Last Updated, Tuesday, 6:40 p.m. Although an aide to the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi demanded a recount late Monday, after his center-right coalition appeared to lose the battle for the Italian Parliament’s lower house to the main center-left coalition by less than 0.4 percent, a look at the raw vote totals reveals a sharp decline in support for him. According to the provisional count, Mr. Berlusconi’s party got about six million fewer votes than in 2008, slipping from first place all the way to third.
As my colleague Rachel Donadio explains, though, that did not spell a triumph for Mr. Berlusconi’s traditional rivals, the center-left Democratic Party, which lost nearly four million votes, because more than eight million Italians voted for the Five Star Movement, a party that emerged, fully formed, from the comedian Beppe Grillo’s popular blog. At the end of counting late Monday, Mr. Grillo’s party had more votes than any other in the lower house election and the second-most votes for Italy’s Senate.
While Mr. Grillo’s mass movement, which drew support from disenchanted voters on the left and the right, did not run as part of either main coalition and so will not lead Italy’s next government, the scale of the new party’s turnout, organized largely through the Internet and vast rallies, stunned observers.
In an update to nearly 1 million followers on Twitter, Mr. Grillo hailed the result, telling supporters, “We have become the leading force in absolute terms after just three and a bit years, without money, without ever having accepted the reimbursement of expenses.”
According to a translation on the English-language version of his blog, Mr. Grillo told supporters in a telephone interview streamed live on YouTube late Monday:
This adventure that we’re having is fantastic. First of all I just want to thank those extraordinary young people that made it possible to find the stages, the lights, the security services, the people that put us up in their homes, that have helped us with the camper. This is the difference between this grassroots movement and “the others”. “The others” are paid and are carried around in buses with flags. We are all volunteers. This is why so many thanks are needed.
Given that neither of the main coalitions will be able to command a majority, Mr. Grillo said, they will most likely have to combine to form an interim government until there can be fresh election. In the meantime, he added:
We are the obstacle. They can no longer succeed against us. Let them resign themselves to that. They’ll be able to keep going for 7 or 8 months and they’ll produce a disaster but we’ll try and keep them under control. We’ll start to do what we’ve always said – our stars: water in public hands, schools in public hands, public health service. If they follow us they follow us. If they don’t, the battle will be very harsh for them, very harsh.
Since the term of Italy’s president is also at an end, one of the first challenges facing Italy’s fractured new Parliament will be to elect a successor. In an update posted on Twitter on Tuesday, Mr. Grillo declared that his movement would decide who to support in an online ballot. Signalling change, he added, “Spring is coming.”
While the surge in support for Mr. Grillo’s party was described as a shock in many parts of the Italian and international media, there were clear signs of the Five Star Movement’s growing popularity in the series of late rallies Mr. Grillo called his #TsunamiTour on Twitter, culminating in a final campaign appearance attended by an estimated 800,000 in Rome’s Piazza San Giovanni.
A television crew from Euronews accompanied Mr. Grillo on one leg of that tour, as he campaigned in Sicily.
One byproduct of Mr. Grillo’s success could be fresh elections, because the center-left coalition led by the Democratic Party, which spurned him as a potential candidate four years ago, is now unable to command a majority in the upper house and so may not be able to form a government. In a Twitter update on Tuesday, Mr. Grillo ruled out joining a governing coalition.
The result left many foreign correspondents looking for a way to explain Mr. Grillo to their readers. The Guardian correspondent John Hooper noted that Mr. Grillo’s ability to tap into popular outrage over corruption in Italy, owes at least as much to his background in economics as to his comedian’s sharp tongue:
Grillo was born 64 years ago in Genoa and studied commercial economics. He might have ended up a provincial accountant.
His studies are the key to why he has such an acute perception of the many scandals in Italy in which politics and finance overlap, like the one enveloped its oldest bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, during the campaign. Grillo can read company accounts in a way few journalists and politicians can. The year before the Italian food giant, Parmalat, collapsed in 2003, Grillo forecast on television what was to be Europe’s biggest bankruptcy.
Mr. Hooper also explained that Mr. Grillo came to the Internet early on because the political nature of his commentary comedy kept Italian television producers from booking him.
He disappeared from the state-owned RAI in 1993. Its rival network, Mediaset, had the odd satire programme, but none was allowed seriously to target the network’s proprietor, Silvio Berlusconi.
Grillo’s exclusion from television is crucial to understanding the man and his success. It added yet more anger to the ranting monologues that had become his speciality. And it forced him to turn to what was then a medium decidedly outside the mainstream, founding a blog that soon became a samizdat for the young, frustrated, indignant and internet-savvy.
As my colleagues Ian Fisher and Rob Harris explained in an article and a video report on Mr. Grillo in 2007, he first rallied popular support that year with his “V-Day,” based on the deep-seated desire of many Italians to dismiss their entire political class with an obscene phrase that starts with that letter in Italian.
