Italy 5-Star favourite wins PM bid for populists

RIMINI, Italy: Italy’s populist 5-Star Movement (M5S) unveiled its candidate for prime minister as it braces to attempt a revolutionary shift from protest to ruling party.

Political darling Luigi di Maio, 31, considered the reassuring face of Italy’s antiestablishment insurgency, pocketed 30,936 of the 37,442 ballots cast.

“I’ll start work tomorrow on putting together a team for government... one the people will be proud of,” he said in an emotional speech in the sea-side town of Rimini as his victory was announced. “It’s a huge responsibility, but together we can do it,” he added.

The clean-shaven lawmaker had been openly groomed to run for the top job in the spring 2018 general election as an everyman able to win over average voters and financial markets alike.

“Di Maio is studying how to become prime minister; he behaves, speaks, walks like one. He scrutinises the rules of the game to try and beat the house,” Luiss University communications expert Alberto Castelvecchi told AFP.

The telegenic youngster had gone up against six totally unknown candidates and a low-profile senator in an electronic vote that had both amused and irked traditional parties and the country’s mainstream media.

“The pathetic primary with Di Maio as a lone candidate (...) is not only a symptom of a lack of democracy” within M5S, wrote Il Fatto Quotidiano daily, which is usually the most sympathetic to the movement.

“It is also proof of the eternal immaturity, incompetence, inexperience and throwntogether nature of a movement that is getting bigger but not growing up,” the paper said. — AFP