The new Italian government was hailed by populists around the world. “What is happening here is extraordinary. There has never been a truly populist government in modern times,” Bannon told La Repubblica. “I want to be a part of it.” Bannon gloated that he had advised Salvini to make the deal with Five Star, and he claimed that he had advised Five Star as well. A source close to Bannon confirmed to WIRED that when he was in Rome in June, Bannon met with Davide Casaleggio.

Days after the new government took power, Salvini—assuming a dual role as both interior minister and deputy PM—closed Italy’s ports to migrant rescue boats and proposed a census of the country’s Roma community ahead of possible expulsions. Some four months later, Five Star’s universal basic income was approved by Parliament in the government’s annual budget. Di Maio promptly took to the balcony of the parliamentary palace to punch the air in celebration. “We’re going to end up with machines replacing many of today’s jobs,” he tells me later, echoing a common argument in Silicon Valley. “The basic income can be a tool not just to help struggling families but one that allows us to face the fourth industrial revolution.”

“If they expel me, it will mean that this is no longer the right place for me,” says Paola Nugnes, a left-wing Five Star senator. “There are so many like me in the movement.”

The EU has denounced Italy’s universal basic income as profligate. The country’s public debt stands at 2.3 trillion euros, or 130 percent of the country’s GDP, which far exceeds EU limits; authorities in Brussels fear that Italy’s spendthrift budget will cause the country to default on its loans. Salvini quickly seized on Europe’s rejection of the policy to drum up anti-EU support. As his rants against immigration and the EU continue, Lega is soaring past Five Star in opinion polls. Di Maio has done little to push back against the government’s rightward turn, even as the rebels in his party are growing more defiant.

Nugnes and Fattori have both courted expulsion from Five Star over the past year, after refusing to vote with the party at times. They have been subjects of internal investigation, severe criticism by Di Maio, and storms of online abuse. “If they expel me, it will mean that this is no longer the right place for me,” Nugnes says. But she adds: “There are so many like me in the movement. No one can know the future of the movement.”

Many believe that the future of the movement is Alessandro Di Battista. The popular former MP decided not to run for election in 2018, despite being omnipresent during the campaign; he says he wanted to get back to the “real world” outside Parliament for a while. Insiders speculate that the real aim of his political hiatus is to avoid hitting his mandatory two-term limit. Once his ally Di Maio’s time is up, many figure, Di Battista will take over the party’s leadership.

Of all the movement’s leaders, Di Battista is Five Star’s unabashed Casaleggian radical. On a scratchy WhatsApp line from Guatemala, where he has passed much of his time out of power, Di Battista comes out swinging when I ask about Five Star’s apparent rightward slide: “Today, whoever wants to take back sovereignty is considered a fascist, a nationalist, a populist, a demagogue,” he says. Such allegations, he says, are just another case of media elites missing the point. “The world can’t be judged from an attic in Manhattan. They don’t understand anything—just as they understood nothing of Trump and Brexit, just as they’ve understood nothing about the Five Star Movement.”

For Di Battista, Five Star’s grand techno-utopian project is never far from sight. “Representative democracy is obsolete,” he tells me. It will soon be as old hat as absolute monarchy seems to us today. “The future is inevitably direct democracy,” he says. But who knows if that future will be quite as inevitable without a hidden hand to steer it.

Redux Pictures (Casaleggio portrait source); Getty Images (all other portrait sources)

Darren Loucaides (@DarrenLoucaides) is a British writer who covers politics, populism, and identity.

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