Italy's 5-Star Movement under fire over city trash crisis

ROME: The anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, which polls suggest could win Italy's next election, is seeing its rise threatened by a mounting garbage crisis in one of the cities it governs.

The Tuscan city of Livorno, one of the largest of 16 local administrations controlled by 5-Star, has become the scene of a bitter national propaganda battle over who is to blame for overflowing skips and piles of rubbish in the roads.

The stakes are much higher than street cleaning in Livorno. The established parties, led by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party (PD), have launched a media blitz to say that 5-Star may be good at protesting but it is incapable of governing a medium-sized city, let alone the country.

In the last year the movement founded by comedian Beppe Grillo in 2009 has established itself as Italy's main opposition party and has risen steadily in the polls to within about 4 points of the centre-left PD.

Moreover, polls say that under a new two-round voting law introduced by Renzi, 5-Star would win power if elections were held today because most centre-right voters would switch to 5-Star if their own candidate were eliminated.

The next election is not due until 2018.

"Livorno is a picture of 5-Star's inability to govern," said Andrea Romano, a prominent PD deputy, in remarks echoed by a chorus of his fellow lawmakers.

Livorno's Mayor Filippo Nogarin, who ended decades of centre-left dominance in a surprise victory in June 2014, says his predecessors left the city's refuse collection firm with 42 million euros ($44.50 million) of debts due to entrenched mismanagement.

However, his warnings that the company was essentially bankrupt and his threats to ask prosecutors to investigate possible wrongdoing alarmed its employees, who have been working to rule and are now threatening strikes.

Nogarin's stance has also met opposition among his own supporters, and his majority on the city council looks shaky.

5-Star's most prominent politicians have rallied around the beleaguered mayor, sensing the danger that Livorno's problems present to the movement's national image, especially if Nogarin were to fall.

"As usual, where the 5-Star Movement governs, it has to build on the rubble left behind by the parties," said Luigi Di Maio, the 29-year-old deputy speaker of the lower house who has eclipsed Grillo to emerge as the group's most popular figure.