Patterns in Italian populism: from the Common Man’s Front to the Five Star Movement

This chapter focuses on the founding discourses of the Common Man’s Front and the Five Star Movement, which have been both widely identified as quintessential parties of Italian populism. While doing so, it highlights one of their common fundamental features: a controversial relationship with political and economic liberalism. The chapter also analyses the ideas and contexts of the founders of the two parties, the comedian Guglielmo Giannini (1891-1960) and the entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio (1954-2016), who both elaborated a complex imaginary, appealing to ‘the people’ not as a whole, but as a ‘net of individuals’. The ideal society depicted by Giannini is a merely administrative state run by ‘common men’, while that imagined by Casaleggio is a pacified global network of individuals, whose political relationships are regulated through the internet. Both utopias can nevertheless be understood as a sort of ‘mass liberalism’, which the chapter clarifies within the context of European populisms.