The long read
Building the Brexit party: how Nigel Farage copied Italy's
digital populists
The former Ukip leader forged an alliance with the Five Star
Movement just as they bulldozed Italian politics using a tightly controlled
digital operation. And now he’s putting their techniques to work in Britain. By
Darren Loucaides
Tue 21 May 2019 06.00 BST
One day in January 2015, Nigel Farage gave his senior
adviser, Raheem Kassam, an unusual bit of news. “On Monday, we’re going to
Milano,” he said. (Farage always pronounced it “Mil-ar-no”, much to Kassam’s
amusement.) “I was like: ‘What? Why?’” Kassam said. Farage, who was then the
leader of the anti-European Union party Ukip, explained that they were going to
sit down with Gianroberto Casaleggio. Kassam whipped out his phone and quickly
Googled “Casaleggio” – he had never heard of him.
Lose yourself in a great story: Sign up for the long read
email
Read more
Farage described Casaleggio to Kassam as the “genius behind
Five Star”, the Italian political party that won a 25% vote share in 2013, the
first national elections it had ever contested. Nothing like this had happened
before in modern Italian politics. Casaleggio and the comedian Beppe Grillo,
who was famous in Italy for his rabble-rousing live shows, had founded the
movement just four years earlier. They had largely built the Five Star Movement
online, with remarkably little money or mainstream media attention.
Five Star was only one step toward Casaleggio’s long-term
ambition: to supplant parliament with an online democracy where citizens,
highly informed through the internet, could fashion policy directly. Farage had
“always been interested” in direct democracy, Kassam said, and in “turning
everything over to the internet”. But Farage was more impressed by the fact
that, after just a few years, Casaleggio’s largely online movement was on the
verge of becoming Italy’s biggest political party. He wanted to know how
Casaleggio had done it – and then to replicate its success.
In Milan, Farage was struck by how Casaleggio was using
social media and the internet to create a new model for political
communications. Five Star members were discussing and voting on policy and
nominating and electing each other to run for office while being steeped in
party propaganda, all on a single online platform. This made supporters feel as
if the movement’s identity was emerging organically from their online
interactions, while Casaleggio and Grillo could guide those interactions with
messaging from above. What’s more, the “movement” was dominated by a private
company owned by Casaleggio. Five Star was in many ways less like a political
party than a publicly traded company in which members were voting shareholders,
but Casaleggio had the controlling stake.
Farage left Milan “very excited” about bringing Five Star’s
style of digital democracy to the UK, Kassam said. So did Farage’s ally Liz
Bilney, who was also present at the Milan meeting and went on to found the
pro-Brexit group Leave.EU. “If I was starting Ukip today,” Farage told the
political scientists Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo around that time,
“would I spend 20 years speaking to people in village halls or would I base it
on the Grillo model? I know exactly what I would do.” Farage and his colleagues
in the Brexit movement had been converted.
The Milan meeting represented a surprising new alignment in
European politics – between Farage’s blokey nationalism and the digitally savvy
direct democracy of the ostensibly left-leaning Five Star Movement. Over the
next four years, Farage would apply the lessons he learned from Casaleggio
first to the Brexit referendum and then to a new party of his own, pursuing his
own political goals under the guise of direct democracy. Although Casaleggio
died of brain cancer in 2016, his son, Davide, and Grillo continued to steer
the Five Star Movement towards the populist right, pushing eurosceptic messages
about sovereignty and immigration. Today, Five Star is the largest party in the
Italian parliament and governs in an alliance with the far-right Lega party.
“Casaleggio was looking down the line,” Claudio Messora, a
popular blogger who was head of communications in Five Star’s Brussels office,
told me. “He predicted a Five Star government in Italy and a Nigel Farage
government in London – and so a new Rome-London axis.” This axis would be
united over its opposition to the establishment, both domestically and in the
EU.
But the Milan meeting was also an important moment in a
larger shift: toward the emergence of a new form of populism, in which
demagogues use digital tools and corporate structures to direct mass movements.
“As long as you are liking them, as long as you’re a fan, as long as you follow
them, they don’t need really to account for what they do,” said Paolo Gerbaudo,
an Italian political sociologist at King’s College London who studies how
political parties use the internet. He added: “What users/members/customers are
given is basically a window-dressing of participation.”
In March 2019, three months after leaving Ukip, his
political home of 25 years, Farage launched the Brexit party. Ditching the
tweed suits and pints of bitter that were his signature during the Ukip years,
Farage has set out to lead a modern political movement. Farage’s new party has
embraced slick digital ads and promised to save democracy by giving power back
to the people. Supporters can apply to be candidates via an online portal, and
the party has jettisoned traditional structures and hierarchies. Similarly to
how Five Star is structured, the Brexit party is a registered company striving
to look like a web-based mass movement – but it is controlled from the top by
Farage.
“The Brexit party is the virtual carbon copy of the Five
Star Movement,” Arron Banks, Farage’s long-time supporter and collaborator,
told me. “What the Five Star did, and what the Brexit party is doing, is having
a tightly controlled central structure, almost a dictatorship at the centre,”
he went on. “If you have a tightly controlled structure, then the crazies can’t
take over.”
The Brexit party’s Facebook page already has 120,000
followers, almost five times more than the new remain-supporting party Change
UK, and it is several points ahead of the other UK parties in European election
polls. “I’ve watched the growth of the Five Star Movement, from its inception,
with absolute fascination,” Farage recently told the Telegraph, adding: “Look
at what we’re already doing in four weeks – we’re doing the same kind of
thing.”
By the mid-2000s, it had come to seem obvious to the man
behind Five Star’s philosophy that representative democracy was past its
sell-by date. Casaleggio believed this outmoded form of government was destined
to be replaced by a global web-based democracy that removed the pesky
middle-men of politics – politicians themselves. “He had this very strong
conviction, this belief, that the internet was all about disintermediation,”
said Filippo Pittarello, a former employee of Casaleggio who now works in Five
Star’s Brussels office. No longer would shops stand between consumers and
producers, publishers between readers and authors, bankers between investors
and entrepreneurs. “Every single aspect of the organisation of society that was
not direct would be disrupted by the internet,” Pittarello continued. “So why
not politics?”
In 2005, through a blog fronted by Grillo, beppegrillo.it,
Casaleggio put this philosophy into practice. The blog dispensed what
Casaleggio and Grillo called “counter-information” as an antidote to the “fake
news” they said was peddled by the traditional media, which was dominated in
Italy by the seemingly immovable prime minister and media tycoon Silvio
Berlusconi. The blog also invited readers to debate the country’s countless
problems.
It was ostensibly out of this online discussion that Five
Star’s original policy positions emerged when the party formally launched in
2009: renewable energy, sustainable transport, internet access for all and a
universal basic income. Although the party claimed to be neither right nor
leftwing, Five Star’s policies attracted many supporters disillusioned with the
Italian left, which, like Tony Blair’s New Labour, had swung to the centre.
Five Star’s central message was its condemnation of what it saw as the
country’s overpaid, corrupt political establishment – right and left alike.
By putting an online platform at the heart of its
operations, Five Star was way ahead of other political parties in Italy – many
of which barely had a functioning website. As the movement grew, the party
seemed to entrust an increasing number of decisions to party members through
online ballots and crowdsourced policies. At the same time, many Five Star
members treated Grillo’s blog as an oracle of truth. As a result, Casaleggio,
who created and managed the blog, could use it to exert enormous sway over the
movement.
Casaleggio “was more a man of the right than the left”, said
Claudio Messora, who first met Casaleggio in 2008. “In terms of the political
animal he was, he was definitely predisposed in that direction.” Several
friends and former staff of Casaleggio told me that he was against open
immigration and that he strongly disliked Italy’s left. Casaleggio claimed his
politics were neither fascist nor socialist, but in fact they seemed to revere
both the imperial and the revolutionary.
Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio.
Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio. Photograph:
Alessandro Serrano/Agf/Rex/Shutterstock
In a video he made in 2008 called Gaia: The Future of
Politics, he imagined a world in which the shadowy conspiracies that currently
rule the world – freemasons, the Bilderberg Group and so forth – would succumb
to an era of worldwide internet democracy. At the same time, the video imagined
the annihilation of billions of people following a total war, and held up
Genghis Khan’s horseback courier network and Mussolini’s radio broadcasts as
examples of the great march of disintermediation.
Compared to Casaleggio’s vision of a future without
parliaments, Farage’s embrace of direct democracy was more limited – it largely
boiled down to crusading for the referendum on British membership of the EU. At
the time of Five Star’s launch in 2009, the main thing the two parties seemed
to have in common was a taste for anti-establishment rhetoric. Both parties
blamed political elites for the deepening financial crisis, which had caused
unemployment to soar in Italy as well as the UK, and capitalised on the
public’s growing mistrust of mainstream parties. But despite their outward
differences, the parties that Casaleggio and Farage built influenced one
another and grew in similar directions.
“The way Casaleggio saw it, the messaging and how Five Star
won support was similar to Farage,” Messora said. Both parties claimed to be
struggling against entrenched powers and taking back control for the people.
Farage claimed referendums could address the disconnect between politicians and
ordinary people and argued for the right of recall, whereby constituents would
have more power to force out their MP. Five Star called itself a “movement of
citizens”; Farage said Ukip’s supporters were the “People’s Army”.
Both movements were also moulded around strong, sometimes
ostentatiously crude personalities. Footage from the European parliament
doesn’t tend to go viral, but videos of Farage’s floor speeches got hundreds of
thousands of views and attracted the attention of Casaleggio and Grillo. “You
have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk,”
Farage said in a tirade at the new European council president Herman Van Rompuy
in 2010. “Who are you? I’d never heard of you. No one in Europe had ever heard
of you!” For his part, in 2007, Grillo held a series of “V Day” rallies at
which he and his followers shouted vaffanculo! – “go fuck yourself!” – at the
political establishment. (The rallies were meticulously planned by Casaleggio
in Milan.)
Grillo and Farage saw each other as kindred spirits. “I’ve
followed him online,” Grillo told CNBC in 2013. “He is an extraordinary orator
… a real eurosceptic.” David Cameron had recently promised an EU referendum for
the first time, bringing Farage’s decades-long campaign closer to fruition.
“This looks to me like real democracy,” Grillo remarked. Farage praised Five
Star and Grillo, too. “I think it’s exciting, it’s modern,” Farage told
journalist Alessio Pisanò a couple of months after Grillo’s CNBC interview. “It
was a protest movement to begin with, but what I’ve been observing is that he’s
been developing a narrative, a story, which is very, very eurosceptic.”
Farage also admired the way Five Star’s appeal to
disaffected voters on the left had helped it during Italy’s 2013 general
election. Ahead of the 2014 European elections, Farage believed that Ukip could
win a majority of Britain’s seats if the party reached beyond the right-left
divide. In an attempt to appeal to Labour’s northern heartlands, Farage
combined his usual message – about EU idiocy and waste – with talk of how
industrial communities had been left behind. But he also stoked fears about
immigration and said the EU’s free-movement policy was a threat to national
sovereignty. Five Star took no official position on immigration, but Grillo was
increasingly critical of the EU and blogposts on beppegrillo.it began to talk
about “sovereignty”, too.
In 2014, Ukip and Five Star formed a new, anti-establishment
bloc in the European parliament. Farage thought the two parties “could have fun
causing a lot of trouble for Brussels”. The new coalition – which also included
a smattering of MEPs from the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats and other
smaller eurosceptic parties, as well as a rebel MEP from Marine Le Pen’s
National Front (now National Rally) – was presented as a “loose alliance” that
existed merely to give each party more individual sway within the EU. (“Being
outside an official group meant counting for nothing,” Messora explained. “It
would mean no money, no time speaking in the chamber.”) But it was more than a
marriage of convenience. Five Star and Farage increasingly shared a philosophy.
Soon they would share an electoral strategy as well.
Five Star’s unofficial headquarters at the time of its rapid
growth was on Via Morone, a quiet street in an exclusive district in the heart
of Milan. Here, behind a set of heavy wooden doors, was the home of Casaleggio
Associates, the private company through which Gianroberto Casaleggio and then
his son, Davide, orchestrated the party’s electoral successes.
Although Casaleggio designed Five Star to look like a
member-led movement, he set the party’s course from the beginning. Casaleggio
Associates not only managed Grillo’s blog; today it also runs Five Star’s
digital operations and controls the valuable data being generated on Five
Star’s online platform by the party’s snowballing membership. According to two recent
investigations by the Italian data protection authority, the Five Star digital
platform was breaching European data protection laws by tracking Five Star
members in individually identifiable ways.
Casaleggio was far ahead of other political parties in using
this data to help shape Five Star’s messaging, which he fed back to supporters
through Grillo’s blog, and increasingly through social media. The very tools
that were supposedly giving members control over the movement were allowing
Casaleggio to exert control over them. With a thoughtfully crafted blogpost, he
could intervene in the movement’s internal debates, bolstering certain
positions and dampening others down.
“This is a long-time project of social engineering, using
the web,” said Jacopo Iacoboni, who has written two books on Five Star’s rise.
The first detailed how Casaleggio had begun to experiment with manipulating
online consensus back in the 1990s, as the CEO of an Italian tech company that
sold business tools for managing employees. He believes the way Five Star has
used data is far more radical, in some ways, than what had happened in the
Trump or Brexit campaigns. “In the UK and with Trump, the campaigns were, at
least formally, separated from the web company running their data – think
Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate IQ,” Iacoboni said. But the Five Star case is
unique, he said: “A web company which creates a party, with the owner directly
possessing all the data.”
Perhaps the most dramatic example of the top-down control
that Casaleggio exerted over the movement was the way he choreographed the
party’s decision in 2014 to align with Ukip in the European parliament. Many
observers and even members of the party had assumed that Five Star was
ultimately a progressive movement, so when the possibility of allying with Ukip
came up, many Five Star members were appalled. “Farage’s party disgusts me,”
Giulia Sarti, one of Five Star’s MPs, told the Italian newspaper La Stampa.
Many vocal Five Star members wanted to ally with the Greens instead.
On Grillo’s blog, Casaleggio responded with a deluge of
posts idolising Farage and criticising the Greens. One post rather
fantastically claimed that Ukip, too, was essentially a progressive movement,
which rejected any form of “racism, sexism or xenophobia” – even though Ukip
members with offensive views had poured out of the woodwork in that year’s
European elections. Another post argued that Ukip had a “coherent and
principled opposition to foreign imperialist wars” in contrast to “the leaders
of the Greens and the liberals, who screamed in favour of the war in Libya”.
Ukip’s campaign for a referendum on EU membership was heralded as an example of
its support for direct democracy.
True to its supposed values, Five Star put to an online
ballot the final decision on which European alliance to join. But the post that
introduced that ballot left little doubt as to which way members were expected
to vote. “It was clearly in favour of the Ukip solution,” Marco Zanni, who had
been elected as a Five Star MEP that May, told me. “It’s not a real democratic
referendum.” In the end, about 80% of Five Star members who voted opted to ally
with Farage. Grillo’s blog hailed the decision as a new milestone in direct
democracy. At Casaleggio’s request, said Filippo Pittarello, the Five Star
staff member, Farage changed the name of his Ukip-led alliance from Europe of
Freedom and Democracy to Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy.
Orchestrating the alliance with Ukip was in many ways a test
case for Five Star’s model of digital democracy. When Farage and Kassam visited
Casaleggio Associates in Milan in 2015, Casaleggio and Davide were busy
upgrading Five Star’s online platform to a more advanced system they called
Rousseau – which would allow members to propose laws and debate and edit them
online. Rousseau also made it easier for members to put themselves forward as
candidates and decide who would stand. But Kassam was most struck by the extent
to which the Italians were amassing and analysing data from all these
activities to hone the party’s strategy.
Three years later, Five Star would use the approach it had
taken to establishing the Ukip bloc to ally with another rightwing party. When
Five Star and Matteo Salvini’s Lega formed an all-populist Italian government
in 2018, both Farage and Steve Bannon hailed it as the newest revolt against
the establishment – following in the footsteps of Brexit and Trump. “In 2015,
@Nigel_Farage and I went to see the now departed Gianroberto Casaleggio, the man
behind Italy’s 5 Star Movement,” Kassam, who was also close to Bannon, tweeted
on the day of the Italian elections. “People thought we were nuts, toying
around the fringes.” But the truth is that Five Star had been the trailblazer.
Before Farage visited Casaleggio Associates in Milan in
January 2015, he wasn’t exactly tech-savvy. “When I first met Nigel, he barely
knew how to turn on a computer,” said Alexandra Phillips, who became Ukip’s
head of media in 2013 and is now an MEP candidate for the Brexit party. But it
didn’t take an IT whiz to see how far advanced Five Star was when it came to
its use of data and the internet. Between the European elections in 2014 and
the UK general election in 2015, “we were creating masses and masses of data”,
Kassam said of Ukip – from people signing up through the website and from its
growing social media following. In contrast to Five Star, though, almost no one
at Ukip’s notoriously chaotic HQ was digging through this treasure trove.
Farage and Kassam thought Ukip should be taking data just as
seriously as the Italians were. After the general election – in which Ukip won
nearly 4m votes – Kassam claims that Farage intended to put him in charge of a
new digital platform, Ukip4M.com, which would regularly poll members, give them
more of a say in the party and weaponise Farage’s movement by encouraging
voters to turn into activists. But Ukip, beset by tensions between Farage and
the party’s national executive council, fell into civil war, scuppering
Farage’s plans for the party.
Another major opportunity to use the knowledge they had
gleaned from Casaleggio would arise soon enough – in the Brexit referendum. In
November 2015, Arron Banks officially launched Leave.EU at an event with
Richard Tice (now the chairman of the Brexit party) and Liz Bilney, the Farage
ally who had attended the Milan meeting and served as Leave.EU’s CEO.
Bilney, who oversees Banks’s portfolio of other businesses,
showed me a report she had sent to Banks after the Milan meeting. It describes
a timeline of key events in web-based politics: the use of the events platform
Meetup.com by Howard Dean’s campaign for US president in 2004; the 2008 Obama
campaign’s focus on small, grassroots donations; and finally, Five Star’s use
of Grillo’s blog to promote direct democracy. Five Star’s lively online debates
and tweetable messaging had boosted its membership and its voter turnout, and
the Casaleggios spoke a lot about crowdfunding, of making calls to action and
fuelling donations around that rallying cry.
Like Farage, Bilney believed there was an opening for a
British party to do the same. “Issue: there is not currently any party in the
UK with any true internet presence,” her report begins. To emulate Five Star,
she placed online engagement at the heart of Leave.EU’s campaign. Instead of a
target audience passively absorbing a message from party leaders, followers were
made to feel they were part of a conversation and a movement – a strategy often
used by brands, too. As Bilney put it, the goal was to “upgrade” a follower to
a paying “supporter” through staying in touch regularly, hitting them with
varied, dynamic content and keeping them engaged.
“We’ve taken learnings from business, because if you look at
insurance, you want people to renew their policies,” Bilney said. “And I would
apply that same principle with an organisation or a party … you wouldn’t want
the members to drop off. But if you don’t talk to your members, and you don’t
engage your members, they drop off.”
Banks hired the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which
later worked on the Trump campaign, to help the Leave.EU team generate messages
and track which ones did best. By the time the referendum came around, Leave.EU
was winning the online arms race. Although the Electoral Commission conferred
official status on rival campaign group Vote Leave, Leave.EU was getting more
online interactions and more engagement than anyone else, reaching up to 15
million people weekly.
As Banks watched Leave.EU grow, he believed it could be more
than a one-off campaign. He wanted to turn it into a long-term movement, like
Five Star. A few months before the referendum, he emailed Farage to suggest Farage
“subtly delink” from Ukip “and we will start building Leave.EU”. He even
offered to put up £10m “to develop a popular political movement along the lines
of Beppe Grillo’s incredibly successful Five Star Movement in Italy”, he writes
in his book The Bad Boys of Brexit. Banks also had a new website built for
Leave.EU that would replicate some of the features of Five Star’s Rousseau.
But Farage decided to bide his time. Given that the new
prime minister, Theresa May, had promised to deliver Brexit, it seemed sensible
to wait. Any new movement could be born out of the ashes of a failed deal,
Alexandra Phillips, the Brexit party candidate, said – and Farage could portray
himself as coming to the rescue to save Brexit.
“Nigel would say that the market has to be right for us,”
Banks told me. “It’s the equivalent of trying to start a fire in a wet forest.
But now the forest is tinder dry.”
When Farage publicly launched the Brexit party this March,
he presented it as a response to May’s failure to secure a Brexit deal. In
reality, its roots stretch back much further – at least to the meeting Bilney
and he had with Casaleggio in Milan four years earlier.
If Casaleggio’s ambition was to replace parliament with
direct democracy, Farage’s ambition seems, in the first instance, to destroy
the Conservative party. Farage declined to speak to me for this article, but
Banks told me that the Brexit party and Leave.EU, which is still very much
active, were pursuing a sort of pincer movement on the Tories. (He also denied
to me that he is a “mystery donor” to the Brexit party.) “Leave.EU goes behind
enemy lines, blowing up their bridges, causing mass mayhem in the Tory party,
while the Brexit party can come in head-on, into their face,” he said.
Since its launch, the Brexit party has reportedly attracted
more than 100,000 supporters paying £25 each. Farage claims they are the main
source of the party’s funding. Donations to the Five Star Movement go to a
private association run by Davide Casaleggio; similarly, donations to the
Brexit party go to a private company. Online donations to the party, which are
collected via PayPal, are impossible to scrutinise. Political parties can only
accept donations over £500 if they’re from the UK, and must report both the
sources of the funding and how it’s spent. With the Brexit party, it’s not
clear who’s giving how much money or where it’s going. (On Monday, the
Electoral Commission announced it would be visiting the Brexit party’s offices
to “to conduct a review of the systems it has in place to receive funds”.)
If the Brexit party continues to follow the Five Star model,
this week’s European elections and trying to push through Brexit may be only
its first steps. Five Star is continuing to grow its network of
anti-establishment partners. Ahead of the European elections, it has courted
France’s Yellow Jacket protesters, offering to help them stand candidates for
office. It has announced a new European group with an eclectic mix of
eurosceptics, nationalists and populists. It has also pushed its messaging and
data-gathering further, reportedly requesting that its elected representatives
hand over access to their personal social media accounts.
At times, Farage has acknowledged that he is not leading a
political party. “We’re running a company, not a political party, hence our
model of registered supporters, and the fact that the chairman Richard Tice and
I are not afraid to make decisions,” he recently told the Telegraph. But, like
Casaleggio and Grillo before him, Farage is also claiming to offer a new form
of politics. “We are going to directly liaise and have votes amongst our
registered supporters to shape policy and shape our future direction,” Farage
told listeners on LBC radio last week. “We will produce policy on the basis of
what our supporters think.” This is the language of the new brand of digital
populism, in which the director of a private company portrays his firm as the
vessel for a democratic mass movement. At another point Farage said to the
audience: “This is going to be the most open political party you’ve ever seen
in Britain.”
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign
up to the long read weekly email here.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário