The most commented-on aspect of the election internationally, though, has been where the remaining votes went: to the comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S). It became the single biggest party in Italy, picking up 25.6 per cent of the vote.

Let us make clear that this is no victory for the left. M5S is an extremely ambiguous phenomenon. As Giuliano Santoro points out, Grillo and the co-founder of his movement, marketer Gianroberto Casaleggio, are both millionaires with a proprietorial conception of their organisation.

M5S’s constitution, written by Grillo and Casaleggio, states: ‘The name of the Five Star Movement is attached to a trademark registered under the name of Beppe Grillo, the sole holder of rights on its use.’ These rights have been consistently used to expel anyone who has tried to make the movement more autonomous from Grillo’s personal style of leadership.

A chaotic mix of left and right

Grillo claims that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are now useless categories. Accordingly, he mixes environmentalism, degrowth and anti-austerity with anti-immigration remarks typical of the far right (for example he rejects citizenship for the children of migrants). When talking to CasaPound, who are self-declared fascists, Grillo stated that ‘anti-fascism’ does not concern him and that everybody is welcome to join the movement.

As the leftist collective of authors Wu Ming noted, Grillo’s proposals are ‘a chaotic programme where neoliberal and anti-neoliberal, centralist and federalist, libertarian and authoritarian ideas coexist’. Wu Ming also accuse Grillo of having channelled popular discontent against austerity in a purely electoral and politically very ambivalent direction, suggesting that this is one of the reasons why there was no Occupy or Indignados movement in Italy.

But what, then, can account for Grillo’s astounding success? You could rightly blame the centre-left Democratic Party for flirting with neoliberalism and austerity. In a paradoxical situation – one very representative of the Italian anomaly – during the electoral campaign the economic positions of left and right seemed to switch. Berlusconi’s right has taken to quoting neo-Keynesian economists in order to condemn Monti’s policies.

Many leftists were hoping that a good performance of the centre-left coalition would allow Democratic Party leader Pier Luigi Bersani to form a government without Monti’s neoliberal centre, and that a good performance by the more radical Left Ecology Freedom party (SEL) could bring the axis of any coalition onto an anti-austerity platform.

But everybody knew that this was highly unlikely and that probably, in the end, the centre-left would have championed neoliberalism by governing with Monti. Certainly Grillo profited from this perception.

Failure of the left

All that is true, but still too simplistic. If it was an anti-austerity vote, then why didn’t Left Ecology Freedom, which proposed an anti-austerity and green platform in many respects similar to Grillo’s, get more than 3 per cent? Because it was allied with the Democratic Party? But then why did Civil Revolution, a group of all the leftist forces that refused to enter the centre-left coalition, get only an irrelevant 2 per cent?

It is striking to see how Grillo won support by ‘stealing’ so many issues and battles that the alternative left has been fighting for decades. As Lorenzo Zamponi notes, there are three main themes that Grillo appropriated from the movements: global justice issues (opposition to war, GM food, big finance, multinational corporations), environmental issues (especially the battle for water to remain public and the ‘No TAV’ movement against a high speed railway in Piedmont), and participative issues, reacting against the top-down nature of the traditional parties (which in Grillo’s case is translated into an exaltation of internet democracy that hides his strict control over the movement).

Perhaps what we find most frustrating is that Grillo completely fails to acknowledge his debt to the alternative left. But I think this is the very explanation for his success. Italy is an extremely politically polarised country. Just as some people will never vote for the right, many people will never ever vote for the left, no matter how bad the right is.

All parties on the Italian left are descendants of the Communist Party diaspora, and to some extent they are still paying for the party’s early support for the USSR and its later ambiguities on the issue. Many people just can’t stand the idea of seeing ‘the communists’ in power, and Berlusconi is well known for having exploited this feeling to the utmost – he has sometimes framed Bersani as some sort of ‘austerity communist’. But even Left Ecology Freedom’s leader Nichi Vendola, an expression of a more libertarian left, is seen as part of the old communist bureaucracy, and indeed he used to be a cadre of the Communist Party.

The attempts from Vendola and his allies to renovate the old organisational forms and the standard conception of political representation by working with social movements, although seriously pursued, did not manage to go far enough. This is partly due to the internal limits and the heritage of the party structure, partly to the impossibility of winning the rest of the centre-left to this strategy, and partly to the lack of consensus within the movements themselves on the issue of collaborating with parties.

The final failure of this strategy came about in 2008, when the centre-left government collapsed. And this is exactly when Grillo’s political project started to take shape. By proposing a new organisation with a new organisational form and rejecting the identity of ‘leftist’, Grillo was the only force that could appear as truly different from the discredited establishment. He drew votes from both sides.

Where will Grillo go?

Sergio Zulian, a long standing activist in Italy’s North East Social Centres network, comments: ‘This electoral result is certainly a child of the economic crisis that finally destroyed the credibility of the political class, which was already highly damaged by the corruption scandals typical of this country. Even the radical left wasn’t able to separate itself from the old representational mechanisms that are seen as part of the establishment. Grillo had a very effective communicative strategy that allowed him to re-frame many battles led by the movements. The same cannot be said for the parties of the left.’

Among other things, with his own anti-austerity and green platform, he managed to build the working class and post-materialist middle class coalition that Vendola’s project had been based on. Many trade union members voted for M5S, as well as those workers who had formerly switched from the Communist Party to the far right Northern League.

Now the centre-left does not have his own majority in the upper house and Monti’s seats are not enough to build one. Bersani and Vendola have rejected the idea a ‘grand coalition’ with Berlusconi, which would make them lose even more support. They are trying to negotiate with M5S.

It’s too early to tell what will happen. Maybe Grillo could work with the left and actually do some of the leftist things that are in his own programme: renegotiate the debt, create incentives for a green economy, regulate finance, guarantee basic income, and so on. Or maybe he will cling to the most demagogic parts of his platform – for instance, after the elections he immediately restated that he wants to abolish all public funding for the parties, which would finally throw electoral politics exclusively into the hands of millionaires like Berlusconi and Grillo himself.

Sergio Zulian adds: ‘This crisis is changing Europe – we need to make an effort to understand this change and bring it on a progressive direction. We’ll soon find out which direction the M5S itself will actually take.’

Who’s who in Italy’s elections

Lorenzo Fe guides us through the maze of political parties competing and combining in the elections
The left wing coalition
Led by Perluigi Bersani
Expected total: 36-42 per cent
Democratic Party (Partito Democratico, PD)
Expected result: 31-34 per cent
The Democratic Party, led by Pier Luigi Bersani, was born in 2007 out of the fusion between two long-time rivals: Democratici di Sinistra – coming from the Italian Communist Party, the major left party in the ‘first republic’ (1948-1994) – and the Margherita, a formation originating from Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy), the main ruling party during the whole of the first republic.
Left Ecology Freedom (Sinistra Ecologia Libertà, SEL)
Expected result: 4-6 per cent
SEL was founded in 2008 when Nichi Vendola and others left the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista. Vendola, currently president of the Puglia region, is building on the idea of innovation of the communist tradition. SEL refuses orthodoxy and works closely with social movements. Some activists from the Green Party, the Italian Socialist Party, and the Democratic Party joined too.
The centre coalition
Led by Mario Monti
Expected total: 10-16 per cent
Centre Union (Unione di Centro, UDC)
Expected result: 4-6 per cent
The UDC comes from the right wing of Christian Democracy, which refused to coalesce with its old-time communist opponents and preferred to ally with Berlusconi in the 1994 elections. Its constituency is mainly formed by conservative Catholics.
Future and Liberty for Italy (Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia, FLI)
Expected result: 0.5-1.5 per cent
FLI leader Gianfranco Fini’s journey started with the Movimento Sociale Italiano, formed in 1946 by the remnants of the Fascist Party. In 1995 the party changed its name to the Alleanza Nazionale and decided to embrace a liberal conservatism closer to other European right-wing parties. In 2009 the party dissolved in order to unite with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the PDL. In 2010 Fini left the PDL due to his disagreements with Berlusconi and founded the FLI, which claims to be more moderate than the populist right.
Civic choice for Italy (Scelta civic per l’Italia)
Expected result: 6-9 per cent
An electoral list formed by outgoing prime minister Mario Monti with contributions by Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, president of the Ferrari car manufacturing company. The list will collect dissidents from PD and PDL along with ‘civil society’ and business figures in order to support Monti’s neoliberal, technocratic agenda.
The right wing coalition
Led by Silvio Berlusconi
Expected total: 27-33 per cent
People of Freedom (Popolo Della Libertà, PDL)
Expected result: 18-20 per cent
PDL came into being after the fusion of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale. Berlusconi founded Forza Italia in 1994 to stop the left from winning the elections after the old party system based on the alliance between Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party had collapsed under the weight of major corruption scandals.
Northern League (Lega Nord)
Expected result: 4-7 per cent
The Northern League is a territorial party, the expression of a Euro-sceptic and anti-immigration right seeking greater autonomy (and at times independence) for the wealthier north. Apart from a break in 1996, it has been a faithful ally of Berlusconi under the leadership of Umberto Bossi. Last summer, a wave of corruption scandals hit the party and especially the Bossi family, leading to a reduction in the party’s influence and a new leader Roberto Maroni.
Others
Five Stars Movement (Movimento Cinque Stelle, M5S)
Expected result: 10-13 per cent
M5S builds on the frustration that most Italians feel towards the political class as a whole. The movement claims that left-right divisions are meaningless and has a mixed agenda comprising environmentalism, Euro-scepticism, anti-corruption, anti-finance, and some anti-immigration remarks. In many ways it has an innovative organisation using the internet, local ‘meet ups’ etc to spread the movement but the founder, comedian Beppe Grillo, exercises considerable power and the sense in which it is democratic is controversial.
Civil Revolution (Rivoluzione Civile)
Expected result: 2-4 per cent
Not a party but an electoral list put together by the anti-mafia judge Antonio Ingroia. It features candidates from the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista and the Partito dei Comunisti Italiani. It also has candidates from the Italia dei Valori, an anti‑corruption party that was quite influential but has lost much of its lustre, ironically, after a recent corruption scandal.
Some minor parties excluded, but included in coalition totals. Poll data comes from an average of the main surveys

Despite recent student and labour unrest, the opposition against austerity measures in Italy has been quite weak, especially in terms of the numbers of people involved, compared to the rest of Southern Europe. At the end of last year, two mass demonstrations were organised against Berlusconi’s government; both ended in violent clashes between some of the protesters and the police.

However, Monti’s troika-sponsored government, although never elected by the people, has managed to gain for itself a much more solid legitimacy than its predecessor, thanks to its image of a neutral ‘technical’ government and the parliamentary support of a grand coalition that includes the centre-left Democratic Party. Monti’s government carried out some common sense measures, for example tougher checks on tax evasion (the efficacy of which is still to be assessed) which probably added to his credibility, alongside  outright neo-liberal policies that involved massive cuts in public spending and the liberalisation of the labour market.

The main promoter of the 2011 demos is often referred to as the ‘social centres movement’. In spite of this collective term, this movement has a complex and plural history. The first social centres were occupied in the ’70s as an attempt by part of the extra-parliamentary Left to survive defeat in its frontal struggle against the state. The organisational structures survived the ’80s and flourished in the early ’90s with the ‘Pantera’ university movement, which coincided with a great surge in the number of occupied spaces.

The peak of the social centre movement was reached in the context of the Global Justice Movement, but the activists faced major difficulties in coping with the severe state repression in Genoa 2001 as well as their own internal divisions. Indeed, the fragmentation is so deep that it is hardly possible to talk of a single movement. Four main political areas can be distinguished that network different occupying collectives nationwide: ‘ex-Disobedient’, ‘autonomist’, ‘marxist-leninist’, and ‘anarchist’. The former three can be said to descend from the ‘Autonomy proper’, from the ’70s. Although the difficulties in finding smooth and shared ways to mobilise in concert (or to part ways) are certainly a problem, the social centres are one of the most positively impressive features of the Italian anomaly. Their mobilising capacity and their rootedness in the territory is very high compared to similar experiences elsewhere, and we should expect to see more significant opposition coming from this milieu.

On the parliamentary side, having had the remains of the Italian Socialist Party completely collapse in the last elections, the Italian parliamentary Left is all about the post-Communist Party diaspora. The mainstream of the Communist Party is now in the Democratic Party together with part of the old centre party Christian Democracy. The main party on the left of it used to be Rifondazione Comunista. After the downfall of the centre-Left government of which Rifondazione was part in 2008, the party split and the Left Ecology and Freedom Party emerged (Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà, SEL). This was partly more successful than many expected and its candidates won several important local elections, most notably the Milan administration.

SEL’s secretary, Nichi Vendola, is now challenging the incumbent Democratic Party secretary Pier Luigi Bersani, and the Third Way candidate Matteo Renzi in the primary elections of the Left coalition (featuring the Democratic Party, SEL, and the Socialist Party) for the general elections of spring 2013.

Right now it is pretty certain that this coalition will gain the relative majority, but it is much less likely to be able to form a government. Much depends on the electoral law, which to this day has not been decided yet. Ironically, the Right is pushing for a more proportional law, because it would probably force the Democratic Party to dump its allies after the elections and form a new grand coalition troika-friendly government just like the present one. This outcome is made even more realistic by the relative success of two anti-establishment parties, Italia dei Valori e Movimento Cinque Stelle, which can hardly be defined as leftist, but that may gather a significant amount of votes from disillusioned supporters of the Left. Although a strong leftist government in power would be, in my view, desirable, it is much more likely that relevant opposition to the dictatorship of finance in the next years will come from the Italian streets and not from the Italian government.