Rome elects first female mayor as 5Star Movement shocks Renzi

MILAN — The Euroskeptic 5Star Movement scored a major victory in Italian local elections Sunday, unseating candidates from Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party in the two traditional strongholds of Rome and Turin.

The second round of local elections saw 5Star’s Virginia Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer, win the capital with 67.15 percent of the vote to become Rome’s first female mayor. Renzi’s candidate, Roberto Giachetti, gathered 32.85 percent of the vote.

In Turin in the north, Chiara Appendino, a 31-year-old manager, won with almost 55 percent.

Renzi’s Democratic Party managed to win Milan, Italy’s business hub, but the prime minister emerges battered from Sunday’s vote, across 121 municipalities, which was being closely watched for signs of who is likely to oppose the former mayor of Florence in the general elections, expected in 2018.

Sunday’s results leaves it more likely he will face a candidate from the anti-establishment 5Star Movement, rather than someone from the center right....

5 things to expect if 5Stars win the Italian elections

The Italian anti-establishment 5Star Movement, which is fast becoming the main political challenger to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, on Wednesday presented a series of foreign policy objectives, including the suspension of the migration deal between the EU and Turkey and restoration of diplomatic relations with the Syrian regime.

Born at the same time as Occupy Wall Street, the German Pirate Party and the Spanish Indignados, like all anti-politics movements the 5Stars are critical of the political establishment.

Here are five things to watch out for if the 5Stars win the elections:

1) Controversial foreign policy

The movement’s founder, comedian Beppe Grillo, found himself in hot water a few years ago over remarks in support of then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and claims in an interview with the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth that a “Jewish lobby” controls the information about Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Grillo is stepping aside but some of Wednesday’s proposals, which were presented as a motion in parliament, are still controversial, including calls for an end to sanctions on Russia, cessation of EU-Turkey accession talks until the rule of law is restored, and suspending Turkey from NATO.

4) Guaranteed basic income

One of the key elements of the party platform is a proposal to guarantee basic income for those living below the poverty line. According to Istat, the Italian statics bureau, that accounts for almost 11 percent of Italian families and such a basic income would cost about €15 billion, or almost one percent of Italian GDP.

In a country with the second highest public debt ratio in the eurozone after Greece, that could be a problem. The 5stars, however, say they know where to find the money, even if critics dispute such claims....

Where are the other three?

5 Star on the Rise: Italy's First Crowd-Sourced Party Delivers Direct Democracy In Action

quote:

Crowd-Sourced politics

First and foremost, the 5 Star Movement is a political party that appears to operate with an entirely bottom-up structure. By applying the late Gianroberto Casaleggio's ideas of direct democracy, the party made the most of its limited resources by creating and maintaining an online platform that empowers voters and activists by allowing them to directly contact their representatives.

The platform also provides the option of creating Meetups, which allows groups of voters to individually organize, creating the party's own progressive electoral backbone in the process. The party maintains a strong online presence, using its blog to post news and policy updates. Furthermore, it actively encourages voters and activists to contribute to the discussion, allowing for easier, direct participation.

A key advantage that made the movement's web innovation attractive was this: by switching over to an online, digitally accessible medium for discussion and organizing, the party managed to rise in popularity at a significantly reduced cost compared with traditional political campaign methods.

As for the party's supporters, and the Italian people in general, M5S's platform and Beppe Grillo's blog have provided another significant advantage when it comes to freedom of political expression: by allowing citizens and activists to break away from Italy's famously stifled media coverage and choose their own venues for political discourse. This has created an interesting precedent in the struggle between traditional and new media.

Before, politics was a one-sided battle of cloistered experts and media outlets against independent, openly available discussion platforms. Now, online transparency appears to be paving the way toward future policymaking. And by all accounts, the new approach seems to be gaining considerable attention on an international level.

Anupam Mishra, the secretary of the Ghandi Peace Foundation, personally congratulated Grillo in response to his Clean Up The Parliament campaign. The online campaign was launched with the intent to pressure the Italian government into passing harsher legislation for political candidates facing prosecution. While the campaign didn't convince the Berlusconi government to pass the required legislation, it shined a harsh and visible light on Italy's age-old bete noir: political corruption.

There have been many anti-corruption movements in Italy, such as Mani pulite. But parties that are ONLY anti-corruption can be reactionary; the CAQ here comes to mind, and Mani pulite had similar negatives.

And frankly, "Jewish lobby"? What a gift to Zionists to use that term. There are plenty of non-Jewish Zionists and non-Zionist Jews.

Agree with lagatta.

And moreover, I'm struggling to see anything progressive about their platform.

Maybe it's just me.

..i hope i'm not digging myself into a deeper hole here but i wanted to express some thoughts and in the end maybe learn a thing or two. when i first posted the #2 i followed the link and saw the "Jewish lobby" remark referred to MEMRI. so it wasn't just a general remark. mind you the link was in italian and i had to use google translate so it may very well be that i got it wrong.

..what interests me about 5stars is (as much as i can see) is how it is structuring itself into a kind of direct democracy..and still retains the ability to get electoral results. and quickly. no years and years of waiting. this happened in spain as well..quickly i mean. as for progressive i agree it is not so much but can it change i think yes because of it's very structures.

The only "progressive" aspects of their platform are "trendy" ones. I certainly agree on legalising marijuana and who can be against fighting corruption?

I don't see how even a Google translation could confuse lobby ebreo (or judeo, but ebreo is more common in modern Italian) and lobby sionista

..txs lagatta. it wasn't as clear to me as you have put it and now i see the difference. i will let this thread die now.

Also, in the European Parliament, they sit as part of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group...a name that sounds progressive until you take note that it includes Nigel Farage and the neo-fascist Sweden Democrats.

No reason to let the thread die - we can certainly discuss questionable movements, and see if they do have any positive points that could be taken on by other forces. Yes, I can see that the EP grouping sounds like a bunch of gentle Illich, Gorz or Chomsky left-liberarian types (libertaire, in French and libertari@ in Italian) but there are very questionable rightwing "liberarians" among them, as well as outright racists.