Populist parties and foreign policy: The case of Italy’s Five Star Movement

AuthorFabrizio Coticchia,Valerio Vignoli
DOI10.1177/1369148120922808
Published date01 August 2020
Date01 August 2020
Subject MatterOriginal Articles
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120922808
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2020, Vol. 22(3) 523 –541
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148120922808
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Populist parties and foreign
policy: The case of Italy’s Five
Star Movement
Fabrizio Coticchia1 and Valerio Vignoli2
Abstract
The role of political parties in foreign policy is gaining increasing attention. Nonetheless, despite
an extraordinary interest in ‘populism’, the foreign policy of populist parties has rarely been
investigated. This article provides an innovative theoretical framework, applying it on a rare
example of a ‘pure’ populist party: Italy’s Five Star Movement. How has Five Star Movement
positioned on Italian contribution to military operations abroad? What does such positioning say
about its ideological leaning? In order to address such questions, the article analyses Five Star
Movement’s MPs’ votes and speeches on foreign policy during its first term in Parliament (2013–
2018). We find that, notwithstanding some ambiguities, the Movement’s stance has been mostly
pacifist and humanitarian, resembling more a ‘left-libertarian populist party’ than a ‘sovereigntist
far-right one’. Through these findings, the article contributes to the debate on populist parties and
foreign policy in Europe, clarifying also the elusive ideological leaning of the Five Star Movement.
Keywords
Five Star Movement, foreign policy, Italy, military missions, populism
Introduction
The literature is increasingly devoting attention to the role of political parties in the devel-
opment of foreign and security policy (Mello and Peters, 2018; Rathbun, 2004; Wagner
et al., 2018). Nonetheless, the foreign policy outlook of populist parties has seldom been
investigated,1 despite growing interest in ‘populism’ in Western Europe and beyond. This
is surprising since, as stressed by Balfour et al. (2016: 19), ‘populist parties are becoming
much more vocal on important international and domestic issues’. This article, focusing
on the foreign policy of the populist Five Star Movement (M5S), addresses specifically
the need to examine the foreign policies of populist parties. M5S’ stunning electoral suc-
cesses have fuelled an emerging scholarly debate in Italy (Bordignon and Ceccarini,
2015; Tronconi, 2018). However, its views on crucial foreign and security policy matters
1DISPO – University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy
2Department of Social and Political Science, University of Milan, Milan, Italy
Corresponding author:
Fabrizio Coticchia, DISPO – University of Genoa, Piazzale E. Brignole 3, 16125 Genoa, Italy.
Email: fabrizio.coticchia@unige.it
922808BPI0010.1177/1369148120922808The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsCoticchia and Vignoli
research-article2020
Original Article
524 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(3)
have remained largely unexplored. This article fills this gap by analysing the voting pat-
terns and speeches of MPs affiliated with M5S during the XVII legislature (2013–2018).
We focus on the most salient defence and foreign policy issue in Italy: military operations
abroad.
As stressed by Rooduijn (2018), while scholars increasingly agree on how to define a
controversial concept such as populism, further attention on measuring it and categoris-
ing populist parties accordingly is required. For instance, some authors (Balfour et al.,
2016; Verbeek and Zaslove, 2017) have illustrated the problematic attempt to classify a
‘populist foreign policy’ because of the considerable variance in the ‘host ideology’
(Mudde, 2004) of populist parties. The categorization of the so-called ‘hybrid’ populist
parties is even more troublesome. Indeed, according to Mudde (2019), while populism is
almost always a secondary ideology, there are examples of ‘pure’ populist parties without
a ‘host ideology’. For this reason, and due to the limited number of examples, the ideo-
logical nature of ‘hybrid populist parties’ did not attract specific interest in the literature.
However, the concept of ‘hybrid ideology’ for populist parties needs to be further exam-
ined and unpacked, empirically assessing whether we can categorise hybrid populist par-
ties and how. This study aims to answer this question by investigating what a ‘pure’ or
‘hybrid’ populist party does in practice, shedding light on the foreign policy positions of
M5S.
Gianfreda and Carlotti (2018) define the M5S as a ‘pure populist party’. In fact, M5S
has not been categorised in the (few) analyses that have attempted to distinguish populist
parties of the left and the right (Verbeek and Zaslove, 2017).2 Relying on the scholarly
debate on the Movement, we can identify schematically two potential ways it can be cat-
egorised: as a populist left-wing/left-libertarian party or a populist authoritarian/sover-
eigntist party. Indeed, in line with existing research on M5S’ behaviour in the European
Parliament (Bressanelli and De Candia, 2019), we claim that the Movement’s positions
and votes in foreign and security policy are actually closer to those of a ‘left-wing/left-
libertarian’ party. At the same time, relying on existing analyses that have stressed the
‘sovereigntist nature of the M5S’ (D’Alimonte, 2019; Vittori, 2017), we can expect that
the Movement also presents traits of a ‘sovereigntist’ party.
Our empirical findings suggest that M5S has maintained a broadly ‘pacifist approach’
to security and defence policy. Consistent with our claim, the MPs of the Movement have
generally supported humanitarian interventions and peacekeeping missions. Conversely,
they strongly opposed all the combat and anti-terrorism operations. Concerning interven-
tions dealing with human trafficking and illegal immigration, M5S has been more ambiv-
alent. However, even on this issue, the Movement can hardly be depicted as ‘sovereigntist’.
The main result of the empirical analysis, which has adopted two Italian parties as param-
eters, is that M5S is closer to a populist ‘left-wing/left-libertarian party’, such as Sinistra
Ecologia e Libertà (SEL), than to a populist ‘far-right/authoritarian and sovereigntist
party’, such as Lega Nord (LN).
This article makes three contributions. First, it clarifies how to investigate the ideo-
logical positioning attributed to a hybrid populist party, paving the way for similar
research interested in examining the ideological nature of ‘pure’ populist parties in Europe
and beyond. Second, and relatedly, it provides the first comprehensive analysis of the
attitudes and votes of a rising populist hybrid party, M5S, on crucial foreign policy
issues.3 Third, by illustrating the parliamentary behaviour of one of the most relevant
populist parties in terms of electoral consensus in Western Europe,4 rising to power after

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