Palestinian flags are a familiar sight in Turin. Go to any big leftwing demonstration, and the chances are you’ll see one. Normally carried by ethnic Italians, every now and then Arabs will be visible marching with them, too.

This demonstration was no different. A nationally advertised event, led by governing coalition party Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), it was about stopping work on the TAV (Treno Alta Velocità), the two-plus decades in the works high-speed train network connecting the Italian city with Lyon.

The Palestinians have nothing to do with it. An ideal gateway topic, that had contributed heavily to the formation of M5S, few events since the end of the Cold War served more as a vehicle for progressive politics in Italy than the TAV controversy.

Reconciling concerns about social justice, economic development and the environment into a single platform, what started out as a conflict confined to northwestern Italy became a national event in the years following the collapse of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in 1991.

The party to most benefit would turn out to be comedian Beppe Grillo’s Cinque Stelle, which ended up placing third in the 2013 elections. Often criticised for being a moralistic front, whose only ideology is being oppositional, M5S would come to assume the space vacated by the PCI.

Nominally socialist and environmentalist, the party’s online collectivism and policy-deciding platform, Rousseau, was treated liked the second coming by many leftists, particularly Americans like ex-Adbusters editor Micah White, best known for his claims to the Occupy Wall Street brand:

Without a doubt, the community and consensus building Cinque Stelle codified online fulfilled a lot of the utopian expectations of the Internet. This was an example of it being politically leveraged as a force for democratisation, not surveillance. Not in Eastern Europe but Italy.

Tellingly, M5S has always claimed to be above it all. The party was meant to be an approach to politics, not an ideology, even though its leaders repeatedly said things identified with the left, such as decrying water privatisation, calling the plight of the Palestinians genocide, or founder Grillo repeatedly complaining about the ‘bourgeoisie’ on his blog.

To Silvio Berlusconi, the red bit has always been obvious. To this day he complains about it. But, to many progressives, particularly those who still identify as anti-capitalist, it’s more rhetoric than reality. Read any of their commentaries on Cinque Stelle and the ambiguity of its politics remains.

Unsurprisingly, the jury is still out, and it’s only been made more sceptical by M5S’s coalition government with the far-right Lega. Progressives might yet transform it into a properly left party. They’d just have to take the initiative and fill the space.

Hence the Palestinian flags at the No TAV demo. There was nothing ambiguous about that. All but forgotten by Italian governments over the last two decades, at one point, the Palestinian cause was espoused across Italy’s political spectrum, but especially the communist left.

Look around Turin today, and one can find numerous references to Gaza and intifadas on the city’s walls, and murals depicting Italians who died working with the Palestinians, such as the late journalist Vittorio Arrigoni, who was killed by a Salafist group in the Strip in 2011.

That M5S founder Beppe Grillo remains a supporter of the Palestinians, in spite of his antipathy towards migrants, must not be mistaken. Multiculturalism and immigration were not hot topics for Europe’s Cold War left like they are today. Anti-colonialist causes like Palestine were.

Hence, the flag of the other stateless Mideast people being flown in even larger numbers at the No TAV protest, that of the Kurds. Not just any Kurdish flags, such as those of northern Iraq’s KRG (Kurdish Regional Government) but the YPG, or People’s Protection Units.

A retro communist red star, imposed on a red or green background, the flags of Syria’s heroic Kurdish resistance movement, which had seized nearly thirty per cent of the country bordering Turkey and Iraq, proliferated at the southernmost boundary of Piazza Castello.

In between them popped up the occasional flag bearing the image of imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan, accused by Turkey of being the real leader of the YPG. If one wants to take Erdoğan’s side and argue that the YPG pose a threat to his country, this would be prime evidence.

Even if it were just revolutionary chic, the shoutout to the Kurds was still heartfelt. Few radical organisations today have the gravitas that the YPG does. They are the heroes of the Arab Spring, its only surviving remnant and an ideologically significant one at that.

Middle Eastern, anti-capitalist, secular and feminist, they are the left Levant Europeans always wanted out of Israel, the spirit of the Enlightenment in a part of the world with no prospects for anything. They even run their own country, albeit with a lot of military help from NATO.

The solidarity on display had an inescapably local angle, too. Pro-Kurdish protestors may have hijacked the No TAV event. But there was no escaping that their flags were reminders to M5S that it had gotten into bed with Italy’s most anti-democratic party to enter government since WWII.

This is the fundamental problem with the coalition agreement with the Lega, signed onto by M5S members in an online referendum in 2018. Though it catapulted the party into government for the first time and gave it ministerial portfolios in which it wields a decidedly more egalitarian influence than its coalition partner, Cinque Stelle lost its way over migration policy.

Though M5S has never distinguished itself on diversity issues, it had never, until this point, been party to an explicitly racist agenda either. For the very first time, governing with the Lega, it found itself bound by its coalition contract to support the policies of Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini, who had also assumed the interior ministry portfolio, overseeing migration and security.

Signing what became known as the Salvini Decree, which eliminated humanitarian protection status for those not eligible to be classified as refugees, but can’t be returned home, 130,000 persons given the two year permit were put at immediate risk of getting kicked out of refugee centres onto the street, and losing their right to work.

To critics of the decree, this aspect of the legislation was especially odious, as it put a stop to measures designed to integrate asylum seekers, providing them with education and job training. Forced back onto the street, the state had converted them into caricatured undesirables in need, whose marginality would inevitably force them into poverty and crime.

Unsurprisingly, splits began to emerge within Cinque Stelle over its approval of the decree. Four senators were expelled from the party and forced to pay fines for voting against it and Turin and Rome, both of which are governed by M5S mayors, refused to comply with the legislation, along with mayors of several other cities, including Milan, Naples and Palermo.

On 9 January, even though they claim to remain committed to the decree, Premier Giuseppe Conte, and Deputy Premier Luigi Di Maio surprised everyone by helping to secure the landing of 49 migrants languishing off the coast of Malta on two NGO migrant rescue ships which had been refused landing rights by Salvini.

The Cinque Stelle leaders also committed Italy to take in an undisclosed number of the refugees, over the head of Salvini, who insisted they had no authority to do this and that none of the asylum seekers would reach land.

It was the first time in months that the party leadership, which has always claimed to be less hostile to migrants, had shown some backbone. Without a doubt, M5S was feeling the pressure of having signed on to the Salvini Decree. Its credibility was at stake.

Already in the hot seat last July, for calling unconstitutional the Lega minister’s demand for a new census of Roma, and for all non-Italian Roma to be deported, Cinque Stelle chief Di Maio had not shown the same diligence concerning the decree. The problem is that it is just as problematic.

Enter the pronounced affection for the Palestinians and the Kurds at the Turin rally. It wasn’t just for show. The M5S may not be as cosmopolitan outside of the affluent northwestern city, with its strong left traditions. But on a certain level, particularly amongst its southern constituents, it still perceives itself as ethnic and discriminated against by white northerners like Salvini.

Why not be more sympathetic towards refugees and antiracist, then? Di Maio and Chamber of Deputies President Robert Fico, both Neapolitans, have repeatedly expressed their reservations about Salvini’s attitude towards migrants. Why create a government with him in the first place?

The problem is Cinque Stelle’s priorities. Emphasising social inequality and corruption, and democracy and the environment, to the exclusion of all else, has an especially anachronistic quality to it. It’s not that these concerns aren’t important. It’s just that racism is missing.

That’s what’s absent from the M5S lexicon, and why the party has become so easily outflanked in opinion polls by Matteo Salvini. As a fascist, he understands this, and that is why the refugee issue is the one he mines more than any other. Few problems tend to cast a shadow over progressive politics more than racism.

This is not to say that Cinque Stelle doesn’t have issues in other areas. But right now, its difficulty with the migrant crisis threatens to block what the party could do for Italy. If that means an end to its coalition government with the Lega, so be it. No amount of Palestinian and Kurdish flag-waving at its events will paper over that.

Joel Schalit is The Battleground’s commissioning editor. Photograph courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.