Since 2005, Beppe Grillo has addressed the public primarily through his blog, at www.beppegrillo.it, which, according to Technorati, the leading search engine for blogs, is the eighth most read in the world. Here Grillo not only denounces political wrongdoing but runs something of a parallel government, complete with a cabinet of volunteer policy advisers, including the architect Renzo Piano, the actor and playwright Dario Fo, and the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who wrote the preface to a book Grillo recently published online about Italian labor law (Grillo, who has made tens of millions of dollars from comedy performances, books, and DVDs, finances his Web site and his political activism with his earnings).
A popular figure
A poll released in December by Renato Mannheimer, an Italian pollster, found that Grillo was the second most popular political figure in Italy, after Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome and the newly elected leader of the left-center Partito Democratico. But Grillo’s campaign has divided intellectuals ; many object that his attacks on politicians are crude and indiscriminate, and that he offers few practical solutions to the abuses he criticizes. On September 19th, in a front-page editorial in Il Corriere della Sera, the political scientist Giovanni Sartori compared Grillo’s assault on Italy’s "lords of power" to the taking of the Bastille.
A week earlier, however, in a front-page editorial in La Repubblica, under the headline "THE BARBARIAN INVASION OF GRILLO," Eugenio Scalfari, the paper’s founder, argued that V-Day was a mass movement led by a demagogue, and could be the prelude to a right-wing dictatorship. Two days later, Umberto Eco, also writing in La Repubblica, declared that Grillo’s campaign signalled "an (incipient) illness of the body politic."
In 1986, Bettino Craxi, Italy’s Socialist Prime Minister, made a state visit to China, and on TV Grillo imagined an aide asking the Prime Minister, "If everyone’s a Socialist down here, who do they steal from ?" Craxi protested to RAI, and Grillo was effectively banned from television until Craxi resigned as the leader of the Socialist Party, in 1993. (Craxi was indicted on corruption charges and accused of taking billions of lire in bribes. He escaped prosecution by fleeing to Tunisia, where he died in exile in 2000.)
The fight against Telecom Italia
After Grillo lost his television job, he created a comedy show and took it on the road, performing in small towns where famous entertainers had rarely appeared before. Instead of standing on a stage, he walked among his audience, trailed by a video camera that projected his image on a screen at the front of the theatre—a technique that he still uses today. "I touch them, I make them smell me—I want to get into their minds physically," Grillo told me.
In 2006, Grillo launched what he called a "takeover alla genovese," against Telecom Italia -now Italy’s largest telephone company-, accusing it of poor management and industrial espionage. On his blog, he urged shareholders to send him their proxy for the next general shareholders’ meeting. Grillo received seventeen hundred and fifty proxies, for 4.8 million shares, making him the company’s largest voting shareholder, although Consob, the regulatory commission of the Italian stock market, ruled that the proxies had not been properly transferred and were invalid. Nevertheless, Grillo spoke at the meeting, last April, and demanded the resignation of the board of directors, who, he said, had "stripped the company of billions of euros of income" and "tens of thousands of jobs." (Telecom’s directors were unmoved by Grillo’s analysis.)
Clean Parliament
V-Day grew out of another of Grillo’s campaigns, Clean Parliament, which he launched in 2005, when he posted on his blog the names of the convicted criminals serving in parliament. Grillo argued that it is "profoundly immoral that convicted criminals should be allowed to sit in parliament," and concluded, "If the law allows it, the law should be changed." None of the Italian newspapers that he contacted were willing to publish either the names or his denunciation, so Grillo took up a collection on his blog, raised sixty thousand euros, and bought a full-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune.
In it, he invited any country with a comparable number of convicts in parliament to form a sister-nation relationship with Italy. "I got a letter from the Gandhi Peace Foundation, in India, thanking me for my initiative and saying that they had had eleven criminals in their parliament, all of whom were promptly kicked out on their asses," Grillo told me. He added, joking, "The Uzbek parliament wrote to say they were sorry, but they could only come up with eighteen convicted criminals, and weren’t really in our league."
Grillo recently decided to propose a "people’s law," a rarely used means for Italian citizens to bring new legislation before parliament. He deposited at the Italian Supreme Court, in Rome, a draft law that would prohibit convicted criminals from serving in parliament, limit the time in office for legislators to ten years, and change the voting system to insure the direct popular election of all members of parliament. (Under current law, most legislators are chosen by party secretaries.)
Retaliatory measures
Italian legislators, realizing that a docile press is insufficient to protect them from Grillo’s Web-based activism, have begun to retaliate. In October, Prodi’s cabinet proposed a law to subject Internet sites and blogs to the same libel rules as newspapers, and to compel them to hire both a publisher and a licensed journalist. "If this law passes, it will be the end of the Web in Italy," Grillo wrote on his blog a few days later. "My blog won’t close. If necessary, I’ll move lock, stock, and server to a democratic nation." (The law is pending passage in parliament).
In November, the Minister of Justice, Clemente Mastella, announced that he was suing Grillo for libel over a speech he had made that month to the European Parliament. (Grillo, referring to a corruption investigation that Mastella had blocked—and in which Mastella himself was a suspect—had said that whereas dynamite was once necessary to stop magistrates from investigating powerful people, nowadays the Minister of Justice simply stopped them himself). When Grillo learned that he was being sued, he invited readers of his blog to sign a statement saying that they agreed with his remarks, after which he would award them the honorary title of "Mastellated." To date, nearly seventy thousand people have been Mastellated.
On Sept 8, 2008, two million people in Italy celebrated V-Day. The event had been organized by Beppe Grillo, Italy’s most popular comedian, to protest endemic corruption in the national government. Grillo has galvanized Italians by talking about corruption with irreverence and humor—indeed, by talking about it at all.
