The Joker's Wild

  • Share
  • Read Later
Francesco Zizola / NOOR for TIME

Beppe Grillo

(2 of 2)

These hurdles make the success of Grillo's party all the more startling. The movement's slogan — a typical Grillo aphorism — was "Better a leap in the dark than assisted suicide." Close to 9 million Italians proved ready to make that leap. Grillo, banned from standing by his party's own rules against candidates with criminal convictions (he was found guilty of manslaughter after a fatal car crash in the 1980s), cannot participate directly in any new government and has made clear he expects M5S members elected to Parliament to stay aloof from any alliances with mainstream parties that might be on offer.

As he sits on the sidelines, issuing decrees, observers wonder if he is any more accountable than the political veterans he despises. "He decides everything," says Giovanni Favia. Once Grillo's most prominent protégé, he was expelled from the party last year after being caught on camera criticizing Grillo. The selection process for the national ticket was less than transparent. A little more than 20,000 people voted online, on the basis of candidates' résumés and short videos. And the measures meant to inject grassroots democracy into the movement — term limits, rotating leadership positions — also prevent Grillo's colleagues from eclipsing him. "They're very weak," says Favia. "The day that they turn against Grillo, they disappear."

In a video, in which he compared his party's campaign to a war, Grillo urged those who criticized his democratic credentials to leave the movement. When Federica Salsi, elected to Bologna's town council for M5S, ignored Grillo's dislike of Italian media to appear on a television talk show, Grillo expelled her from the party. Salsi says she received death threats on her Facebook page in the days after the clash. "The leader of this movement has his strength in the Internet," she says. "It wouldn't take much for him to urge his followers to use it more ethically." Grillo, who was not involved with the death threats, says Favia and Salsi were expelled for not following the rules of the party.

The Change They Need?
Grillo's ringtone is the rock classic "Bad to the Bone," but he meets Time barefoot, in a T-shirt emblazoned with the words of Mahatma Gandhi ("Be the change you wish to see in the world"). The change he wishes to see is causing deep concern in financial institutions across the world.

Grillo rejects the belt-tightening that helped calm the euro crisis. His platform, if implemented, would leave the rescue strategy for Europe's embattled single currency in tatters. He proposes to put Italy's membership of the single currency to a referendum at a later date.

That kind of talk might be expected to send the entire European economy into seizure. But Italian bond yields have stabilized after their upward surge immediately after the elections. One reason is that political turbulence in Italy is not an exception but the rule, and markets have already priced it in. "Italy's default state is to have a bewildering succession of governments, none of which change fiscal policy very much," says Paul Donovan, London-based managing director of global economics at the Swiss investment bank UBS.

In that sense, Grillo, though a new player, appears to fit neatly into the continuum of Italian political leaders with influence but limited power. If M5S were to win a workable majority at the next election — which could be as soon as this summer if mainstream parties fail to cobble together a viable government — the markets would prove far less sanguine.

Even if Grillo's movement fizzles, he may have already achieved more than generations of conventional politicians, by galvanizing Italy out of inertia. In Rome, there is a scent of revolution in the air. M5S's newly minted parliamentarians are an unknown quantity. The old guard is on its guard. "The Italian political class took too much time to make the necessary changes," says Enrico Letta, Bersani's deputy. "The only possible answer is to make representative democracy work better."

"Something big needs to change," wrote Jim O'Neill, the outgoing chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, in a note days after the poll. "Maybe this election outcome and the peculiar mass appeal of the Five Star Movement could signal the start of something new?"

Grillo will find it easier to disrupt than to build, but M5S has already helped vent anger through the ballot box that in other austerity-ridden countries has flared into riots or swelled support for far-right, anti-immigration parties. "We fill a void," says Grillo. "I channel all this rage into this movement of people, who then go and govern. [Our critics] should be thanking us one by one. If we fail, [Italy] is headed for violence in the streets."

Italy's battered Establishment is unlikely to thank a man who has showered it with invective and says he is now contemplating taking his scabrous routines to a wider audience through a world tour. Though Grillo plans to stay on as the Five Star Movement's leader, he still considers himself a comedian, he says — "an extraordinary one." Not even his opponents would disagree with that.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. Next Page