 Good afternoon, everybody. You're all very welcome to Trinity College. He says as if he's just been given a professorship. My name is Barry Andrews. I'm the Director General of the Institute of International European Affairs. And this is the fifth in a series on populism that we are co-hosting with Trinity College Dublin since last summer. And we are working on a policy paper looking at the implications of the rise to prominence of populist parties across Europe and some of the implications for Ireland. And we're very, very privileged to be joined by a very distinguished speaker today, Dr. Lara Ferrara, who, a PhD, who is working incredibly hard in the European Parliament for the Chincustella movement as an MEP. Her list of rapporteurships is incredibly long and it really is quite excellent. To introduce today's event, what I'd like to ask Professor Kizam Arikan, who's the Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, who delivers a course on political psychology here in Trinity College to make some introductory remarks. Thank you. Thank you very much. So I am also at the same time today representing Trinity Research in Social Sciences, which is co-hosting this event with IIEA. Trinity Research in Social Sciences was founded in 2015 to support and advance world-leading research in the social sciences. It brings together social scientists from across the university and around the world and hosts various events with the aim of supporting and fostering social science research. Tris has recently started this exciting collaboration with the IIEA that includes a series of talks and workshops regarding current social and political issues, including Brexit, migration, and populism. And in fact, this is one of the talks in the series titled Populism and Challenges to the Liberal Order. In her address today, Dr. Ferrara will discuss the history and rise to the power of the five-star movement, which is a new grouping that became the largest political party in Italy in the March 2018 elections. She will argue that the five-star movement is a political association without ideologies but with ideas, principles, and values that wants to put the needs and the rights of the citizens at the heart of political decision-making. So it is our pleasure. Thank you. Just to introduce the speaker, Lara Ferrara is a member of the European Parliament with the five-star movement, which, as Ghazan has just described, describes itself as an Italian political movement that promotes direct participation of citizens in the management of public affairs. Following her election to the European Parliament in 2014, she was appointed Vice-Chair of the Committee on Legal Affairs, and she's also a member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justices, and Home Affairs. She previously worked as a lawyer, and she received her PhD in Theory and History of Human Rights at the University of Florence. Prior to this, she received her MA in Law from the University of Bologna, and her BA in Law from the University of Calabria. So please put your phones on silent, if you would, if you would, and also the opening remarks are on the record, and the Q&A is under Chatham House Rule. Dr. Lara Ferrara. So good afternoon. Thank you very much for inviting me to deliver a speech at this prestigious institute here in Dublin. So my name is Lara Ferrara, and I'm an Italian member of the European Parliament since 2014. This is my very first political as well as institutional experience, even if I have on my shoulders years of activism in the field of human rights. When I ran from the European Parliament, I was only 30 years old citizen without public institutional experiences, exactly like the other 16 EP members and the other 150 members of the Italian Parliament elected within the five-star movement. You should now ask you how it is possible that a group of simple citizens, even if very confident in the necessity to drive a political change through democratic institutions, could run for a seat and win at the very first attempt becoming the spokesperson of the first Italian political movement. All of this has been possible thanks to the idea of two persons, Bepe Grillo and Gian Roberto Casaleggio, the two founding fathers of the five-star movement. They took account of the huge distance of citizens from political institutions that has been caused by professional politicians, a distance that on the one side left politician free to serve their own interests more than the public interest with consequence in terms of corruption, risk management and inefficiency. On another side, this distance resulted in a great discontent as well as in the spread of a sentiment of disaffection towards the democratic institutions such as the parliament suffered by the Italian citizens. In this connection, Bepe Grillo and Gian Roberto Casaleggio understood that it was necessary to cut the distance in order to give back the political power as well as the sovereignty to the people. The main instrument to cut this distance, in their opinion, was to promote the participation of the people to the decisional power through all the possible direct democracies means. Therefore, in the 2005, they started promoting the self-organization of group of citizens through several local meet-up all over the country, having always as a guide and a point of reference the blog Bepegrillo.it that during those years was one of the most prominent and followed political and information blog of the world. Through the internet and the social gathering and meeting platforms, thousands of citizens who followed the blog Bepegrillo.it and Grillo's shows met daily together to learn, deepen, talk about issues of society and to carry out concrete battles on renewable energy, sustainable mobility, zero waste, fight against corruption and mafias, public water, ethical economy, fight against land consolidation, participated in direct democracy and many others. So the goal was not to occupy a seat in a city council or in parliament, but to be informed, to inform people to change society and politics with new projects that arise directly from citizens themselves. In this connection, citizens started to bring their voices to the municipalities through popular petitions and motions of popular initiatives. Meetup, an international instrument, became in Italy the first spontaneous gathering opportunity for social utility, a tool to share ideas and proposals. And in a short time, the groups born on the internet challenged the political and institutional system of the country, promoting renewal from below and people started to respond by creating a critical mass able to reason on real problems and sustainable solutions. Two years after the first political public reunion of the blog followers and activists that has been held in Bologna on the 80th of September, 2007, Beppe John Roberto decided to found the movement with the aim to actively participate into the political and decisional process through the elections. So on the 8th of March, 2009, in Florence, was launched the project, Liste Civicae, five-star, so five-star, civic lists project. Each star representing a fundamental battle of meetups, the public water, zero waste and sustainable development, renewable energies and energy efficiency, sustainable mobility, connectivity. These are the five-star. In the municipal elections of May 2009, more than 45-star municipal councillors have been elected. In summer 2009, Beppe Grillo decides to be candidate to the post of secretary of the Democratic Party, but his candidacy was excluded by the board of the Democratic Party. And this was the last attempt to try to have a dialogue with the traditional party system. In this occasion, Piero Facino, one of the most prominent leaders of the Democratic Party, said about Beppe Grillo, let's make a party of his own and let's see how much votes he takes. And it was a sort of prophecy for us because in the 4th of October 2009, at the Teatro Smeraldo in Milan, Beppe Grillo and John Roberto Casaleggio announced the birth of five-star movement and launched a program with the idea of creating a new civic awareness through the use of internet as a mean for democratic democracy and collective participation as a new way to do politics. A movement and not a party outside the traditional left-right paradigms. So the movement was born on the day when San Francesco, the patron saint of Italy, he celebrated with the aim of raising it to a dimension that is not that narrow and myopic of politics, but that without limits of the spirit and of human beings. So the five-star movement contains in five points the five-stars, the main key points of the program that I said to you before. The pivotal bottles carried out by the five-star movement are clear and insensitive. Stop the privilege of the political class, stop to condemn that people in the parliament, stop to the waste of public money, more transparency and accessibility to public records. Furthermore, the characteristics required to be candidates and therefore future members of public bodies represented an absolute novelty in the Italian political landscape and a specific future of the five-star movement. So candidates must be without criminal records. Members of the parliament have to cut drastically their salaries. Maximum two electoral mandates are allowed. Independency from any other party it has no political alliances. So the five-star movement does not have party structures made of secretariat and intermediaries, but each one can be registered to the movement blog via internet in a certified way through his identity card. Each member of the movement can vote and make direct decisions or make proposals through the internet blog. In October 2012, Bepe Grillo swam the Strait of Messina that divide the Italian peninsula from Sicily to demonstrate that nothing is impossible. And in the regional elections, always in 2012, the five-star movement becomes the first political force of the Sicilian regional assembly. It was the first boom of the five-star movement and this huge success was followed by the incredible result of the national elections of 2013 when the five-star movement became at its first attempt the first political force represented in the Italian parliament. After five years of strong opposition against the traditional parties, we won the national elections of the 4th of March 2018 with the 32% of score. Unfortunately due to a bad electoral law written against us, as frankly said by the other traditional parties, we had to search an agreement with other political forces elected in the parliament in order to form a government and enforce the points of our electoral program. First of all, the introduction of the Radito-Dicitatin that is the main point for us. It has the minimum income to struggle poverty and then the reform of the pension scheme law to let people go to pension and create new jobs. But I will talk about this topic later. So now I would like to tell you what is in a nutshell the five-star movement before introducing the argument of direct democracy. The five-star movement is a free association of citizens is not a political party nor it will become in the future. The movement has no leftist or rightist ideologies but just ideas. And it wants to achieve an efficient and effective exchange of opinions and democratic considerations outside of association and party ties and without the mediation of governing or representative bodies. The movement aims at recognizing to the totality of citizens the role of government and address usually allocated to few people. It's an ambitious goal that we will pursue through the affirmation of direct democracy that in our opinion is the future of democracy. In the future in fact, parliaments could be considerated obsolete thanks to the evolution of internet and digital technologies. The legislative power then will be exercised directly by citizens. Today somebody still think that internet does not allow participation in political life. Somebody are still convinced that the 19th century model of organizing politics is here to stay. There are nowadays systems able to connect a large number of people that have also emerging properties that are going to produce revolutionary changes. These systems allow us to build the communities based on models of production and distribution of knowledge and imaginable until a few years ago. This is also happening for models of democratic participation in political life. Connecting people, giving them the opportunity to share resources, to decide, to train, to take actions on their territory. Brings out from forms of digital and participatory citizenships that until a few years ago were very hard even to imagine. According with these thoughts, Rousseau, the operating system of five-star movement has been developed. The goal of Rousseau is the management of the five-star movement in its various elective components, Italian and European parliaments, regional and municipal councils, as well as the participation of the members of the five-star movement, first of all their activists. Through, for example, the drafting of laws and the vote for the choice of electoral lists or to settle position within the five-star movement. Anyone can access the Rousseau website as a guest, but to access all the functions, it is necessary to be enrolled in the five-star movement by a verified registration that requires the exhibition of a certified document. Since its launch, Rousseau has developed 11 functions and today Rousseau has over 100,000 registered members. Since we're starting voting online, there have been 232 votes on Rousseau. Rousseau is the more clear proof that a new model of participation is possible. And Rousseau shows that the concept of democracy is evolving. In our opinion, democracy is, in general terms, having the opportunity to participate proactively to all the democratic decisions of the community where we live at every level, local, regional, national, European. And in this connection, democracy is to be free to choose once our candidates. Since the establishment of the five-star movement, there were 72 votes to choose our candidates at all levels. The prime minister candidate, the president of the republic, the candidates to the Italian and European Parliament, but also the governors of the regions, mayoral candidates and civic councillors candidates in the municipalities. In our opinion, democracy is to define the government programs together. Just to give you an example, the program that led the five-star movement to the government has been proactively written and voted on Rousseau by its members that expressed more than 2.4 million preferences spread over 26 votes, 104 questions, and 348 priorities. Democracy is also to decide what to finance in order to decide where to allocate the salary cuts of regional councillors of the five-star movement. The members have evaluated over 350 projects for an amount of 1.2 million euro. Democracy is also giving a personal contribution to shape and draft a law to be proposed in the parliament. Through Lex Parliament, Lex Regions, and Lex Europa, the five-star movement community has been able to participate in the drafting of over 600 acts presented by its own spokespersons who have seen more than 90,000 Rousseau members' interventions among amendments, changes, objections, suggestions, or report of the effects of form. So democracy is also sharing good practices. On the sharing function of the platform, our spokesmen in the region and in the municipality have shared more than 3,000 acts between proposals for board resolutions, motions, agenda, bills, and the electoral programs. The concept of democracy means also studying the e-learning application on the platform and the training in the training meetings on the territories have promoted participation in curses and days of study for more than 14,000 people. Democracy is to be proactive on one-star territory. It's just one year from its release that call to action function gave birth to 4,148 active citizenship initiatives organized from below. About 70 events each week will more than 400 with the official events that the local spokespersons of the five-star movement have organized in their territories and loaded on the activism function in just over six months. Democracy is to imagine the future. We have built a model of participation in political life that is unique in the world. With the Rousseau Open Academy, we decided to go farther and we believe that democracy is more than a vote on a ballot but a free and conscious exercise of the new individual and collective rights allowed by the use of internet. We are experiencing a new season of participatory democracy in which we must be protagonists. On the basis of this consideration, maybe I think that you can say that Rousseau is not just a trend and direct and participated democracy as I said before is the future. So considering what I said until now, you could think that our movement exists and acts only on internet but nothing could be more wrong. On the most important, one of the most important strong point of the five-star movement is indeed the local participation and the activism of their members whether or not they have been elected in some public body. We all mobilise our own capacities in order to be social actors rather than passive subjects. Each of us is committed to manage the resources, make decisions and control the activities that affect our political and social lives applying the principle one worth one. In this connection, every weekend we are present in our territory to listen to the people, to explain our parliamentary or administrative activities, to decide together what actions has to be taken to face both local and national problems. It's therefore easy to understand how strong and vital are the ties between citizens, activists and spokespersons of the five-star movement elected in the institutions at every level. Now it's time to talk about our government action. As you know, with 32% of votes, we won the last national elections in Italy. Even if we don't have the absolute majority of seats in the parliament, we didn't escape from the responsibility to form a government. In this connection we presented to the parliament our programme and priorities in order to see which political force would like to take the honour and the responsibilities to change Italy with us according to this premises. Only one party, the League of Matteo Salvini, accepted this challenge. Therefore, we signed a contract of government that doesn't mean a typical political alliance, but just a written agreement with a number of political goal that we are committed to reach in the next five years. I try to summarize some of these goals. First of all, public water. That is also one of our stars. Public water so means that the protection of the water as a common good as a referendum will express it in 2011. Environment, green economy and zero waste. Environment sustainability through the carbonized and the economy, energy efficiency and renewable sources, support of the green economy, research innovation and training for ecological worker development and promotion of the circular economy. Bank for investments and savings, establishment of an investment bank for small and medium enterprises, saving protection, separation between a credit bank and an investment bank. Conflict of interests, prediction of conflicts of interests in the presence of interference between a public interest and another public or private interest that could influence the objective exercise of a public function, regardless of an economic advantage. Application of the law also for non-governmental positions. Another main point is the defense, protection of the armed forces personnel, hiring new resources with increased resources and endowments, rationalization of resources in military expenditure also with reference to the reform of the abandoned real estate assets. Review the international mission in relation to the actual national interest. About foreign affairs, acknowledgement of our membership of the Atlantic Alliance as well as of our alliance with the United States of America, openness to Russia to strengthen trade relations. About rapid and efficient justice, the separation of judiciary career, simplification and reduction of trials, enhancement of legitimate defense, tightening penalties for sexual violence, fair compensation for victims of violent crimes, prescription reform of crimes, penalty increases for theft, robbery, fraud, speeding up of trials, class actions for citizens and business, reduction of access to justice codes and building of new prisons. Immigration, so overcoming the doubling regulation, respect for the principle of first sharing of responsibilities between EU countries, repeated procedures for verifying the rights to refugee status, transparency of public funds for the reception system, cooperation between countries. About job, introduction of the minimum early wage, reduction of the tax wage and simplification of bureaucratic procedures, strengthening of employment centers, contrast to the precariousness and to the effects of the job act, strengthening of work training pathways. About the fight against corruption, increased penalties for crimes against the public administration, interdiction from public offices for corrupts and corrupting, introduction of undercover agent and provocative agent, strengthening of the national anti-corruption authority, more protection for whistleblowers, strengthening interceptions especially for corruption, strengthening of the crime on political mafia exchange vote. About the income of citizenship and pension of citizenship. The introduction of the citizenship income as a basic income for Italian citizens aimed at job reintegration. The support will amount to 780 euros per month per person based on the OECD scale for larger households. The beneficiary of the income will have to adhere to the job offers coming from the employment centers, maximum three proposals within two years and in case of refusal to benefit disease. An investment of two billion euros for the reform of employment centers. Introduction of the pension of citizenship in order to guarantee a minimum pension for those living below the minimum poverty line. About the institutional reforms of autonomy and democracy. Reduction of the numbers of the members of the parliament. Introduction of the mandate constraint for members of the parliament. Strengthening of direct democracy, regional autonomy and a guarantee of funds in favor of local authorities. Introduction of a proactive referendum. Quorum suppression for abrogative referendums. Strengthening of the legislative initiative. Transparency on the financing of foundations connected to political parties. Evaluation of the performance of the public administration managers. Spending review laws and simplifying the public administration. About the health care. Strengthening of funds for the public health service. Protection of regional autonomy in the organization of health services. Fight against ways, corruption and inefficiencies. About security, legality and law enforcement. Increase of funds, means and equipment. Stuff increase. Reorganization of the local police with increase of means and tasks. Serious contrast to bullying. Contrast to gambling. Speeding up of evictions for illegal occupants and repatriation of foreign illegal abusers. Investments in road safety. About the cuts of the costs of politics, costs of institutions and gold pensions. Cuts in costs of politics of useless bodies and privileges. Equalization of the social security system of parliamentarians, regional councillors, et cetera, to the social security system in force for all citizens, even for the past. Reduction of blue cars, state aircraft and personal escort services. Cuts in gold pensions not justified by the contributions paid. About transport, infrastructure and telecommunication. Reduction of the use of vehicles powered by diesel and petrol engines. Incentives for hybrid and electric vehicles. National infrastructure plan for the recharge of vehicles powered by electricity. Strengthening of electric car sharing. Development of urban and extra urban cycle networks. Investment of resources to equip ports and modernization and up-grinding of rail lines. About European Union. The revision of the European governmental agreements. The fight against the counterfeiting and falsification of Made in Italy products. Rediscussed the Italian contribution to the EU. Opposition to international free trade agreements such as TRETA, MES, China and TTIP. Some of the most symbolic goals of our contract of government have been already introduced in the first budget law that our government drafted. First of all, the introduction of the income and of the pension of citizenship. So these are, in a synthesis, yeah, the principal items that you'll find in the contract of government between us and the League of Matteo Salvini. So often the five-star movement is accused of populism. In the negative sense of the word, that means demagogy, cultural roughness, inconclusive rebellion. Honestly, we are not afraid to be called populists. In our opinion, indeed, we believe that if democracy is government of the people, populism means people's movement. Therefore, it is a synonymous of democracy. We just think that we have no leftist or rightist ideologies. We think that we are simply on the side of citizens. And in this sense, we are proud to be considered populist. But there is no doubt that our political action is concrete and aim at putting people's needs and rights at the heart of political decisions. Unfortunately, the European Union of the last years seems to have forget that it has been established to create an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen. This is, we can find it in the article one of the EU Treaty. In the last decades, it seems that the main concern of EU was to protect banks and financial powers. Anyone concerns about the solidarity principles like the immigration crisis in the Mediterranean and the fall of solidarity towards Italy is showing. So therefore, we believe that this Europe doesn't work properly in the interest of their citizens, but one thing must be clear. We are not against Europe. We are critical with this situation, but we would like to strengthen it, renewing the spirit of solidarity and attention to the people aimed by the founding fathers. In this connection, we would like to propose a sort of third way to improve the rights as well as the economical and social conditions of European citizens. So thank you for your attention and I remain here at your disposal for clarification and questions. Thank you very much.