The M5s had already blown up, he just didn't want to admit it

The Italians gave him the first and last real test of trust on March 4, 2018: since then, between the Salvinian embrace and some goals such as annuities, armchairs and citizenship income, the Movement has progressively exhausted itself without grow

The secretary of the Democratic Party Nicola Zingaretti and the political leader of the 5-star Movement Luigi Di Maio (photo: Fabio Cimaglia / LaPresse) The result of the referendum on the cutting of parliamentarians, a historic battle - as they say - of the naturally exhausted the mission of joyful fifteen years of anti-politics, if we want to go back to the "friends of Beppe Grillo". The blanket, this time, is in fact too short: the other sides have not let themselves be fooled and have taken a good piece of that plebiscite, snatching a slice of 69% of Yes. As for the rest, the Movement in decline fixed from years has collected the umpteenth electoral disappearance from the administrative elections after 17% at last year's Europeans, a sensational collapse from 32% of the policies of March 2018. The first party in Parliament is no longer a movement, for some time, and it does not want - or maybe it can't - be a party. But she still has all the problems from before and after.

Thus, in these post-electoral days, while the maxi-purges of the arbitrators start for those who dared to vote No and those who keep the rich salaries as a parliamentarian in their pockets, an inevitable show is staged, substantially already written, but no less indecent for the country. Indecorous, and even a little dangerous, considering the majority in the Chambers in full pandemic and unprecedented economic crisis and because everyone, for years, had been telling the Movement to grow, to better select candidates and not to transform into a senator or even a regional councilor one who took three likes on Facebook, to dissolve the infinite contradictions, to come to terms with the inescapable. That is, abandoning the Casaleggian utopia of direct and digital democracy which today would not guarantee even a condominium (but at the same time working on it seriously, because that is one of the roads, especially on a local scale), yielding to the constructive compromise without staining itself with grotesque obstacles and choosing from which side to be. Because obviously that right and left no longer count for anything is a puppet argument to avoid the problem: the containers and even the people will have disappeared, the underlying principles remain - in an era that desperately needs social justice - that despite everything does not they can unite Salvini to Elly Schlein.

The risk is instead that, as they say in Rome, the M5s will again choose to gloss over, throwing it into caciara. Losing himself in a deadly way behind possible expulsions and the heap of how to choose the new leaders: "vote" online - vote on Rousseau, come on, too much grace - the new boss to replace the dissolved Crimi, choose a collegial body or appoint the yet another by-product of its own, hallucinating internal bureaucracy that ferries the crew of mutineers to what elsewhere they would call, more modestly, congress.

Against the backdrop of a dead movement, it is therefore no surprise that the shadow returns, never disappeared, of a leader himself politically extinct but who in spite of everything was the only and true leader I had, because at least to do politics he tried to do it contrary to the intermittent revolucionario Alessandro Di Battista: Luigi Di Maio, the Foreign Minister, who will come to the real liberating confrontation in the coming months with his former knife-brother. If it is true that, on the Mes or otherwise, a group of very loyal to the former Roman parliamentarian is ready to overthrow the Conte Bis government. But perhaps even in this case, as always happened with Di Battista's alleged coup, it is all a tactical bluff: who knows how many followers he really has, in the Chambers, with Montecitorio and Palazzo Madama losing weight in the next legislature and many elected per second. sent in search of armchairs (yes, the very ones they just sawed off). Not to mention the territories where, according to regional data, the Movement is also facing an explosion in the municipalities to vote next year. Di Battista, in short, is now background noise.

Over the last year and a half the Movement has been given up for dead on repeat, it is true, but there was a misunderstanding: in reality he was already dead . Dead in the sense of exhausted, exhausted, emptied, meaningless as absurd as his own populist charge on the one hand was dispersed in the Salvinian embrace and on the other it actually came to completion, as with the referendum of 20 September, with laws and measures on corruption, annuities or citizenship income. The first and last real test of trust was given to him by the Italians on 4 March 2018 and, to a lesser extent, with some symbolic victories - symbolic also in the sense that, in practice, they have changed little of the administered territories - such as Turin and Rome. years ago. Since then, the climax of a decade of vaffastreaming, the phase not so much of descent as of elementary evaporation has begun.