Abstract
The aim of this paper is to propose an interpretative key to Italy's populist shift in a context of multipopulism. The authors try to analyze the main populist phenomena that have animated Italian politics as variants of the same schema whose point of commonality lies in a shared civil matrix.
The hermeneutic thesis is based on the fact that the pattern of multipopulism in Italy has been determined by a succession of populist variants that have only one factor in common: belonging to civil society and, consequently, a marked antipolitical inclination. This anti-political mass attitude and the subsequent cases of populism are associated to the depoliticization process in Italy.
By depoliticization the authors mean a set of changes in the ways political power is exercised in the neoliberal era by legitimizing actors less able to witness the presence of the "political".