Young activists are hunched over computers in the war rooms of the insurgent Five Star Movement inside Italy’s parliament, scenting a historic breakthrough.
The party is the frontrunner as the campaign starts for the Italian general election on March 4, completing its transition in a few years from the comical protest fringe to the centre of Italian politics.
Whatever the result, the election will shake up Europe, presenting a test for German domination and a potential threat to the euro.
“There are no ideological hangups in our party,” said Five Star’s leader, Luigi Di Maio, 31, whose appeal to younger voters is built on familiar themes of inequality, generational discontent and disgust with the old parties.
Di Maio got a boost last week when Italy won support from France for concerted new moves to deter migration, potentially defusing an issue that has drawn voters away from Five Star to the far right. He can now move to capitalise on another popular issue, sharpening the party’s demand for an end to the fiscal austerity imposed by Brussels.
The Five Star manifesto calls for a universal basic income of about £700 a month. The party says it will renegotiate the European Union’s “fiscal compact” with Brussels so that it can spend more, cut taxes and fund a series of reforms.
Di Maio, who has served as deputy speaker of parliament for five years, said in a recent interview with The Sunday Times that a Five Star government could call a referendum on membership of the euro as “a last resort”.
All the main parties are vying to stand up for Italy against the economic policies directed by northern Europe, but it is Five Star’s claim to be authentic and fresh that has kept it in the lead.
“We are the leaders in this campaign and they are the followers,” Di Maio said.
“You’ll see how the old system works in the coming months. There’ll be a campaign of disinformation against us founded on untruths.”
Thousands of would-be candidates have swamped the party’s online registration platform, underlining the grassroots enthusiasm that has propelled it this far.
Di Maio’s grown-up image is hampered by the absurdist personality of Five Star’s founder, the comedian Beppe Grillo, and the party has taken a knock from scandals around Virginia Raggi, 37, its telegenic but hapless mayor of Rome.
Raggi recently asked a Rome court for an immediate trial on a charge of lying about a public appointment, saying: “I want an immediate hearing because I am innocent.”
Her ascent was typical of the party’s volatile early years when Grillo had dictated candidacies and policies on a whim, secure in the knowledge that his own charisma was its main asset.
When Five Star’s Chiara Appendino became mayor of Turin, however, the party began to embed itself in local administration and in parliament. “We have learnt how the apparatus works,” Di Maio said with a smile.
The path to power is not simple. In the corridors of parliament the tight poll numbers for Five Star are leading to intricate political calculations. The movement consistently hits 28% support, but it is tied with a potential coalition of the centre-right and a possible leftist alliance around the ruling Democratic Party (PD).
Di Maio said that if Five Star won about 200 out of 630 seats in parliament, it would be “mathematically impossible” for his rivals to form a coalition and he would ask Sergio Mattarella, the Italian president, for permission to form a government.
Also running the numbers is the octogenarian tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, himself barred from election because of a conviction for tax fraud but who has staged a political renaissance.
Far from the glare of publicity, a suntanned Berlusconi welcomed politicians to his private villa at Arcore, in northern Italy, for private talks on alliances.
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party shares some policies with the nationalist Northern League and could win enough seats to form a coalition with another right-wing, anti-immigration party, the Brothers of Italy.
This could have consequences for the euro. Both Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader, talk of a “parallel currency” for use in Italy while retaining the euro for international trade and use by tourists — a policy that has not yet been explained to the financial markets.
Even the ruling centre-left PD has put the renegotiation of the EU’s fiscal compact in its manifesto, recognising that public opinion is hostile to its imposition of strict budget cuts on high-debt nations such as Italy.
Europe has inflicted “a double betrayal” on Italy, argued Maurizio Ferrera, a Milan-based professor of political science and economics who writes for the Corriere della Sera, the Milan daily newspaper.
“Fiscal discipline and structural reform are obviously important, but they are also politically divisive and sometimes economically paradoxical,” he added.
Although the PD is sliding in the polls, it harbours hopes of striking a working deal in parliament, perhaps even making a “grand bargain” with Berlusconi to keep power in the hands of the traditional parties.
There is also a striking unanimity that Italy cannot continue to take in migrants — more than 119,000 arrived last year, according to the EU’s Frontex border agency, at a cost of more than £4bn to the state.
“Italy feels abandoned,” admitted the prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, the suave scion of a distinguished Roman family. “This is a European problem that needs a European solution.”
The solution, however, might come too late to salvage his government.
