After last week’s general elections in Italy, Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democrat who is running for Chancellor of Germany, said he was “shocked” that Italy had elected “two clowns.” One of the funnymen Steinbrück had in mind was Silvio Berlusconi, though Il Berlusca seems less like a clown than a B-movie zombie: no matter how many times a magistrate blasts him with charges of bribery, extortion, tax fraud, or sex with an underage prostitute, he keeps rising from the dead and running, running, running for Prime Minister. Steinbrück’s second clown was Beppe Grillo, a charismatic comedian and social critic—Italy’s answer to Stephen Colbert—whose three-year-old political movement had just won a quarter of the Italian popular vote to become the leading party in the lower house of parliament. The Economist made the same joke on its cover, with photographs of Grillo and Berlusconi, and the headline “Send in the Clowns.”

Grillo certainly doesn’t sound like a politician. “I was just down in Rome with our new parliamentarians—young, spotless, upstanding people,” he told me yesterday. “And we announced, ‘Ok, so now we’re going to get down to work, and keep all the promises we made during the election campaign.’ People stared at us wide-eyed and said, ‘Keep your election promises? How dare you?’ ” He sighed happily. “It’s marvellous what we’ve managed to do, with no money, in three short years. We’re bringing strong ideas back into government, words that we had inside ourselves but were afraid to say—solidarity, community, feeling a part of something.”

It’s hard to get the straight story about Grillo anywhere. The Italian press, both liberal and conservative, is unrelentingly hostile. Grillo’s pledge to end the widespread political control and funding of the Italian media may help to explain this. Likewise, the political old guard in Italy denounces Grillo as—take your pick—a right-wing demagogue; a left-wing anarchist/saboteur/naysayer without constructive plans for Italy; a narcissist in the thrall of a personality cult; or the puppet of some menacing, but as yet unidentified, puppet master. This belligerence may have something to do with Grillo’s promises to “send home” the entire ruling class, Europe’s most entrenched and self-serving, which he blames for Italy’s badly frayed economic and social fabric. It’s also true that some Italians simply don’t know what to make of him (and others have listened seriously to him and just don’t agree).

Some time ago, I spent a week with Grillo while reporting a Profile for The New Yorker—snooping around his home near Genoa, talking with him backstage after shows and rallies, travelling with him in Lombardy and Sardinia. What I saw makes me think that Peer Steinbrück and other politicians, abroad and in Italy, along with much of the press, has him wrong. True, Grillo is a funny fellow, but in person he’s also pensive, inquisitive, and a tad professorial; his library is filled with underlined, dog-eared tomes on economics, renewable energy, and healthcare, and he frequently sounds out ideas with their authors, members of a Nobel-studded brain trust that includes Joseph Stiglitz, Muhammad Yunus, Lester Brown, and Dario Fo. Grillo ignores other politicians and the press, and broadcasts his messages through alternative channels: comedy shows, city-council meetings, demonstrations, and MeetUp gatherings across Italy, and via his Web site, which is run by the Internet guru Gianroberto Casaleggio but displays Grillo’s blend of irreverence, optimism, and fruitful obscenity. (Much of it plays with words in a way that doesn’t come across easily in translation.)

Grillo told me yesterday that his Movimento 5 Stelle (“Five-Star Movement,” frequently abbreviated as M5S) isn’t a political party at all but “a democratic dialogue born online and in the piazze. Every ten days, we vote on positions, always working from below, never from above—the opposite of the political pyramid that has suffocated our democracy.” In contrast to members of the political class, M5S parliamentarians must have no criminal record, will serve a maximum of two terms of office, and will take home only about a third of their salary. (The balance will be returned to the government, or used to fund social programs like microcredits.)

If wanting to demolish and rebuild Italy’s dysfunctional political system makes you a radical, then Grillo certainly qualifies, though his radicalism is methodical: the M5S program, with its action steps for the economy, public health, education, energy, and other cruxes of public life, is online, and much of its content will be familiar to anyone who has listened to Grillo’s comedy routines for the last few years. Had Occupy Wall Street produced a leader with long-term vision, and a manifesto of concrete goals, it might have resembled the Movimento 5 Stelle. For all the novelty and Web jargon of Grillo’s message, too, it has a homespun quality, stressing old-school virtues like trasparenza (“transparency”), coerenza (“consistency”), efficienza (“efficiency”), and above all, democrazia (“democracy”).

“Italian citizens need to participate directly in running their country, as they once did,” Grillo told me. “Voters have to enter the fray, take a personal role in political life. They have to inform themselves directly about issues, and not just swallow what they hear in the mainstream news. I want to tell Italians, ‘You cannot delegate anymore—this movement is you.’ ”

Photograph by Stefano De Luigi.