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Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement: Organisation, Communication, and Ideology. Edited by Tronconi Filippo . Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate , 2015. 254p. $107.96.
Book Reviews: Comparative Politics
Much to the surprise of political analysts, pollsters, party leaders, and the voters themselves, in the February 2013 Italian national elections, the Five Star Movement (MSS) obtained more votes cast in Italy for the Chamber of Deputies (25.56%) than any other political party. Only thanks to the votes of Italians living abroad was the Democratic Party (DP) capable of winning the electoral majority bonus. The overall figures are impressive: M5S Chamber of Deputies 8,784,499; PD 8,932,615. In Europe's post-World War II electoral history, no other party in its first national competition has gathered an amount of votes comparable to the one obtained by the Five Stars. Interestingly enough, the second-best-placed organization in the European ranking is another Italian political movement: Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (Go, Italy) that in its first showing, March 1994, polled 8,136,135 votes (21.01%) to become the most voted party. One important difference to stress is that Forza Italia had not competed in any previous national or local election, while the Five Star Movement had tested the ground in some local and regional elections. In a way, its "brand" was somewhat already known.
The chapters written explicitly for this valuable edited volume provide an in-depth analysis of the most important features of the Five Star Movement: the organization, the activists, the electoral base, the members of Parliament, the role played by the Web in the formation and functioning of the movement, the motivations of the voters, the "post-ideological" nature of the movement, and the organizational and ideological reasons for the truly astonishing success.
The material collected and analyzed is impressive, and it illuminates the assets and liabilities of comedian Beppe Grillo's adventure in Italian politics. What becomes clear and should never be forgotten is that behind this political success story...