Italians woke up on Tuesday to the realisation of what their collective vote had done. Two out of every five Italian lawmakers will be new. The anti-political establishment Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) missed becoming the leading party in Parliament by a whisker. It still wiped out a number of minor parties and took away roughly five per cent of the vote from each of the major coalitions.

One can have the right polls but one must still see what is before one’s eyes

Romano Prodi’s one-seat majority in the Senate, cobbled together back in 2006, is now looked at with nostalgia by the centre-left coalition, which will remain a full 21 seats short of just such a razor-thin Senate majority even if it allies itself with the centrist group, disdained by voters, led by Mario Monti.

Although there’s much that’s still unclear, however, three messages from Italy’s election ring out clearly for Malta.

First, there’s the matter of the polls. Despite the surprising result, the polls were not quite at fault. Beppe Grillo had himself spoken of M5S getting the 25 per cent it did with foreign journalists over a week before the election. The surprise was generated by a combination of three factors.

First, Italian law prohibits the publishing of polls within two weeks of a general election. So the known polls were relatively old (they showed M5S at circa 15 per cent), especially when there’s an emerging pattern, across European member states, for elections to be decided only within the last five days.

Second, patterns were difficult to read in the light of the past, since there were two new political groupings on the scene: Monti’s coalition and Grillo’s movement.

Most of all, however, it seems that even those people, like newspaper editors, who did have access to the latest polls just didn’t see what was before their eyes. The last polls showed an increase in the number of people intending to vote but not a corresponding increase in the vote of the two major coalitions. Although people under-reported their intention to vote for M5S, sharp-eyed observers noticed that they must be going over to Grillo.

Here’s the first Italian message for Malta. One can have the right polls but one must still see what is before one’s eyes. I repeatedly come across Maltese voters who are convinced that on March 10 they will wake up to see a classic, tight, electoral result. But if the polls showing a consistent 11 to 13 per cent lead for Labour are right, the next Parliament will be unprecedented in the last 50 years.

In a two-party Parliament, the new electoral law, which grants a majority of seats in exact proportion to the number of first-count votes, an 11 per cent majority would grant Labour a majority of seven or nine seats.

The second Italian message concerns the nature of the M5S. When this article went to print, Italians were asking questions like: will the movement accept a coalition agreement with anyone? Will its legislators carry through their promise to freeze interest payments on national debt? Will they insist on holding a referendum on Italy’s membership of the eurozone?

One of the movement’s parliamentary candidates told The Guardian that she doubted that Grillo really meant to freeze interest payments. She said he didn’t give the MPs orders anyway since M5S was a grassroots movement.

Actually, Italy may be about to rediscover that a movement may be grassroots and undemocratic. Grillo is not just the founding president of M5S; he is its owner. He owns the name and the symbol.

Over the past three years, no M5S politician was permitted to take part in political discussions (except, sometimes, to answer brief questions). Italian journalists were routinely excluded (until complaints grew too much) from the backstage of M5S events while Grillo generally refused interviews (except with foreign journalists) or questions.

Virtually the only medium of communication of M5S policies was Grillo himself, through his blog and performances. A handful of M5S politicians who criticised the lack of democracy within the movement were expelled and attacked on his blog.

The movement does have a statute. In practice, Grillo and the group around him decide what ideas to take on and which to exclude. He’s put together a movement that spans left and right, appealing to small businesses, radical ecologists and activists who want workers to be declared co-owners of the firms they work for.

But how are M5S legislators going to vote when and if such issues arise? If they think Grillo is being too extreme, or not enough, will they flake away from the movement or will it implode?

Political movements, whether it’s M5S or the Tea Party in the US, have a way of reminding us that there’s a worthy reason why political parties evolved out of movements. They give members voting rights, procedures for getting rid of officials, even procedures for having ideas accepted even if they are opposed by the leader but attractive to a majority.

Anything that depends solely on the benevolence of the leader is retrograde: not democratic but patronising. It’s also extremely unstable because it cannot last without some people realising what the game is and, noisily, breaking away, disillusioned.

The third Italian message is obvious. With Europe’s third-largest economy about to embark on such a volatile journey, which could see it rock the eurozone, we had better pray for Maltese leaders of good judgement and steel nerves.

ranierfsadni@europe.com