Even by the standards of Italian politics, it was a bonkers week: we thought we had a government, then we didn’t and now, three months after the general election, we really do. Giuseppe Conte’s new administration is, by a long shot, the most populist government in Europe. This is the beginning of Italy’s “Third Republic”.

There are a few key concepts from Italian politics that explain what the populists are rebelling against. The first is trasformismo, a word associated with Italian democracy since its inception: it implies the art of corrupting or co-opting all opposition. It’s like a football match in which half the players on the losing side join the winning side mid-match. Incessant disloyalty is masked by intellectual daintiness.

Rather than confrontation and clarity, there has been compromise and whispers. Behind the backs of the electorate, there’s an inciucio, a Neapolitan word that implies a secret pact. Instead of public good, there is private gain. Radicalism is absorbed and neutered. Everything is farraginoso, they always say: messed up or muddled.

That leads to another vital concept: gattopardismo or “leopardism” (after the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa). It’s the illusion of change to ensure that everything stays the same. During the First Republic (1946-1992), there were so many parties that ballot papers were called “bed-sheets” and yet of the 52 governments, 48 were led by the Christian Democrats.

Reinvention is constant: losing parties change name as often as a toddler changes nappies. There are as many new electoral laws as there are elections; there have been three new voting systems in the last 13 years. And yet the electorate just can’t get shot of charlatans such as Silvio Berlusconi (four-time prime minister) or the late Giulio Andreotti (seven-time PM) – both notorious for their proximity to the Cosa Nostra. Many Italians call their democracy a mafiocrazia or a peggiocrazia (a “worse-ocracy”).

There are two reactions to that treacly system that are now diametrically opposed: the first is esterofilia, a love of all things foreign. Most Italians hold their politicians in low esteem and have been delighted to see powers devolved to the European Union. For the same reason, the electorate has been content to be governed by technocrats: there have been three “technocratic” prime ministers since 1992 and during last week’s crisis we very nearly had a fourth.

Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio, left, and the leader of the far-right League, Matteo Salvini Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images

But the other response is qualunquismo (“common man-ism”). The term was coined in the immediate postwar era, but it reemerged as a form of furious, coarse populism in the early 1990s when Umberto Bossi shouted from the podium that “the Northern League has a hard-on”. He wanted to screw the patrician establishment. One of the shoutiest slogans of the Five Star Movement (M5S) a few years ago was simply “fuck off”.

Those two comprehensively won the March election with just over 50% of the votes between them. In a country with 11% unemployment, and in which the number of people living in poverty has tripled since 2006 to almost 5 million, Five Star’s promise of a basic income of €780 a month was an winner. Many admired, too, their uncompromising attitude to politicians with criminal convictions: they adamantly refused to negotiate with Berlusconi.

The trouble is that in cities where Five Star is already in power, such as Rome, the party has often appeared incompetent and chaotic. And there’s darkness in the populist coalition: the League, having dropped the “northern” prefix, is no longer secessionist but nationalist. Its far-right policies are snarlingly opposed not just to immigrants (it has promised to deport hundreds of thousands of refugees and build vast new detention centres) but also to the EU.

If the populists have won the political battle, the economic one will be even harder. Last week, the country obsessed over what is called lo spread: it’s the divergence between Italian and German bond yields. Put simply, the higher the difference, the less the market trust in Italy and the more it costs the country to borrow. Last week, lo spread approached 3%. Italy’s public debt is running at more than 130% of GDP. A proposed new flat tax of 15% will reduce revenue by €75bn a year, while the basic-income policy could cost €16bn a year.

That, perhaps, is why the key posts in the new administration have been given to well-educated technocrats. It seems astonishing to a British observer that the prime minister, the finance, foreign and European ministers are all unelected university professors. If this is a populist revolution, the revolutionaries look suspiciously establishment.

• Tobias Jones lives in Parma. He is writing a book on Italy’s football ultras