see him coming: his voters turned out more consistently than anyone else. The same thing happened in Germany with the Pirate party in the recent Berlin election, where pollsters dramatically underestimated their support. Polling companies have some work to do.
This election was a litmus test on whether social media campaigning and support can translate into actual votes. The result is a resounding yes. The melange of virtual and real-world political activity is the way millions of people relate to politics in the 21st century. Formal membership of political parties is plummeting, while social media following – Facebook groups or Twitter followers – is growing fast. Grillo has shown how to use them.
Other parties will try to replicate his success. In some ways, they will struggle. I can’t see Ed Miliband holding a “fuck off” day aimed at the establishment, or Nick Clegg calling David Cameron a “psycho dwarf” any time soon. But the appetite for anti-establishment parties is growing.
Grillo’s message has resonated in a country where faith in government, parliament and the media is low and falling. According to recent surveys, the UK public feels much the same: while 88% of Italians don’t trust political parties, 80% of Brits feel the same way. Social media politics as pioneered by Grillo – citizen-led, brazen, open, democratic – is what happens when politicians appear too distant, too elite, too different from the people they represent. The established parties need to take note.
Italian elections: austerity challenged
‘In retrospect, 25 February 2013 may go down as the day when Europe’s austerity policies, at least as originally conceived, finally hit the buffers.’
Italians this week have voted their discontents, their divisions, and their fantasies. Not so very different, then, from other European electorate
Editorial The Guardian,
Italians this week have voted their discontents, their divisions, and their fantasies. Not so very different, then, from other European electorates. But in Italy the political system, in part because of Silvio Berlusconi‘s malign institutional heritage, seems perfectly designed to magnify all three.
The result has scared Brussels and Berlin, scared the markets, and scared Italians themselves. What have they wrought? Is Italy headed for permanent political crisis? And could this vote endanger the already threatened common currency, with all which that implies for Europe and its future?
Asked a few years ago whether he was worried about the political situation in his country, an Italian economist replied: “I’m not worried, but I am desperate.” There is indeed something about Italian politics, at least since the rise of Mr Berlusconi, which induces a state of chronic desperation. Italy “has been in a political, economic and moral crisis for the past 20 years,” observed one shrewd student of its affairs, “as it never really succeeded in achieving agreement over reforms” following the collapse of the old party system in 1992. Well, it is still far from that today, although the efforts of Pier Luigi Bersani to tempt the Five Star movement of Beppe Grillo into a common reform programme may offer some hope for the future.
Five Star campaigned, in essence, on the Italian equivalent of the American slogan “Throw the bums out”. It did not entirely succeed in that: Mr Berlusconi, the biggest villain of the piece for the grillini, has ended up in a powerful position in the upper house, although he cannot veto the Bersani-Grillo partnership which, if it happens, may turn out to be a way forward for the country.
But, so far, how the Italians are going to get out of this mess is anybody’s guess. A grand coalition of left and right is a possibility, and so is the deal between the centre left and the Five Star movement which Mr Bersani is exploring . But how would either cope with a renewed economic storm, interest rates shooting up, austerity packages unravelling, grim messages from Angela Merkel? How long could such unnatural marriages last?
And if such a government set out to call fresh elections, perhaps with a new electoral law, how would the established parties avert an even greater triumph for Beppe’s people? That would not clear up the mess: it would merely create a new one. So, on one level, this was yet another election which failed to solve Italy’s chronic political problems. On another, it was a verdict on the German-led austerity policy which is Europe’s current remedy for its common currency and other economic ills. Mario Monti, austerity’s main man in Italy, went down with a bang, and Mr Grillo’s pledge of a referendum on the euro certainly played a part in the success of his movement.
This was an Italy saying no to austerity. And, with unemployment at more than 11%, according to a recent article in Le Monde, more than 100,000 small firms, the backbone of the Italian economy, closing in 2012, and the number of graduates leaving the country reaching a million, that is an understandable negative.
Such a verdict cannot be wished away.
It is of course far from the first such judgment.
The backlash against austerity has brought down incumbent after incumbent across Europe, and, most recently, François Hollande’s victory owed something to his pledge to fight austerity.
But Italy is the eurozone’s third-largest economy, and the vote there this time went less to candidates promising to soften or contest austerity, like Mr Hollande and Mr Bersani, than to those saying, or hinting, that they would reject it.
The German government will be forced to reconsider – or, rather, to reconsider even more than it already reluctantly has.
France, coping with its own slipping economic performance, also has difficult choices.
In retrospect, 25 February 2013 may go down as the day when Europe’s austerity policies, at least as originally conceived, finally hit the buffers.
The result has scared Brussels and Berlin, scared the markets, and scared Italians themselves. What have they wrought? Is Italy headed for permanent political crisis? And could this vote endanger the already threatened common currency, with all which that implies for Europe and its future?
Asked a few years ago whether he was worried about the political situation in his country, an Italian economist replied: “I’m not worried, but I am desperate.” There is indeed something about Italian politics, at least since the rise of Mr Berlusconi, which induces a state of chronic desperation. Italy “has been in a political, economic and moral crisis for the past 20 years,” observed one shrewd student of its affairs, “as it never really succeeded in achieving agreement over reforms” following the collapse of the old party system in 1992. Well, it is still far from that today, although the efforts of Pier Luigi Bersani to tempt the Five Star movement of Beppe Grillo into a common reform programme may offer some hope for the future.
Five Star campaigned, in essence, on the Italian equivalent of the American slogan “Throw the bums out”. It did not entirely succeed in that: Mr Berlusconi, the biggest villain of the piece for the grillini, has ended up in a powerful position in the upper house, although he cannot veto the Bersani-Grillo partnership which, if it happens, may turn out to be a way forward for the country.
But, so far, how the Italians are going to get out of this mess is anybody’s guess. A grand coalition of left and right is a possibility, and so is the deal between the centre left and the Five Star movement which Mr Bersani is exploring . But how would either cope with a renewed economic storm, interest rates shooting up, austerity packages unravelling, grim messages from Angela Merkel? How long could such unnatural marriages last?
And if such a government set out to call fresh elections, perhaps with a new electoral law, how would the established parties avert an even greater triumph for Beppe’s people? That would not clear up the mess: it would merely create a new one. So, on one level, this was yet another election which failed to solve Italy’s chronic political problems. On another, it was a verdict on the German-led austerity policy which is Europe’s current remedy for its common currency and other economic ills. Mario Monti, austerity’s main man in Italy, went down with a bang, and Mr Grillo’s pledge of a referendum on the euro certainly played a part in the success of his movement.
This was an Italy saying no to austerity. And, with unemployment at more than 11%, according to a recent article in Le Monde, more than 100,000 small firms, the backbone of the Italian economy, closing in 2012, and the number of graduates leaving the country reaching a million, that is an understandable negative.
Such a verdict cannot be wished away.
It is of course far from the first such judgment.
The backlash against austerity has brought down incumbent after incumbent across Europe, and, most recently, François Hollande’s victory owed something to his pledge to fight austerity.
But Italy is the eurozone’s third-largest economy, and the vote there this time went less to candidates promising to soften or contest austerity, like Mr Hollande and Mr Bersani, than to those saying, or hinting, that they would reject it.
The German government will be forced to reconsider – or, rather, to reconsider even more than it already reluctantly has.
France, coping with its own slipping economic performance, also has difficult choices.
In retrospect, 25 February 2013 may go down as the day when Europe’s austerity policies, at least as originally conceived, finally hit the buffers.
This article titled “How Beppe Grillo’s social media politics took Italy by storm” was written by Jamie Bartlett, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 26th February 2013 15.36 Europe/London
