Europe's Political Center Is Caving in

The Cinque Stelle is not discernibly Left or Right but just anti: antiestablishment, antiausterity, anti-European. It could be called antipolitical, and almost anti-Italian. Such random protest parties are often labeled Euroskeptic, but although the graffito slogan you can see in the Veneto, “Basta Italia!,” will probably be painted by a supporter of the rightist Northern League, that’s the spirit of Grillo’s Five Stars as well: enough Italy as well as enough Europe, enough of our rulers, throw the rascals out. This is the specter haunting those rascals, or at any rate what that interestingly heterodox French politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement calls “the soi-disant elites.”