The Threat to the Political Establishment By the New Populist Parties: A Comparison between Podemos and Five Stars Movement

From the nineties on, the crisis of traditional political families has become particularly intense in the democracies of southern Europe, with an increase in electoral volatility, the contraction of membership and crises of confidence as well as of electoral consensus. In these realities, alongside the traditional parties of the twentieth century, a generation of new political parties was born that reject the right / left division, proposing a new fracture between the low and the high of society, or - better - between the people and the elite. In Spain and Italy, the anti-establishment political offer is marked by the birth of Podemos and the Five Star Movement. This article focuses on the comparison between these two new political parties, highlighting differences and analogies in terms of policy, identity, and organization. The research hypothesis developed in this paper refers to the different form and identity in which populism is expressed in the two national cases. From the methodological point of view, the comparison between the two parties will be conducted through the analysis of the text of the electoral programs of the two different political forces. In order to have a full definition of national and supranational issues that characterize the two political groups, we will consider the official electoral programs presented in the national political elections and in the European elections in the period running from 2014 to 2017.