Throughout this book, I have maintained that populism and constitutionalism, and in particular post–WWII constitutionalism (of which Italy is a prime example, as seen in Chapter 2) cannot be reconciled, due to the exclusionary, holistic and majoritarian nature of populism. As we saw in Chapter 1, this does not mean that populism and constitutionalism cannot have something in common, namely the importance of emotional reactions and the distrust of political power.

‘Constitutions belong to all but are not “empty” (politically neutral)’.1 With these words an eminent constitutional lawyer reacted to a series of attacks launched on the Italian Constitution by some political parties at the beginning of the new millennium. Indeed, the irony in this is that the new wave of populisms has been obliging constitutional lawyers to deal with some long-standing issues, including that of the neutrality of constitutions. Instead of embarking on a large-scale comparison, which may risk missing the historic roots of these phenomena, in this volume the analysis will be carried out by focusing on some important instruments of constitutional democracy –referendums and the prohibition of the imperative mandate, among others – and this will ensure consistency and coherence with the comparative law analysis carried out throughout the book. In this sense, while the present book has a precise focus on the Italian case, this does not exclude the possibility of framing this national case in a comparative perspective, as it is an ideal case study of post–World War II (WWII) constitutionalism.

For research like that carried out in this book, diachronic comparison and historical research are essential to show why some of the ambiguities that remained after World War II favoured the emergence of different waves of populism in Italy. The aim of this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, I shall clarify why the Italian case is so important to study the relationship between constitutionalism and populism. On the other hand, Italian political culture partly explains the variety of populisms experienced in the country.

In this chapter, I will analyse a case study that is crucial to exploring the way in which populists understand identity politics, while in subsequent chapters, I will investigate the perspective of politics of immediacy. The concepts of mimetism and parasitism presented in Chapter 1 will be tested, and the notion of sovereignism (‘sovranismo’) – frequently alluded to in the Italian debate and elsewhere – will be used as a case study.

In this chapter, I shall investigate the aspect of the politics of immediacy, exploring how populists understand the referendum. Following an idea endorsed by Davide Casaleggio, the mastermind of the Rousseau platform,1 former Minister Riccardo Fraccaro2 denounced the insufficiency of classic representative democracy and stressed the need for more direct democracy, especially with the advent of new technologies.

This book is the outcome of two projects that I have coordinated over the last four years. The first one is a Jean Monnet project called European Public Law-ius (Eur.Publ.ius), which was funded by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency of the European Union. The project, which ended in 2019, was devoted to the current challenges faced by the European Union, and of course among them there is the rise of authoritarian populisms in Hungary and Poland with the well-known rule of law crisis.

In this chapter, I shall undertake an in-depth analysis of how in-office Italian populists understand parliaments. Before going into the technicalities of constitutional law however, it is necessary to frame the issue in a broader perspective and mention the kind of politics that the Five Star Movement has in mind.

‘We will open up parliament like a can of tuna fish’.1 This is what Grillo said before the general election of 2013, when the Five Star Movement obtained its first representatives in the parliament. In the rhetoric of the movement, direct democracy is frequently understood as inevitably enriched by the use of new technology and in the long run, according to the Five Star Movement, this will reduce the centrality of parliaments.

On May 5 and 6, 2010 Greece witnessed extensive protests including a forty-eight-hour nationwide strike and demonstrations in major cities. Protests were provoked by the passing of three austerity measures by the Greek parliament in February 2010, in March 2010, and finally in May 2010. The measures were part of the conditions for the €110 billion first EU bailout, acquired in order to solve the Greek government debt crisis. These events ended with clashes between the police and anti-austerity protesters, during which the police made widespread use of tear-gas and flash bombs, and made multiple arrests. Three people died when some individuals set fire to a bank branch with Molotov cocktails, and tens of people were injured. One year later, the police once again made use of violence against protesters at the May 11 demonstrations. This was a few days before the Greek Indignant Citizens Movement on May 25, 2011 started to protest in major cities across Greece. In June 2011, in concomitance with the government discussions on the midterm adjustment program and additional austerity measures (the adjustment program was later passed on June 29, 2011), police clashed with demonstrators numerous times – again, making excessive use of tear-gas.

On 24 May 2011, in the middle of the parliamentary debate on the so-called mid-term adjustment plan, yet another round of austerity imposed by Greece’s international creditors, a call for a demonstration at Syntagma Square in Athens and at the White Tower in Thessaloniki appeared on Facebook. By the next day at least 20,000 people assembled in the two squares, mostly chanting “thieves, thieves” at parliamentarians and cursing the Parliament. The movement of the Greek Indignados or Aganaktismenoi was born. It would prove to be massive, expansive, and innovative. Immediately after the initial demonstrations, the main squares in the two cities were occupied, and simultaneous protests began in almost all major urban centers of the country. Interest would focus on Syntagma Square, however, where the occupation was symbolically confronting Parliament, juxtaposing the public assembly and the symbolic seat of political power. In the following days, the occupation grew exponentially, eventually reaching almost 400,000 participants on June 5th. In our dataset, there is an event associated with the Aganaktismenoi on almost every single day until the end of the episode on June 30th.

In the introductory chapter of this volume, we presented our case for studying interaction dynamics between governments, challengers, and third-parties in the “middle ground” because we share Tilly’s (2008: 21) view that this level of analysis offers the “opportunity to look inside contentious performances and discern their dynamics” without losing the opportunity to systematically analyze these dynamics in a quantitative framework. In this present chapter, we further develop this middle ground by presenting a novel method for studying these interaction dynamics. We concur with Moore (2000) that most of the literature on the interaction between governments and challengers is based on cross-sectional analyses using national, aggregate yearly data, which is fundamentally inappropriate for the questions raised about the interactions we were studying. To deal with such questions, we need sequential data that allows us to specify how the different actors react to each others’ previous actions. Such sequential data not only allows us to causally connect all the actions constituting an episode as we have done in Chapter 6, but it also permits us to take a step further and uncover regularities that occur in the interaction between the protagonists of the conflict. Drawing on the construction of action sequences from Chapter 6, we now focus on the relationship between actions and their triggers and examine some of the main themes and mechanisms in the literature on contention politics through this novel methodological lens. In other words, we shall take the mechanism-centered approach from the narrative tradition and marry it with some of the basic tools of time-series methodology to infuse it with statistical rigor. This, in essence, is the dynamic aspect of Contentious Politics Analysis that we put forward in this volume.

So far, we have mapped what the three stylized actors did in the (more or less) contentious episodes, treating all three actors as unitary entities. This chapter takes the analysis a step further by describing features of the coalitions and actor configurations. In doing so, we answer who the actors involved in the conflicts over austerity and institutional reforms were and how they are typically related to each other. Available protest event studies on the Great Recession indicate at least three organizational features of the recent protest wave in Europe (e.g., Carvalho 2019; Diani and Kousis 2014; Hunger and Lorenzini 2019; Portos 2016, 2017; Portos and Carvalho 2019). First, they highlight the crucial role of institutionalized actors, particularly labor unions, in bringing the masses to the streets early on when the crisis hit the European continent in 2008 and 2009. Second, newly established and loose networks played an essential part in the southern European countries hit hardest by the crisis – the Portuguese Geração à Rasca, Democracia Real, and the Indignados in Spain as well as their Greek counterpart Aganaktismeni are illustrative of this dynamic. Third, the moment of such noninstitutionalized players who entered the protest scene tended to be relatively short lived, but, remarkably, even in Spain, there are indications of a process of institutionalization as formal organizations (trade unions and political parties) became more important in later phases of the protest wave.

The previous chapters on interaction dynamics, the central aspect of the second part of this volume, have investigated the determinants of various action forms of the contending parties as a function of preceding action types or contextual features of the episodes. One particular feature of these dynamics, however, has remained unexplored. The flow of interaction between the contending parties does not proceed in a smooth, linear fashion – with one action triggering a reaction that in turn triggers a counter-reaction – as a stylized understanding of contentious politics might suggest. As we have shown earlier in Chapter 6 on the construction of action sequences, the empirical reality paints a more complex picture. While some actions indeed trigger one and only one further action and move the episode forward in that stylized fashion, others trigger two or more reactions, while still others put an end to a sequence and trigger no further actions at all. In other words, some actions have turned out to be considerably more consequential for the remaining part of the episode than others. Our first aim in this chapter is to highlight one type of such actions, in particular those with a heightened capacity to trigger an outstanding number of reactions, and seek to understand the regularities that characterize these actions. We shall refer to these actions as points of opening, inspired by the intuition that they open up contentious episodes to different threads of contention.

At the outset of this volume, we situated our approach between two main paradigms prevailing in the field of contentious politics, taking up the challenge that Tilly (2008) put forward more than a decade ago. One, epitomized by the “narrative” approach, focuses on conventional storytelling, where explanation takes the form of an unfolding open-ended story. The other, protest event analysis (PEA) (see Hutter, 2014 and Koopmans and Rucht, 2002 for reviews), or what we called the epidemiological approach, focuses on a narrower set of action types: namely, instances of popular mobilization in the streets, and primarily relies on statistical techniques to explain the temporal regularities of protest actions or protest waves (Lorenzini et al, 2020). We aimed to accomplish this task by drawing on the programmatic Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al. 2001) with an eye on preserving the conceptual depth of the former infused with the methodological rigor of the latter. In addressing “the middle ground” favored by Charles Tilly, we applied an analytical approach to the study of the dynamics of contention that allows for the systematic comparative analysis of causal patterns across individual narratives.