(John Lloyd is a Reuters columnist but his opinions are his own.)
By John Lloyd
(Reuters) – Jim O’Neill, head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, thinks Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement is a greater threat to Europe and the euro than the trials of little Cyprus. That’s because Grillo received more than a quarter of the votes in February’s election in Italy and has since gridlocked the political system by refusing any dealings with the established parties. A government can’t be formed.
O’Neill warned that if growth does not come soon to the euro zone’s third-largest economy, stalled for longer than any other in Europe, even more people will start to support Grillo’s movement and its call for a referendum on membership of the euro zone. What, he asked, does Grillo think? His response: “Does anyone really know?”
I do, Jim.
Grillo and his collaborator, the slightly mystic Gianroberto Casaleggio, believe that the Web is the new form of democracy, infinitely superior to the representative parliamentary kind in which, they say, leaders frame the politics and politics fail the people. The Five Star Movement, said Casaleggio in a recent book, believes the word leader “is a word from the past, a dirty word that leads you astray. Leader of what? It means that you attribute intelligence and the power of decision making to others, so you aren’t even a slave, you’re an object.”
Grillo, Casaleggio and their movement may be a flash in an Italian pan, as brilliant and tasty as many other things in Italian pans, but it may disappear just as fast. Elsewhere in Europe, the Pirate parties, which have largely fallen to quarreling and collapsing, have done just that. But Italian political fads can catch on. Think of Christian democracy, fascism and communism-with-a-human-face. The latter was the forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev’s politics, the unintended destroyer of the Soviet Union.
This present flash may illuminate the world because it says something about democracy, and not just Italy’s democracy. Grillo thinks politicians (and journalists) should get out of the way and let the people rule directly, through the Web. We who cleave to elections, parliaments and representatives find this horrifying. But we forget several things:
1) Politicians (everywhere) disappoint. They promise much, and deliver little. Marine Bulard, the deputy editor of the leftist Monde Diplomatique, recently excoriated her country’s socialist leader. “In under a year in office,” she wrote, “President Hollande has abandoned all his election promises and turned towards the conventional, and rightwing, financial and social policy positions of his predecessor.” That this will happen is the assumption, especially of the young, about politicians. Yes, it’s often unfair, but it’s also sometimes not. Politicians in the 2000s identified global warming as threatening the future of the planet, and we were all treated to lots of pictures of sweet-looking polar bears standing mournfully on shrinking icebergs. The icebergs are still shrinking and the bears are still mournful, but the subject has receded.
2) Politicians are corrupt. There’s a high level of political corruption in Grillo’s Italy- so, too, in France. There was a recent big money scandal in Spain that touched the prime minister. The new democracies of Central Europe -Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania – are bywords for the buying of politics. British MPs fiddled their expenses. German ministers fiddled their doctoral theses. Indian politicians corrupt most things they touch – at least according to Indian journalists, many of whom are themselves not above taking back-handers in return for favorable coverage. And those are just the examples from democracies.
3) Politicians are slow. When they do their job properly, in modern democracies, politicians struggle to overtake snails. Democracies have become so democratic that it seems – certainly to politicians who want to do things – that their world is composed of two figures, Checks and Balances.
4) Politicians – again, when they do their exacting jobs – are dull and middle-aged. They’re dull because most things they deal with are complex: They have to at least partially master the details- and they have to deal with them. Go to any legislature whose language you understand, and you’ll find that the speeches are as far from “government of the people, by the people and for the people …” and “We will fight them on the beaches …” as a mutt is from a borzoi. The men and women who mouth the rhetoric are middle-aged because they usually don’t get elected until they’re at least in their forties, since they have to work their way into their party’s good graces to be selected for election.
5) Worst of all, politicians now mostly can’t do what democratic politicians in the West have been able to do since World War Two: ensure that the children of their voters will have a materially better life than the voters themselves. Youth unemployment in the southern European countries is rising at an alarming rate. Few European governments look forward to the summer, season of riots and angry youthfulness.
Grillo’s movement, whatever its immediate fate, is on to something large. Democratic politics cannot continue to be seen (and too often to be) corrupt, out of touch, unresponsive and unsuccessful in protecting living standards – and survive. Hectoring, arrogant and impatient, Grillo infuriates those who know how hard doing politics is – and enthuses millions who know nothing about that, except that it doesn’t seem to work.
In office, the Five Star Movement would be worse than the disease. But the disease does rage. Politics is very often a group of overworked people who believe in representing and serving those who elected them. But they’re presently seen to be failing, and Beppe Grillo and his comrades think they have a much better way of running our societies. They will not be alone in this.
(John Lloyd co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is Director of Journalism. Lloyd has written several books, including “What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics” (2004). He is also a contributing editor at FT and the founder of FT Magazine.)
(John Lloyd)
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