Coordinated populism: a reconstruction of M5S Directorate’s communication from 2013 to 2019

In the last decade, the rapid rise of the Five Star Movement has been the focus of many studies investigating populism and its characteristics. While the communicative role of the founder Beppe Grillo has been widely discussed in the literature, to date little attention has been paid to the relevance of the Directorate in shaping the political assets attributed to M5S. By analysing all the tweets posted by Di Battista, Di Maio and Fico from the Italian electoral campaign of 2013 until the European election of 2019, we will show how instead the peculiar political proposal of M5S has been built over time also thanks to the communicative coordination capacity of the Directorate and their strategic exploitation of digital platforms’ affordances. Indeed, the presence of a shared communicative leadership has laid the ground for the construction of a political proposal capable of intercepting and shaping the different souls of the Movement, without, however, affecting the rhetoric of opposition between people and elite on which populist movements rely. The algorithmic logic of customization that governs social media has instead accentuated the possibility for users to choose the «face» they like among the various and contradictory positions of the Directorate. In these terms, M5S communicative strategy highlights the elective affinity between social media and populist rhetoric, showing how the Directorate presence on Twitter has been an exemplary case of populist ability in using the algorithmic governance of digital platforms to one’s advantage. In this view, the avoidance of overlapping between the components of the Directorate is extremely relevant: the coordinated communication between different leaders ensures that no contradictions emerge within the discourses of the individual but also that the broad political proposal can generate a chameleonic and catch-all dimension inside the party.