It would be a mistake to give too much weight to the desperate act of Luigi Preiti, the troubled, unemployed man who allegedly shot at and wounded two police officers in front of Palazzo Chigi, the official residence of Italy’s Prime Minister, late last month. And yet it is hard not to see something symbolic in the shooting, which occurred at the same time Italy’s new government was being sworn in. Preiti reportedly told police that he wanted to kill politicians, and anger against Italy’s political class has been the dominant mood in the country recently; politicians are routinely compared to zombies and vampires. In elections held in February, the Five Star Movement, a protest group led by the comedian Beppe Grillo, came out of virtually nowhere—with almost no television coverage or advertising—to win an astonishing twenty-five per cent of the vote on the anti-politician slogan “Tutti a casa!” (“Send them all home”). Italians have only grown angrier and more frustrated since then, as they have watched an election with a central message of “change,” written in the biggest possible letters, result in the formation of a government that looks very much like those that came before it.

In some ways, the newly formed government of Enrico Letta, an alliance of left and right that includes both the main center-left party, the Democratic Party, and the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right People of Liberty party, seems new: at forty-six, Letta is one of Italy’s youngest Prime Ministers; his cabinet contains more women than any before it, along with the country’s first minister of color. In other aspects, it is eerily familiar. Letta himself began his career as a member of the Christian Democrats, the party that governed Italy from 1946 until 1993, and his uncle, Gianni Letta, is one of Berlusconi’s closest advisers and an old Christian Democrat himself. And the country’s President is still Giorgio Napolitano, an eighty-seven-year-old who’s been in office since 2006. More troubling than the government’s content is the means by which it was formed: the usual bargaining among the big parties, exactly the kind of self-interested insider power politics that Italians have come to hate. Coupled with all of this is the death, on Monday, of seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti—a pillar of post-Second World War Italy—which makes the old political order, itself no picnic, seem like a golden age of ordinary dysfunction compared to today’s new hyper-dysfunction.

February’s elections may have sent a clear message of change, but they did not produce a government to accomplish it. The left-of-center coalition, headed by the Democratic Party, won the largest share of the vote, with thirty per cent. In theory, this was a victory; in reality, it was a defeat, one that has only been compounded since the vote. By all logic, it was an election the left stood to win handily, thanks to the failures of Berlusconi, who was forced to resign his post in 2011 with the country on the brink of financial collapse, but it managed to prevail by only the narrowest of margins. Even so, leftists still came away with an opportunity to form the first left-wing government in modern Italian history. They failed, in spectacular fashion, to capitalize on it.

The Democratic Party, under the leadership of Pier Luigi Bersani, ran a bland, lackluster campaign that lacked a clear identity. “People didn’t know what we stood for,” Rosy Bindi, a party leader, said in a recent interview with La Repubblica. “Grillo stood for ‘Send them home!’ Berlusconi stood for ‘No property tax!’ But what did we stand for?” As a result, the Democratic Party and its coalition barely out-performed both Berlusconi and Grillo, and found itself in desperate need of a new partner.

The first natural place for the Democratic Party to turn after the elections was Grillo. Many in the party greeted the comedian’s stunning success as a welcome wake-up call, an opportunity to pursue a strong reformist and progressive agenda and regain an identity that had been blurred through compromises made in the course of cobbling together shaky centrist coalitions. Bersani’s strategy was to adopt the more reasonable proposals of the Grillo program—a new electoral law, reducing the number of and salary for members of parliament, a conflict-of-interest law, and a corruption law—and to ask for Grillo’s help in passing important pieces of the Democratic Party’s agenda. The left had successfully done this in Sicily, where the local Democratic Party has, with the Grillo movement’s help, made several positive steps, including, most importantly, the elimination of the area’s provincial governments—a costly and redundant structure on top of the municipal and regional governments that was mainly a source of political patronage and corruption. Bersani tried, quite cleverly, to maneuver Grillo into a similar solution on a national level in the elections for the presidency of the Italian Senate, in which he needed Grillo votes to get his chosen candidate approved. While Berlusconi offered Renato Schifani, a former mafia lawyer, as his candidate, Bersani—to everyone’s surprise—proposed the anti-mafia prosecutor Piero Grasso, thus forcing Grillo’s movement to face a stark choice: A mafia lawyer or someone who has dedicated his life to fighting the mafia? Although Grillo had strictly forbidden his followers in parliament from joining any coalition with other parties, the Grasso choice was too much for some of them, and a handful of defectors used the Senate’s secret voting process to elect Grasso and defeat Schifani. Bersani had hoped that there would be room for coöperation with the substantial group of Grillo’s followers who were prepared to support a reformist agenda. But he had not reckoned with the intransigence of Grillo and the strange, non-traditional nature of his movement. Grillo was furious, and threatened to excommunicate anyone who broke with party discipline. And his response to Bersani’s overtures was to call Bersani “a dead man walking” and repeat his goal: send all the politicians home, win a hundred per cent of the vote in future elections, and replace the party system with some form of direct, Internet-based democracy.

Members of the Democratic Party hoping to establish good relations with the scores of newly elected Five Star Movement deputies found it rough going. When I visited the Italian parliament in late March, many deputies I interviewed said that they had never met or spoken with a Five Star deputy. Grillo’s followers—many in their early twenties and showing up to their new jobs wearing baseball caps and carrying backpacks—resolutely refused to join the daily life of the Italian parliament, where deputies sit around on couches in the elegant long room outside the voting chamber or schmooze at the bar of the Lower House. One leading Five Star deputy even refused to shake hands with the Democratic Party leader Rosy Bindi when Bindi tried to introduce herself. Many of the “Grillini” showed up to work and placed can-openers on their desks to signify that they were going to open up the parliament and expose its corrupt ways. “The Grillini are nowhere around,” one member told me. “They move in groups so that they can keep an eye on each other and avoid individual members talking with us and becoming corrupted.”