Grillo attacks the M5S: "The revolutionaries have discovered the corridors of power. The Movement has lost its identity"

“The Five Star Movement has lost its identity and, above all, its ‘diversity’. There is little point in observing the anthropological transformation of its leading figures; it is the same old story: the new becomes old, the revolutionaries discover the corridors of power and the intentions that pave the road to hell – complete with a toll.” The person accusing the Five Star Movement of straying from its roots is not just anyone, but its very own founder, Beppe Grillo, who has written a long post on his blog with a title that leaves no room for ambiguity: “Si sono montati la testa senza leggere le istruzioni”. And so, with this intervention, Grillo has returned after a long silence to take a highly critical look at the Movement, which “was born out of a popular sentiment that continues to exist, even if those who were supposed to represent it have stopped listening to it”, he recalls.

However, the timing does not appear to be entirely coincidental. Yesterday was due to see the first hearing in the civil case brought by the founder over ownership of the M5S name and symbol, a hearing which was subsequently denied by his lawyer. Twenty-four hours later, the attack came: the birth of the Movement, Grillo continues, stemmed from “disillusionment with a Western model based on democracy and rights, but increasingly dominated by capitalism. The questions remain, the answers have vanished”. Shortly after the post was published, Andrea Stroppa, Elon Musk’s representative in Italy, spoke out on X in defence of Grillo: “Casaleggio, with all his limitations – often technological – created the Five Star Movement, a powerful innovation brought to the general public by Grillo and betrayed by wretches. It would be right for the Movement to return to its co-founder and to start afresh from the original idea.” 

“We,” insists the Movement’s former spokesperson, “had tried to put forward some of these: redistributing income, changing the ruling class, involving citizens in decision-making and planning for the future rather than just managing the next election. We called them the universal basic income, the two-term limit, refunds, direct democracy and the ecological transition; proposals which, over time – he accuses – have become slogans to be trotted out at conferences and forgotten once the buffet is over.” Grillo then moves on to a more general analysis of the “crisis of the Western model”, which he describes as “deeper” and which bears the symptoms of “an illness that politics prefers to exploit rather than cure”. As, for example, with “the unrest linked to immigration, when migration flows are left unmanaged and without integration”. He goes on to explain that “if we believe the Western model must be defended, we must make it credible; to do so, we must return to listening to citizens, before fear drives them into the arms of authoritarian models. When democracy ceases to respond, someone comes along who promises to do so in its place – sometimes wearing a uniform, other times controlling an algorithm”. And so the programme “should start from here, from listening”.

And the questions, he points out, “concern safety and health, fairness, participation and identity”, with a particular focus on the impact of artificial intelligence on our lives (from work and healthcare to the security of our personal data), and he warns: “We need clear answers that look beyond the next poll”. The lengthy post also includes a passage linking the “internet” to democracy, one of the Movement’s original key issues: “The internet allows millions of people to communicate and vote in a matter of seconds, yet we continue to delegate almost every decision to representatives who, once elected, answer to political parties and factions, and sooner or later end up prioritising their own survival above all else. Technology could enable continuous citizen participation and oversight of decisions – not so much to eliminate representation, but to limit its power and prevent that delegation from becoming a blank cheque for five years.” He concludes on a bitter note, accusing the party of having lost its way: “You see, the Movement was founded to tackle all these questions, but then it began to focus on itself. But the questions haven’t gone away; they’re still out there, outside the halls of power, waiting for someone to try to answer them.”