‘162 Grillos’ hold future
Mostly pragmatic
ROME, Feb 28, (RTRS): Meet the Grillini. They are the 162 very ordinary people who are now regarded with trepidation by financial markets and world leaders after this week’s Italian election failed to produce a government.
The Grillini — literally “little Grillos” — are the lawmakers elected for the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of comic Beppe Grillo, which upset all forecasts by emerging as the largest party in Italy.
They now hold the key to the future of the euro zone’s third largest economy and possibly of the single currency as a whole, amid fears that Italy’s political instability could reignite the region’s currently dormant debt crisis.
It will be very hard for Rome’s hung parliament to form any government without their consent, but they appear to be neither rabblerousers, demagogues nor even populists, three accusations often levelled at their leader.
Like the movement’s mayors and councillors who already run city and regional governments, they seem far more pragmatic than Grillo, whose proposals can become more and more extreme as he whips himself into a hoarsevoiced frenzy at his rallies.
Ideologies
Movement
“The ideologies are finished, ideas aren’t right-wing or left-wing, they are good or bad,” said Sebastiano Barbanti, a 36-year-old marketing strategist elected in the poor southern region of Calabria.
Barbanti told Reuters that 5Star’s “model” should be the kind of policies pursued by its regional councillors in Sicily, who gave up 75 percent of their salaries and pooled the money saved to provide cheap credit to small businesses.
It remains to be seen whether Grillo’s lawmakers are dangerous, but the 108 lower house deputies and 54 senators certainly seem like aliens in the stuffy, gerontocratic world of Italian politics.
All of the deputies are in their twenties or thirties and none have any experience of professional politics. Those spoken to by Reuters had voted for the left or abstained in previous elections.
They reflect Grillo’s promise to select “normal people” rather than the mixture of career politicians and celebrities recruited by most of the other parties.
They are teachers, students, factory workers and housewives; doctors, nurses and engineers. Several are unemployed. They will refuse the title of “honourable” normally reserved for parliamentarians, preferring the plain “Mr” and “Mrs”.
They were selected as parliamentary candidates in primaries held on the Internet, where they were voted on by party supporters after introducing themselves with a written biography or by using a webcam.
Grillo’s whole movement, which he founded just three years ago, is based on the Internet.
It has no headquarters, no local offices and no internal hierarchy other than that Grillo is its undisputed leader. And he even rejects this definition, describing himself with some irony as merely its “spokesman”.
His followers are certainly inexperienced, but they also say they are determined to bring desperately needed transparency and honesty to the corridors of power.
Their priorities do not however include a referendum on Italy’s continued membership of the euro, the suggestion of Grillo’s that most worries markets.
His disciples expressed no antieuro views and played down the referendum idea, which does not feature in the party’s manifesto, as just a way of provoking debate on an often taboo subject.
Instead, they all want to change Italy’s dysfunctional electoral law, crack down on corruption and waste, cut spending and find ways to offer cheap credit to hardpressed firms and a minimum income to the unemployed.
Carla Ruocco, 34, who works in state tax offices in the central Lazio region, said she and her fellow deputies would collect just 2,500 euros ($3,275) per month, compared with the standard lawmakers’ salary of around 8,000 euros ($10,500).
“The first thing I want to do in parliament is to reduce what Italians have to pay for their political institutions,” she said.