The rise of the Five Star Movement in Italy is the number one happening in Europe right now and mainstream media has not even begun to cover it in any depth. The movement is led by an Italian comedian, Beppe Grillo.
Main Rules for the Five Star Movement
- Not be an elected politician prior to 5 Stelle
- Commit to stay in charge for no longer than 2 terms
- Commit to take a minimum salary and give the rest back to the community
- Post a public platform on the internet
- Be willing to hold a public debate on the platform
Beppe Grillo's personal position, not a mandate for the Five Star Movement is "Get out of the Euro and default on debt"
For more on the Five Star Movement please see Six Reasons Why Italy May Exit the Euro Before Spain; Ultimate Occupy Movement
Time-Lapse Interactive Polls
Following are some time lapse polls of the Five Star Movement and other political parties in Italy. Please give the graphs extra time to load.
The polls are from data gathered by data gathered by Termometro Polico (one on the best Italian poll-makers according to a friend who sent me the link.) The important poll is in tab number four.
Explanations and Comments on the graphs appear below.
For now, please click on tab number four. You may also wish to go to the link above for additional information (in Italian).
Graphs courtesy of Termometro Polico via tools from Tableau Software.
Explanations and Comments
The following comments are from Lorenzo, who lives in Italy. He is the person who sent me the link to Termometro Polico.
Hello Mish
In the first and third chart, red=centre-left (PD+Idv+Sel+others), blue= centre-right (PdL+Lega+Others), and yellow = 5 star movement. PdL = Former Prime Minister Berlusconi's party.
The third tab shows that a centre-left plus center (green) coalition could win the election, albeit with a relatively small margin. There is a catch however: (centre-left and centre-right) do not currently exist, except as theoretical coalitions rather than political parties.
Right now PDL and PD support the Monti government, while all the other parties that they commonly ally with (Lega, IDV, SEL, etc) do not. The two main parties (PD and PDL) scorn each other but are "forced to go along", while the minor parties in both "coalitions" bad-mouth them and Monti's government to attract the resentment created by Monti's taxes reforms.
This makes it pretty hard to predict the shape the two coalitions will take and how the voters' choices will change according to it. The situation is pretty fluid right now.
Italian politics is hard to make sense of for somebody used to a simple two-parties system situation.
Lorenzo
Coalition Building
For more on the difficulty of building a coalition in Italy, please see comments from Andrea in my post Reader from Italy Explains Why Early Elections Might Lead to "Deadlock".
Andrea is a reader who is from Italy but now lives in France. The pertinent section is labeled "Explaining Italian Politics".
Five Star Movement September 2011 vs. June 2016
This simple graph below shows the stunning rise of the Five Star Movement
Implications of the rise in popularity of the Five Star Movement from 3.7% in September 2011 to 20.6% in June 2012 are both massive and obvious. Yet mainstream media in the US and Europe have essentially ignored the phenomena.
