The Five-Star Movement as a laboratory for leadership consolidation in populist digital parties

Despite being a relatively young party, the Italian Five-Star Movement (M5S) has already experienced so many changes in its leadership arrangement that it may be seen as an ideal case study for studying leadership transformation and consolidation. What insights may derive from the M5S’s experience? And are they relevant to the new demands posed on leadership by the new times? Starting with the analysis of this case, the paper intends to focus on two main aspects that may be central to the study of leadership in the 21st century. First, the party founded by the former comedian Beppe Grillo in collaboration with the ICT entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio has always adopted forms of collective leadership (Campus, Switek and Valbruzzi, in preparation). It emerged from the collaboration of a tandem of founders; after their departure, the M5S introduced a series of power-sharing arrangements. Therefore, it may help to understand if these leadership structures perform well and can be considered as real alternatives to individual leadership. Second, M5S’s difficulties in adopting a stable leadership arrangement after the founding phase illustrate the issue of leadership succession in those ‘movement-parties’ (Kitschelt 2006) undergoing a process of institutionalization once the party obtains parliamentary representation and passes the ‘executive threshold’. However, in the case of the Five-Star Movement there are challenges that are absolutely peculiar to this new type of party. In fact, the M5S represents the prototype of what has been recently defined as a ‘digital party’ (Gerbaudo 2019), namely, a ‘digital native’ party organization that has been formed through the diffusion of new technologies. Unlike traditional party organizations, digital parties require the introduction of digital intermediaries into the structure of political parties to facilitate internal communication, engage in political decision-making and transform the overall experience of participation in political parties. In the case of the M5S, digital intermediation is provided by an external association headed by Davide Casaleggio, son of one of the party founders. Although this association operates outside the formal boundaries of the party organization, its control of some of the most crucial functions of the party affects the internal balance of power, the process of decision-making and the composition of the leadership structure. Thus, the analysis of the M5S will provide new evidence on the transformation of the contemporary political leadership. And, even more importantly, it allows for better understanding the impact that digital technologies may have on leadership formation and consolidation even in cases of more traditional parties that, unlike the M5S, are provided with an organization on the ground, but are incorporating digital platforms as further operative tools.