The anti-corruption 5 Star Movement's inception seemed almost like an afterthought, established in 2009 by fans of comedian Beppe Grillo's blog. However, the Italian political movement soon gained significant traction and in 2012 its candidates managed to win mayoral seats in Parma, Comacchio and Mime.

By 2013, the movement had grown exponentially, going so far as to secure almost a fifth of the national preferences in the February elections and achieve a strong presence within the Italian government. Perhaps the 5 Star Movement (M5S) would have even taken over the administration if not for a strict electoral system that secured Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's position.

In 2014, M5S appeared to be losing some of its momentum, as it only secured 21% of the Italian people's preferences in the EU elections – a percentage vastly overshadowed by the 40% landslide won by Renzi's Democratic Party. That DP victory turned sour before long, however, as infighting, questionable practices and Renzi's own right-leanings came to light, leaving an opening for a 5 Star resurgence.

And this year, the movement has made good on that opening. In June, Virginia Raggi, a 37-year old M5S candidate, was elected mayor of Rome. Her victory was complemented by the election of another movement candidate in Turin, 31-year-old Chiara Appendino, who overtook the previous mayor and founder of the Democratic Party. The M5S now appears prepared to assume greater powers as a proper political organization without compromising its own innovative approach.

Crowd-Sourced politics

First and foremost, the 5 Star Movement is a political party that appears to operate with an entirely bottom-up structure. By applying the late Gianroberto Casaleggio's ideas of direct democracy, the party made the most of its limited resources by creating and maintaining an online platform that empowers voters and activists by allowing them to directly contact their representatives.

The platform also provides the option of creating Meetups, which allows groups of voters to individually organize, creating the party's own progressive electoral backbone in the process. The party maintains a strong online presence, using its blog to post news and policy updates. Furthermore, it actively encourages voters and activists to contribute to the discussion, allowing for easier, direct participation.

A key advantage that made the movement's web innovation attractive was this: by switching over to an online, digitally accessible medium for discussion and organizing, the party managed to rise in popularity at a significantly reduced cost compared with traditional political campaign methods.

As for the party's supporters, and the Italian people in general, M5S's platform and Beppe Grillo's blog have provided another significant advantage when it comes to freedom of political expression: by allowing citizens and activists to break away from Italy's famously stifled media coverage and choose their own venues for political discourse. This has created an interesting precedent in the struggle between traditional and new media.

Before, politics was a one-sided battle of cloistered experts and media outlets against independent, openly available discussion platforms. Now, online transparency appears to be paving the way toward future policymaking. And by all accounts, the new approach seems to be gaining considerable attention on an international level.

Anupam Mishra, the secretary of the Ghandi Peace Foundation, personally congratulated Grillo in response to his Clean Up The Parliament campaign. The online campaign was launched with the intent to pressure the Italian government into passing harsher legislation for political candidates facing prosecution. While the campaign didn't convince the Berlusconi government to pass the required legislation, it shined a harsh and visible light on Italy's age-old bete noir: political corruption.

Applied Activism

Grillo, the 5 Star Movement's founder, appears to be eager to back up his own pro-active claims. In 2006, he openly protested against a 281-page, anti-environmental regulation proposal put forth by the Berlusconi government, and produced an abridged version of the legislation that focused on alternative energy sources and a waste reduction proposal.

Grillo made his economic and ecological position even clearer during a 2013 protest in Genoa, where he stated: “We must go beyond protest. We must go beyond marching in the streets and start winning elections. To solve the financial catastrophe, we must break the stranglehold that money has on politics... The ecological crisis can only be solved by a unified peoples’ movement."

The following year, Grillo was sentenced to four months in prison for blocking the construction line for a high-speed train, which was widely criticized as unnecessary and damaging by the party's supporters and environmentalists nationwide.

Now, the movement, which promised to go beyond opposition to the establishment and to effect real political change, is starting to keep that promise. Already, the party has put forward two mayoral candidates that are in no way backed by the nepotist, cronyist traditions of old Italian politics. The party has never openly stated that it has feminist leanings. In fact, its tendency for merit and transparency has served both its female candidates well.

Following her election to office this summer, Raggi said, "I feel like pointing out that, for the first time, the mayor [‘sindaco,' in the masculine] of Rome is a woman. In a time in which gender equality is still a dream, this is a historic moment.”

The Road Ahead

But the 5 Star Movement's meteoric rise to power, while impressive, won't be enough to sustain a long-term political transition in Italy. In a column published by the Guardian, Francesco Grillo wrote, “This is the first time that a movement that has rapidly grown out of the radical critique of the ‘establishment’ will have to establish itself in a more stable political organization, without losing much of the novelty of its own approach.”

By all accounts, the party has had its fair share of friction. Grillo has been criticized for hijacking campaigns initiated by his voters, while the movement has so far adopted an aggressive stance against traditional approaches to political discourse, such as making TV appearances.

Furthermore, the 5 Star Movement's agenda is ambivalent on the loaded issue of how to regulate mass EU immigration, which will require more strictly defined policies moving forward. The party has also assumed an openly Eurosceptic stance without revealing any properly defined alternatives after an exit from the Union. So far, it has only focused on privatizing nationalized companies and planning for a guaranteed national income.

Whichever path the party chooses to follow, one thing is certain: the transparency and political openness that helped M5S rise to power must now serve to bring the party's current and future proposals to the forefront – especially if it intends to be remembered as something more than another European populist fluke.

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