Mainstream political parties have outlived their purpose as they cannot adapt to the changes in the political system and are out of step with the voters, Beppe Grillo, the founder of the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), said.

“The world of the old politics and old political parties,” which expect the people to trust them with defending the public interests, is “slowly dying out,” Grillo, a former Italian satirist and activist, told Ex-Ecuador President Rafael Correa during the “Conversations with Correa” show on RT Spanish.

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People are no more willing to just blindly follow some political forces, they are much more informed now, they seek for information in the internet and want to form their own opinions, he explained.

“The world is changing at a fantastic speed. However, the current generation of politicians does not feel these changes. They just do not see it,” Grillo said, adding that the politicians are oriented “on a short-term horizon.” Meanwhile, the society, particularly the young people, is no longer attracted by the ideas propagated by the mainstream parties. The existing “ideologies have outlived their usefulness,” Grillo said.

“There are just good and bad ideas,” he added, explaining that “they are not divided into ‘right’ and ‘left’ anymore.” The self-described anti-establishment activist then criticized the mainstream politicians for hiding their own inability to adapt behind the warnings about the perceived threat of populism.

“As for the populism, I am proud to be a populist, if the word ‘populus’ (the people) is still of some importance,” Grillo told Correa. “Our goal is to reach out to people, to encourage them to think for themselves, to give them instruments to fulfill their own ideas,” he added.

He agreed with Correa’s statement that the so-called “anti-populism” is what really poses a threat to the modern society as it seeks to keep the system unchanged. He particularly agreed that “anti-populism” is in fact a “means of attack” as it sees everything that challenges the system as populism and seeks to clamp it down.

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The mainstream media in the modern world often serves the state at the expense of people, Grillo warned.“People should have an opportunity to understand what is actually going on to get the necessary information to take an independent decision,” he said, adding that MSM are often misleading people and “spread fake news.”

Many media outlets are actually living on the subsidies from a state, the M5S founder said, warning that such situation effectively leads to a conflict of interest. “The media should get the financing from their readers and not from the state,” he said, adding that the Italian ruling coalition led by his movement is planning to deprive the media of the state subsidies.

“We are going to draft an anti-corruption bill, a bill about a conflict of interest, as one cannot just control all the TV channels, advertising and monopolize the media,” Grillo said.

You can watch the entire episode of the “Conversations with Correa” program in Spanish here.