The Power of the Unworthy: the idea of Party Democracy in the discourse and practice of the Italian "Five Star Movement"

Italy is one of the most interesting countries for studying populism. The defining characteristic of this phenomenon is anti-elitism, which is often expressed by criticism of political parties for building a system of monopolistic control over public life — particracy. The Italian "Five Star Movement" (M5S) is one of the most interesting populist projects, which also actively used criticism of the party-political system in its rhetoric, but at the same time not only criticized the establishment, but also tried to perform politics in a fundamentally different way. The subject of this study is the antiparticracy discourse of the M5S and the influence of this discourse on the evolution of the studied political project. The methodological basis of this study is the historical-genetic method necessary to study evolution of M5S. In addition, qualitative textual and discourse analysis of primary sources were used. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the use of the prism of criticism of the particracy to trace the evolution of the M5S as a populist project. It is found that in the course of the party's organisational centralisation and with the growing integration of the "Five Stars" into the establishment, the Movement gradually reduced the degree of its criticism of party pseudo-democrats. This became especially noticeable during the "Five Stars" tenure in the country's government in 2018-2022. The subject of this article's research remains unexplored in the Russian-language literature on the "Movement". In foreign scholarship, the topic of anti-particracy discourse has been touched upon only tangentially and has not become a reason for writing separate studies. Thus, the aim of this article is to fill the existing gaps and provide a new perspective on the transformation of the "Movement" into a more mainstream party.

populism, anti-elitism, particracy, party politics, democracy, participatory democracy, Italy, Five Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, Gianroberto Casaleggio