Three Of Italy's Top Four Political Parties Seek A New Parallel Currency

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

In a bid to appeal to the growing anti-euro sentiment in Italy, three of Italy’s biggest political parties seek a dual currency.

Italy’s leading opposition parties are calling for the introduction of a parallel currency to the euro, which they say will boost growth and jobs.

Three of the country’s four largest parties – the Five Star Movement, the Northern League and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – have proposed introducing a new currency following an election scheduled for next year.

The proposals for a parallel currency have replaced the opposition parties’ previous calls to leave the euro completely.

By settling on a dual currency, analysts say the parties hope to appeal to anti-euro sentiment in the country while avoiding, for now, the upheaval of an outright exit.

A poll by the Winpoll agency in March showed that only around half of Italians back the euro.

As the election nears, and with opinion polls currently pointing to a hung parliament, only the ruling Democratic Party is not proposing changes to the current euro set-up.

Next General Election

The next Italian General Election is due to be held no later than May 20, 2018.

Key Players

• M5S – Five Star Movement – Beppe Grillo, a comedian. The M5S is variously considered populist, anti-establishment, environmentalist, anti-globalist, and Eurosceptic. The “five stars” are a reference to five key issues for the party: public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, right to Internet access, and environmentalism. In foreign policy, the M5S has disapproved military interventions of the West in the Greater Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) as well as any notion of American intervention in Syria.


• PD – Democratic Party – Matteo Renzi, former prime minister. The PD’s main ideological trends are thus social democracy and the Italian Christian leftist tradition.


• Northern League – Lega Nord – Matteo Salvini. Under Salvini, the party has emphasized Euroscepticism, opposition to immigration, and other “populist” policies, while forming an alliance with nationalist and right-wing populist parties such as France’s National Front, the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom and the Freedom Party of Austria at the European level.


• Forza Italia – Forward Italy – Silvio Berlusconi, a four-time Prime Minister. Under Berlusconi, FI’s long-time coalition partner was Lega Nord.

Silvio Berlusconi is prone to flip-flops and would likely do anything if it brought him back in power. However, PD + FI will likely not come close to 50%.

Early Elections?

On May 30, Bloomberg reported Italy Moves Toward Early Vote as Election Law Deal Nears

Italy’s biggest parties are considering a proportional system similar to the German model with a 5 percent cut-off for smaller parties, and lawmakers are due to discuss a first draft of the new law early next month. An agreement would remove any hindrance to snap elections, eliminating the need to wait for scheduled elections in early 2018.

Ultimately, it’s up to Italian President Sergio Mattarella to make the call on when to dissolve parliament. According to Italian newspapers including Corriere della Sera, Mattarella would prefer to let the government of Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, 62, a soft-spoken diplomat and Democratic-Party ally of Renzi’s, stay in power until next year.

While an early vote would put an end to a legislature that already saw three governments in power amid palace coups and constitutional-referendum defeats, a proportional system runs the risk of producing a hung parliament. An election this year would come at a delicate time for Italy, with its banking woes unresolved and the budget law for 2018 still to be approved.

The proposed new law “would likely not facilitate an outright victory by one of the three major political groups” resulting in a hung parliament, said LC Macro Advisers Ltd. founder Lorenzo Codogno who sees the likelihood of early elections at 60 percent.

That deal fell and I can find no other recent references regarding early elections.

Left Crumbles

On June 26, the Guardian reported Italy’s Centre-Right Wins Big in Mayoral Elections as Left Crumbles

An alliance of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and the anti-immigrant Northern League won 55% of the votes in Genoa, the northern port city that was a leftwing stronghold but which the right will now govern for the first time in more than 50 years.

PD leader Matteo Renzi, 42, who has been seeking to make a comeback since stepping down as prime minister in December, was the clear loser in Sunday’s vote.

The centre-left has governed Italy for four years, during which time the economy grew by only half the eurozone average. Three different PD premiers have struggled to shore up a banking system strangled by bad loans, and to manage half a million migrants who came by boat from north Africa.

Sunday’s vote – the second round for cities where no one candidate won more than 50% two weeks ago – is one of the last before a general election due by the end of May 2018, but it may not be a reliable indicator of what will happen then. The first-past-the-post voting system used at the municipal level, which favours coalitions, may not be replicated at a national level, where a proportional system is now in place.

Genoa is the latest of a string of defeats in the PD’s traditional strongholds. Last year it lost Turin, Italy’s fourth-largest city, and the capital Rome, both to the Five Star Movement (M5S), which was founded only eight years ago.

M5S, which opinion polls say is slightly more popular than the PD nationwide, performed very badly in the first round of voting on 11 June and made the run-off in only one of the 25 largest cities. It added eight mayors to its modest tally.

“We now have 45 mayors, up from 37 before, which is an increase of 20%,” M5S founder Beppe Grillo said on his blog. “Every damned election we are growing and that is what counts.”

Two Things

M5S, NL, and FI appear likely top a combined 50%, perhaps easily. That does not necessarily mean a coalition will form.

The two things and possibly the only two things that unite the Five Star Movement, the Northern League, and Forza Italia are a desire to crush Matteo Renzi and a desire to get Italy off the Euro.

And when it comes to Berlusconi’s views on the euro, one has to question his sincerity. He has changed his position many times.

Why Every European Country Has A Trump Or Sanders Candidate

Authored by Richard Drake via TheAmericanConservative.com,

The suicide in the Friuli region of northern Italy earlier this year of a 30-year-old man, identified in the newspapers only as Michele, has become a symbol of the country’s unemployment tragedy, particularly as it affects young people.

Though much worse in the South, the country’s economic crisis also has had a blighting effect on the North. The national unemployment rate now stands at nearly 12 percent. A 40 percent youth unemployment rate nationwide, however, has people speaking of a generational apartheid in Italy. There is no work to be found for young people. In the workplace, comparatively speaking, they have been walled off from the rest of the population.

Friuli is a region of plain and mountain in the northeastern part of Italy, flush against borders to the north with Austria and the east with Slovenia. The annals of Friuli antedate by many centuries the arrival of the ancient Romans, who founded the colony of Aquileia there nearly two hundred years before Christ. The barbarian invasions swept over Friuli in the general wreckage of the Roman Empire. An Aquileian state arose in the Middle Ages, but was absorbed in the 15th century by the expanding Venetian empire. Then Friuli passed through French and Austrian phases of occupation and control before becoming part the newly founded Kingdom of Italy, in 1866.

The Friulani, a highly energetic and resourceful people steeped in the work ethic common to the peasant and artisanal cultures of traditional Europe, tilled the land and also gained a well-deserved reputation for their skill in specialty crafts and the building trades. Typically in such cultures, the work that a man did defined him. The modern world has changed those old ways of life, but the culture they generated persists. More recently, Friuli became renowned for its small businesses and factories, which played a vital role in the national economy. There was still hard work for the Friulani to do.

From his mother’s milk, Michele would have imbibed the work ethic of his native region. He would have thought of work as dignity and honor. In a suicide note, he claimed to be bereft of such things and of hope. “Desire has passed me by,” he wrote. Michele never had been able to find a meaningful job and had despaired of ever finding one. Contemplating his blank future, a sense of deep frustration had crushed his spirit. He hoped that his parents would forgive his dreadful act, but could not envisage a place for himself in a society without work.

No less than many other regions in the country, Friuli has been devastated by the economic crash of 2008 and its seemingly permanent aftermath. Hundreds of its small businesses and factories have closed, leaving many thousands unemployed. Michele’s father called his son’s death “the defeat of a moribund society.” What other way is there to describe a society unable to create work for its young people?

One of Italy’s rising political figures, Beppe Grillo of the politically eclectic Five-Star Movement, has proposed a guaranteed citizen income for all Italians. His reasoning appears to be that the Italians should be getting something from their government other than its slavish devotion to the corrupt oligarchy of the banks and corporations that rule the country.

There is a strong Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein component in the Five-Star Movement, as well as an admiration for the challenge that Hugo Chávez threw down to the multinationals in Venezuela. Grillo also has praised Ecuador’s Rafael Correa for his opposition to the International Monetary Fund, an institution that the Italian leader reviles as a battering ram of noxious austerity policies. Since the recent presidential election in the United States, Grillo has praised Trump as a much-needed change-of-air in world politics. Change of any kind, a powerful sentiment in the United States last fall, exerts the same kind of force in Italy now.

Even if a guaranteed citizen income initiative were to prevail and become law, the main problem underscored by Michele’s death would still remain. An allowance conjures up the image of juvenile dependence. A national welfare program for all citizens certainly is preferable to leaving ever rising numbers of them in want, but it would not solve in a socially edifying way the anterior problem of work. Michele was not asking for an allowance. He wanted work to do. This is a human need that societies deserving of survival are obliged to supply, a point raised by Thorstein Veblen in the book of his he valued most, The Instinct of Workmanship (1914). Human beings, he wrote, are called by nature to useful effort. It is not only the deprivations and frustrations associated with sex that undermine and subvert the human personality. He judged the men who live by moving money around to be the greatest peril of all to those who live by work.

The problem of work in Italy today belongs to the class of social consequences identified by Pier Paolo Pasolini in a famous Corriere della Sera article in 1974. “The Italians are no longer what they once were,” he observed. By this statement, Friuli’s greatest poet, filmmaker, and social critic meant that Italy’s traditional values had undergone an anthropological mutation. The country had abandoned its traditional way of life, which in its peasant culture had achieved a kind of poetic synthesis in the saying of Padron ‘Ntoni, novelist Giovanni Verga’s lead character in I Malavoglia (1881): “He is richest who has the fewest wants.” Pasolini feared that the new values of a hedonistic consumer society would be a poor substitute for Italy’s Christian and socialist ideals. What a debased fate for Italy, to come through the civilization-defining vicissitudes of its millennial history, only to end up ignobly aping American-style conspicuous consumption.

Pasolini had in mind a particular phase of the globalized economy, which since the 1970s has sped forward on the principle that money must be completely liberated to maximize profits for those who have it. It is immediately evident why this golden rule for today’s economy, though achieving its purpose of profit-maximization, has been a poor proposition for most of the working people of the Western world.

While rates of extreme poverty worldwide have declined in recent decades, the means to produce such a result have required an outsourcing of the West’s manufacturing base. The coincidental surge in profits made possible by the relocation of manufacturing jobs to countries unencumbered by high wages, labor unions, and environmental laws has with perfect justice sparked a political firestorm.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explained in Globalization and Its Discontents (2004) that the basic problem with the world’s current financial arrangement concerned the institutions and organizations commanding it. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the U.S. Treasury, and the European Monetary Union protect special interests, Wall Street most of all. Despite their lip-service in democratic argot, the very last thing seriously on the minds of the top financial policy makers is the well-being of ordinary people.

As a result of the methods used to promote globalization, the consequences for the West have been tragic. Work is becoming increasingly uncertain and insecure, or it is in the process of disappearing altogether. It would take Veblen’s talents for social satire, which are unsurpassed in all of American literature, to depict with the essential exactitude of artistic synthesis how far the United States has fallen away from democratic grace, the country’s dramatically widening gap between the haves and the have-nots being what it is. Clearly, we are on the wrong course. What the robotics revolution, now at an incipient stage, will do to further diminish opportunities for Western peoples to work can be easily imagined, if the economic imperative of corporate capitalism is the rule to go by.

The same desolating trends can be seen in Europe, where people increasingly regard the European Union as a Trojan horse. The economic elites and their political front-men responsible for this image-challenged contraption lose public support with each new poll. The people by and large blame the European Union and the other accessories of globalization for their worsening standard of living. When informed by the establishment media that thanks to globalization Europe has never been more prosperous and peaceful, Europeans in historic numbers are reacting with disbelief. Their deepening sense of betrayal propels the surge of populism that defines the politics of Europe today.

Arguments long-settled in favor of deregulation, liberalization, open borders, and other globalization watchwords have been reopened. The constituency is growing for a politics that puts the well-being of Europeans first. Political measures calling for the protection of European jobs and cultures have gained a following unforeseen prior to 2008.

In Italy, for example, 77 percent of the people questioned in a recent poll could see no advantage to them at all from the country’s membership in the European Union. Sixty-four percent of them expressed hostility toward it. Eight Italian businesses out of 10 can find nothing positive to say about the European Union. It is seen to be a creature of the banks and the big financial houses. As public relations disasters go, this one has unfolded on an epic scale as the underlying populations, long left out of consideration by the economic elites, have begun to sense the fate their masters have in store for them.

Leaving underlying populations out of consideration was a special feature of the planning that went into globalization. They have been voiceless. In America, Trump gave them a voice, and they responded to him with their political support. It did not matter that he came before them without a plan for their deliverance. That he came to them at all mattered. He understood the depth of the anger and alienation in America against a status quo personified by his opponent, Hillary Clinton, whose repeated and munificently rewarded speeches before the captains of finance on Wall Street effectively branded her as the safe candidate for all who wanted to leave existing economic arrangements fundamentally undisturbed.

Trump may go down in history as a president who was hopelessly out of his depth on all vital matters, but his presidential campaign will be studied for as long as historians have an interest in American politics. It was a masterpiece of intuition based on an uncannily correct judgment about the spirit of the times. Bernie Sanders had the same insight, but the Democratic Party turned out to be much more corrupt and vulnerable to manipulation than the Republicans, an astonishing feat. In possibly an even more flagrant instance of interference in the American democratic process than anything yet proven against Vladimir Putin, internal machinations weighted the primary process against Sanders. The Republicans tried to head off Trump, too, but a fiercely loyal base and a dearth of plausible opponents gave him an easy victory in the primaries.

At an academic conference in New York in May a year ago, I participated in a conversation among scholars, journalists, and government officials who generally thought that Trump would not even win 20 percent of the national vote. His ridiculous campaign surely would fall of its own dead weight. Professional pollsters, though not so far wrong as my conference colleagues in New York, also missed what appears to be the main story of the campaign: a loss of faith, unprecedented in its severity, by the American people in the rules of the game. There is no other way to explain the stunningly bizarre choice that they made for the man to lead them.

That Trump has rapt admirers and self-confessed imitators in Europe should come as no surprise because the mood he represents is an international phenomenon. Virtually every European country has a Trump candidate saying basically the same things that he did in his campaign against immigrants, globalization trade agreements, and the establishment media. Italy has two such candidates: Grillo and the leader of the xenophobic League Party, Matteo Salvini. They are riding a wave of anti-establishment outrage and in tandem are outpolling the two major mainstream parties, the center-left Democratic Party, now in internal disarray from schism, and the center-right Go Italy Party.

As Europe since the end of World War II has slipped ever more securely into the orbit of American military and economic power, it is only to be expected that the Atlantic Community will be increasingly homogeneous. The Italian case is most instructive about the fundamental meaning of America for Europe. Italy’s greatest postwar novelist, Cesare Pavese, explained in The Moon and the Bonfires (1950), “America is here already. We have our millionaires and people are dying of hunger.” Contemporary Italy, in keeping with Europe as a whole, is best understood as an example of America’s role as the prime mover in international affairs and economics, or of how the world works per necessità, in Machiavelli’s phrase, according to the dictates of those who hold irresistible power.

By outsourcing its manufacturing base in search of portfolio enhancement, the United States exercised a freedom for which liberty-loving European businessmen, bankers, and politicians hungered as well. Unable to compete with 50-cent per hour labor, the working classes in America and Europe would have to go to the wall, but while adjusting their blindfolds they could rest assured that in the fullness of time the wonder-working ways of the free market would redeem the world.

Such a promise held no meaning for Michele, and he left this world slamming the door. “I feel betrayed,” he wrote in his suicide note. Who can say which other factors drove him in those last desperate hours before he took his life? We do know what his stated reason was for doing it. Work was the final thought that he had. How else could a Friulano give a good account of himself in this life?

Italy's 5-Star Party Demands Immediate Elections After Failure Of Electoral Reform

Not everyone is satisfied with today"s news that Italy"s early elections will likely be pushed back. Italy"s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement called on Thursday for immediate national elections after the previously reported deal on electoral reform - which would have resulted in the next Italian elections taking place in September, at the same time as Germany"s - among the major parties unraveled.

"There is no chance of starting all over again. The legislature should end here and we should hold immediate elections," said Luigi Di Maio, who is widely expected to be the 5-Star"s candidate for prime minister. He spoke shortly after the lower house voted to send the electoral reform bill back to a cross-party commission for further discussion.

Today"s events have reintroduced confusion about the Italian political timeline: as Reuters adds, upping the pressure for an early election, the parliamentary party leader of the ruling Democratic Party, Ettore Rosato, told reporters he did not know how the coalition government could hold together following the rupture over the voting law.

Also moments ago founder of the Five Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, said in a post on his blog that the Democratic Party now wants to avoid early elections, and regrets that no agreement found on electoral law.

As a reminder, the Five Star (M5S) party has erased the PD"s lead over the past two years, and according to recent polls was neck and neck, if not leading in the polls.

The Ruling Democratic Party and the Anti-Establishment 5 Star Movement Are Polling Neck-and-Neck
Opinion polls on voting intentions at Italy"s general elections

Looking at Italian bonds, there has been a modest reaction to the latest news, although much of that may be a function of the ECB"s "dovish relent" earlier in the day, which has pushed European yields broadly lower.

Italy Increasingly Likely To Abandon The Euro

Submitted by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

An analysis of the political setup in Italy shows eurosceptics are on the verge of taking control of the country.

The only missing ingredient is an early election. And early elections are now the odds-on favorite.

Let’s back up a bit to fill in the pieces as to how things got to this point.

1. Former prime minister Matteo Renzi stepped down in December after holding a referendum that failed miserably. See Renzi Resigns Following Crushing Referendum Defeat: Beppe Grillo, Marine le Pen, Matteo Salvina Tweets


2. Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, appointed Paolo Gentiloni as the new prime minister after Renzi resigned. See Meet Paolo Gentiloni, 4th Consecutive Italian Technocrat Appointed Prime Minister: Renzi Not Vanquished Yet


3. The president said he would not hold new elections until differences between how the lower house of parliament assigned seats.


4. Point number three has been resolved. Both houses of Parliament are back on a proportional system.

New Elections

• New elections are possible now but the next scheduled elections are not until 2018.


• Matteo Renzi wants new elections in June. Even though he resigned, he wants back in. Renzi wants new elections this year because PD may oust him if he waits.


• Beppe Grillo wants elections as soon as possible because he believes he will win, and also because FI leader Silvio Berlusconi cannot run for prime minister until 2018 because of a tax fraud conviction.


• Berlusconi does not want early elections, but he is in the minority.

It is up to the president to call new elections, and there is pressure form at least two fronts for him to do so.

Election Polls

Chart from Opinion polling for the next Italian general election.

The situation for Renzi is actually way worse than it appears. Not only do polls tend to over-play support for PD, the party is about to splinter. Via email, Eurointelligence explains …

Whatever Happens in Italy, Grillo is Winning

Our pessimism about the political outlook for Italy was confirmed once more this morning with reports that the PD is now very likely heading for a split – the trigger being disagreement over the election date. Pier Luigi Bersani, Renzi’s predecessor as general secretary of the party, came out strongly against early election in June saying that the PD would be finished as a party if Renzi were to go ahead.

Renzi could assemble a majority in the Italian parliament in favour of a new electoral law and early elections, so this is technically doable. The question is, at what cost? Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement officially supports early elections, but Renzi probably has a point when he says that another year of political chaos in the PD would drive even more voters to Grillo, whose party thrives on the chaos in the country. In other words, Grillo wins both ways, and the likely design of the electoral law will also be favourable to his party. So much for the theories that there would be a technical stitch-up to keep the Five Star Movement out of power. The Italian establishment is not sufficiently united to be able to do this.

Massimo D’Alema, Renzi’s fiercest oponent within the PD, says he has done research on the potential electoral support for a party to the left of the PD which could count on 11-14% of the vote. With a weak centre-right and a fragmented left, the probability of a victory by the Five Star Movement, perhaps in alliance with other radical forces, must now be considered very high.

Wrong Five Ways

The don’t worry, it will never happen crowd said …

1. Renzi would win the referendum – Wrong


2. Renzi would not resign if he lost – Wrong


3. Renzi would gracefully step aside after he resigned – Wrong


4. PD would not splinter – Wrong


5. The other parties would pass legislation making it impossible for M5S to gain control – Wrong

That same don’t worry, it will never happen crowd also proposed

1. An alliance between Grillo and other parties won’t happen


2. If an alliance does happen, parliament will not approve a referendum on the Euro


3. If there is a referendum on the Euro, people will vote against leaving


4. It still requires a constitutional amendment

Point number 6 is in the works right now. And if such an alliance does form and win (both are highly likely in my opinion), then all that is left to stop “Italeave” is fearmongering and points 8 and 9.

In Humiliation For Beppe Grillo, Pro-EU Liberal Group Blocks Alliance With 5-Star Movement

In what may have been this weekend"s biggest surprise, and one which some have suggested demonstrated Beppe Grillo"s true nature, in a blog published on Sunday, the founder of Italy"s Five-Star Movement (M5S) said his political movement should ditch Nigel Farage"s anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the European Parliament, and seek a hook up with the liberal pro-EU group Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, or ALDE, led by European Federalist Guy Verhofstadt, in an attempt to consolidated power in the European parliament.

For those unfamiliar ALDE is led by former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, who is also the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator. He is a keen European federalist and his strong, pro-EU views would seem diametrically opposed with the eurosceptic 5-Star, which has previously ridiculed the liberal leader. Grillo also said he had also approached the Greens about a possible tie-up, but was rebuffed, adding ALDE was the only group willing to discuss an accord with his movement. With ALDE’s 68 MEPs, the alliance could become the “third political force in the European parliament”, Grillo wrote. He said the two shared values linked to “direct democracy, transparency, freedom and honesty." They also seem to share a heretofore unannounced vision toward European unity, in contravention to what Grillo has professed during most of his political career.

A UKIP spokesman said not all 5-Star parliamentarians were happy. "While it"s interesting that some 5-Star MEPs adamantly wish to stay in the EFDD group as adults, we wish them all the best whatever they do," the spokesman said.

Sadly, what happened next to the 5-Star group was anything but the best. In fact, it was outright humiliation, because while 79% of M5S supporters endorsed the move in an internet vote on Sunday and Monday, it was the object of Grillo"s affections, that crushed the M5S" hopes when Verhofstadt had to give up his plan only 20 minutes into a meeting with national delegations of his gorup on Monday evening.

Liberal MEPs rejected Verhofstadt"s bid to obtain the Italian populist parties" support

“I have come to the conclusion that there are not enough guarantees to push forward a common agenda to reform Europe," he said in a statement. "There remain fundamental differences on key European issues, like the euro" the former Belgian prime minister added.

There is not enough common ground to push forward ALDE"s pro-European agenda with the Five Star Movement. More: https://t.co/asrTiGTbqS pic.twitter.com/EIGM7KLqGg

— Guy Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt) January 9, 2017

Quoted by EU Observer, he said that "on issues of shared interest, such as the environment, transparency and direct democracy, the Alde Group and the Five Star Movement will continue to work closely together," however.

The MEPs" blockade is a setback for Verhofstadt who hoped to clinch the parliament"s presidency as a compromise candidate against the conservative and socialist candidates.  It was also humiliation for Grillo, who did an unprecedented ideological U-turn, just to get precisely nothing out of it.

A vote on the unexpected Alde-M5S marriage was supposed to take place among the liberal group on Tuesday (10 January), but it quickly became clear on Monday that liberal MEPs considered the populist Italian party as going directly against their core values. Some liberal MEPs were struck by the notion that one of Europe"s populist, anti-euro parties should become the biggest gathering within the pro-EU, federalist liberal group.

Several Alde member parties, in Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Estonia said they would not support M5S joining the group. Kaja Kallas, an Estonian MEP, told EUObserver website that the political differences between M5S and the liberals were too big.

"The biggest issue is the difference in policies, look at their antiglobalist, anti-Europe, nationalistic policies and what we stand for. They are anti-euro and supported Brexit, both of which are weakening the EU. We think all member state benefit from the union," Kallas said. She also voiced concern that with its 17 MEPs, M5S would become the biggest party within the Alde group and could set its tone, which would mean a fundamental change for the group.

Another faultline was that while liberal MEPs have voiced concern over Russian meddling in European affairs, Grillo"s party supports lifting EU sanctions against Russia.

Finally, most liberal MEPs were kept in the dark during negotiations between Grillo and Verhofstadt, adding to the discontent about a possible merger. According to a leaked copy, the agreement between Verhofstadt and Grillo gave a role in the group leadership for the M5S in exchange for their support for the Belgian politician"s bid for president, shedding light on previous negotiations between the two party leaders.

Meanwhile, humiliated suitor Grillo, tried to rebuild the same bridges he burned down just 24 hours earlier, and in a letter titled ‘Dear Nigel" posted on his blog on Monday, explained that M5S wanted to use the liberal group to achieve its shared goals with Ukip.

"The 5 Star Movement"s battle has yet to come, and to win it we evaluated to go to another political group in the European Parliament because, in this way, we think we can deal with more concentration both, you and us, the next challenges,” he wrote in English.

"We can change this world,” he added.

Sadly, after today"s fiasco and this weekend"s ideological flip-flop, that is increasingly uncertain.

What will happen to the M5S MEPs is unclear. Before Alde turned down Grillo"s offer to join, Farage had said in a statement that "Beppe Grillo will now join the Euro-fanatic establishment”.

Italy's Grillo Slams Mainstream Media "Manifest Manipulation Of Reality"

"Fake news" has officially crossed the pond and once again it the mainstream media that is producing more of it (while blaming the alternative media). Beppe Grillo, founder of Italy"s Five Star anti-euro movement lashed out at the country"s journalists for "manufacturing false news," accusing them of fabricating stories to keep the Five Stars down.

"Newspapers and television news programmes are the biggest manufacturers of false news in the country, with the aim of ensuring those who have power keep it," he said on his blog on Tuesday.

As Local.It reports, he called for "a popular jury to determine the veracity of the news published," and said in cases of fake news "the editor must, head bowed, make a public apology and publish the correct version at the start of the program or on the paper"s front page".

 ...the politicians are now demanding stronger measures against bloggers...

[BUT], have never urged punishment for those who commit more serious crimes, lying in absolute bad faith, abusing the credibility of institutions. That lie can not be punished. It is not in the interest of mainstream politicians.  

All major newspapers should be closed for manifest manipulation of reality, or obliged to go out with a sticker that certifies the lack of credibility.

The media world was - of course - enraged...

The news director of the private TG La7 channel, Enrico Mentana, said he would sue the comedian, while journalists" union FNSI slammed the "lynching of all journalists".

What Grillo is proposing "is called Fascism, and those who play it down are accomplices," PD senator Stefano Esposito said.

Marco Travaglio, editor of the far-left Il Fatto Quotidiano daily, agreed with Grillo but said the popular jury idea would never work.

"The biggest lies are those spread by the television and newspapers, but the solution he is proposing is naive," he said.

Beppe Grillo: "The Amateurs Are Conquering The World Because The 'Experts' Destroyed It"

Despite Italian Prime Minister Mateo Renzi"s solemn denials that he will resign when, not if, the Italian constitutional referendum fails on December 4, it is now obvious that the Italian government is on the verge of collapse. And in yet another U-turn Renzi admitted as much himself, when according to La Repubblica, he told his entourage this weekend that the government would fall if he loses Dec. 4 constitutional referendum. “It’s very simple: if I lose the referendum this government falls. At that point we’ll see who is capable of reaching an agreement for another administration,” Renzi was quoted as saying

Well, one person who may or may not be capable, but is certainly waiting for his opportunity is Beppe Grillo, leader of Italy’s Five Star Movement, who has launched an assault against the government in Rome. The battle, which he says he will soon win, is taking place in Brussels, the city where he marched against Chinese steel dumping and in favour of the European steel industry.

While Grillo made the daily front pages in 2013, when his M5S, Five Star movement won the second most popular votes for the Italian Chamber of Debputies (but obtained just 109 deputies out of 630 due to an electoral system which favoured parties running in coalition), he has since faded from the spotlight. So, with just two weeks until Grillo is back with a bang, here is a fascinating interview with Grillo courtesy of Euronews, which serves as an opportunity for readers to get reacquainted with his ideology, especially now in the aftermth of Brexit and Trump, when many of his policy points have been validated by the voting public.

Perhaps the most notable point brouth up by Grillo is his answer whether he would govern Italy if given the opportunity, after the failure of Renzi. This is what he said:

We want to govern, but we don’t want to simply change the power by replacing it with our own. We want a change within civilisation, a change of world vision. We’re talking about dematerialised industry, an end to working for money, the start of working for other payment, a universal citizens revenue. If our society is founded on work, what will happen if work disappears? What will we do with millions of people in flux? We have to organise and manage all that.

From our side, we want to give the tools to the citizens. We have an operating system called Rousseau, to which every Italian citizen can subscribe for free. There they can vote in regional and local elections and check what their local MPs are proposing. Absolutely any citizen can even suggest laws in their own name. This is something never before directly seen in democracy and neither Tsipras nor Podemos have done it.

If that is Grillo"s checklist of conditions he needs to take charge, he may find more appropriate career choices elsewhere, unless of course he merely wants to be constantly "in the running", without actually ever winning.

Whatever the reason, we agree with the next point he makes, namely the overthrow of "experts" by amateurs.

euronews: “Do you think appealing to people’s emotions is enough to get elected? Is that a political project?”

Beppe Grillo: "This information never ceases to make the rounds: you don’t have a political project, you’re not capable, you’re imbeciles, amateurs… And yet, the amateurs are the ones conquering the world and I’m rejoicing in it because the professionals are the ones who have reduced the world to this state. Hillary Clinton, Obama and all the rest have destroyed democracy and their international policies. If that’s the case, it signifies that the experts, economists and intellectuals have completely misunderstood everything, especially if the situation is the way it is. If the EU is what we have today, it means the European dream has evaporated. Brexit and Trump are signs of a huge change. If we manage to understand that, we’ll also get to face it.”

Bingo, or as Nassim Taleb put its, the "Intellectual-Yet-Idiot" class. It is the elimination of these so-called "experts", most of whom have PhDs or other letters next to their name to cover their insecurity, and who drown every possible medium with their endless, hollow, and constantly wrong chatter, desperate to create a self-congratulatory echo chamber in which their errors are diluted with the errors of their "expert" peers, that will be the biggest challenge for the world as it seeks to break away from the legacy of a fake "expert class" which has brought the entire world to its knees, and has unleashed the biggest political tsunami in modern history.

One thing is certain: the "experts" won"t go quietly as the "amateurs" try to retake what is rightfully theirs.

Full must see interview below:

* * *

And here are the translated and transcribed key excerpts.

Gardenia Trezzini, euronews
“Beppe Grillo, our meeting takes place at a time that, without undue exaggeration, can be labelled ‘historic’. That’s to say, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. What’s your take on that?”

Beppe Grillo, Leader of the Five Star Movement
“It’s an extraordinary turning point. This corn cob – we can also call Trump that in a nice way – doesn’t have particularly outstanding qualities. He was such a target for the media, with such terrifying accusations of sexism and racism, as well as being harassed by the establishment – such as the New York Times – but, in the end, he won.

“That is a symbol of the tragedy and the apocalypse of traditional information. The television and newspapers are always late and they relay old information. They no longer anticipate anything and they’re only just understanding that idiots, the disadvantaged, those who are marginalised – and there are millions of them – use alternative media, such as the Internet, which passes under the radar of television, a medium people no longer use.

“With Trump, exactly the same thing has happened as with my Five Star Movement, which was born of the Internet: the media were taken aback and asked us where we were before. We gathered millions of people in public squares and they marvelled. We became the biggest movement in Italy and journalists and philosophers continued to say that we were benefitting from people’s dissatisfaction. We’ll get into government and they’ll ask themselves how we did it.”

euronews
“There is a gap between giving populist speeches and governing a nation.”

Beppe Grillo
“We want to govern, but we don’t want to simply change the power by replacing it with our own. We want a change within civilisation, a change of world vision.

“We’re talking about dematerialised industry, an end to working for money, the start of working for other payment, a universal citizens revenue. If our society is founded on work, what will happen if work disappears? What will we do with millions of people in flux? We have to organise and manage all that.”

euronews
“Do you think appealing to people’s emotions is enough to get elected? Is that a political project?”

Beppe Grillo
“This information never ceases to make the rounds: you don’t have a political project, you’re not capable, you’re imbeciles, amateurs…

“And yet, the amateurs are the ones conquering the world and I’m rejoicing in it because the professionals are the ones who have reduced the world to this state. Hillary Clinton, Obama and all the rest have destroyed democracy and their international policies.

“If that’s the case, it signifies that the experts, economists and intellectuals have completely misunderstood everything, especially if the situation is the way it is. If the EU is what we have today, it means the European dream has evaporated. Brexit and Trump are signs of a huge change. If we manage to understand that, we’ll also get to face it.”

euronews
“Until now, these anti-establishment movements have come face-to-face with their own limits: as soon as they come to power they seem to lose their capabilities and reason for being. Alexis Tsipras, in Greece, for example…”

Beppe Grillo
“Yes, I agree.”

euronews
“Let’s take the example of Podemos in Spain. They came within reach of power, then had to backtrack. Why?”

Beppe Grillo
“Because there’s an outdated way of thinking. Because they think power is managed by forming coalitions or by making agreements with others.

“From our side, we want to give the tools to the citizens. We have an operating system called Rousseau, to which every Italian citizen can subscribe for free. There they can vote in regional and local elections and check what their local MPs are proposing. Absolutely any citizen can even suggest laws in their own name.

“This is something never before directly seen in democracy and neither Tsipras nor Podemos have done it.”

euronews
“You said that you’re not interested in breaking up the European Union, but rather in profoundly changing it. What can a small group of MEPs do to put into motion such great change?”

Beppe Grillo
“The little group of MEPs is making its voice heard, but there are complications… In parliament, there are lobby groups and commissions. Parliament decides, but at the same time doesn’t decide.

“We do what we can, in line with our vision of a world based on a circular economy. We put forward the idea of a circular economy as the energy of the future and the proposal has been adopted by the European parliament.”

euronews

“One hot topic at the Commission at the moment is the problem of the conflicts of interest concerning certain politicians.

“President Juncker suggested modifying the code of ethics and lengthening the period of abstinence from any private work for former Commission members to three years. Is that enough?”

Beppe Grillo

“I have serious doubts about a potential change in the code of ethics being made by a former minister of a tax haven.”

euronews
“You don’t think the Commission is legitimate?”

Beppe Grillo
“Absolutely not. Particularly because it’s a Commission that no one has actually elected. That’s what brought us closer to Nigel Farage: a democracy coming from the people.”

euronews
“You don’t regret being allied with Farage?”

Beppe Grillo
"It was an alliance of convenience, made to give us enough support to enter parliament. We’ve always maintained this idea of total autonomy in decision-making, but we united over the common idea of a different Europe, a mosaic of autonomies and sovereignties.

“I’m not against Europe, but I am against the single currency. Conversely, I am for the idea of a common currency. The words are important: ‘common’ and ‘single’ are two different concepts.

“In any case, the UK has demonstrated something that we in Italy couldn’t even dream of: organising a clear ‘yes-no’ referendum.”

euronews
“That is ‘clear’ in terms of the result and not its consequences. In reality, the population is torn. Many people’s views have done u-turns.”

Beppe Grillo
“Whatever happens, the responsibility returns entirely to the British. They made the decision.”

euronews
“Doesn’t it bother you that Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is playing the spoilsport in Europe? Criticising European institutions was your battle horse and now he is flexing his muscles in Brussels.”

Beppe Grillo
“Renzi has to do that. But he’s just copying me and in doing so, strengthens the original.”

euronews
“Whatever it may be, his position at the head of the government can get him results.”

Beppe Grillo
“Very well. If he wants to hold a referendum on the euro, he’ll have our support. If he wants to leave the Fiscal Stability Treaty – the so-called Fiscal Compact – which was one of our battles, we’ll be there.”

euronews
“In the quarrel over the flexibility of public accounts due to the earthquake and immigration, who are you supporting?”

Beppe Grillo
“On that, I share Renzi’s position. I have nothing against projects and ideas. I have preconceptions about him. For me, he is completely undeserving of confidence.”

euronews
“Renzi’s negotiating power will also depend on the outcome of the constitutional referendum in December. We’ll see whether he sinks or swims.”

Beppe Grillo
“It’s already lost for him.”

euronews
“If he doesn’t win, will you ask for early elections?”

Beppe Grillo
“Whatever happens, we want elections because the government as it stands is not legitimate and, as a consequence, neither are we.

“From this point onwards, the government moves forward simply by approving laws based on how urgent they are. And 90 percent of laws are approved using this method. So what good will it do to reform the Senate to make the process quicker?”

euronews
“Can you see yourself at the head of the Italian government?”

Beppe Grillo
“No, no. I was never in the race. Never.”

euronews
“So, Beppe Grillo is not even a candidate to become prime minister or to take on another official role, if one day the Five Star Movement was to win the elections?”

Beppe Grillo
“The time is fast approaching.”

euronews
“Really? A projection?”

Beppe Grillo
“People just need to go and vote. We’re sure to win.”