As Italy’s Five Star and Democrats Eye Tie-Up, Bad Blood Remains
As Italy’s Five Star and Democrats Eye Tie-Up, Bad Blood Remains
(Bloomberg) --
Italy is no stranger to odd-ball alliances. But the prospect of the Democrats linking up with the insurgent Five Star Movement in a bid to stave off snap elections would have been unthinkable until just a few weeks ago.
Five Star, a raucous, anti-establishment movement founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, has reveled in taking Italy’s center-left party to task since it was founded in the late 2000s.
Grillo, ever the rabble-rouser, even submitted his candidacy to be PD leader in 2009 -- purely to disrupt the party’s primaries.
Ever since, Five Star has worked to build up its support in central and southern Italy, traditional strongholds of the left, and its success in the 2013 general elections deprived then-PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani of a full parliamentary majority.
More to the point, Five Star went as far as agreeing to talk with Bersani on possible support for his government, only to humiliate him publicly in a meeting captured on video, images that have stuck in the mind of PD supporters ever since.
During the PD government that preceded the populist coalition, Five Star gleefully bashed the center-left establishment as corrupt, privileged and out of touch with voters.
The party also made a full run at PD supporters, with campaigning based on social issues and opposition to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s constitutional reforms, as well as criticism of the government’s role in a banking collapse in which depositors lost money. That never sat well with PD leaders.
The most recent clash came just a few months ago, in a local scandal where Five Star charged PD with complicity in a case concerning social workers allegedly brainwashing children in order to turn them over to foster parents for cash.
To contact the reporters on this story: Marco Bertacche in Milan at mbertacche@bloomberg.net;Jerrold Colten in Rome at jcolten@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Richard Bravo, Iain Rogers
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