The terrace of a private golf club on Sardinia’s Emerald Coast feels like an unlikely spot to meet one of Europe’s leading populists. Below us, a perfectly groomed course nestles into the hilly Mediterranean shrub land. In the distance is blue sea, dotted with yachts. The clientele — just a dozen or so people — is mostly foreign, and wealthy.
Beppe Grillo, successful comedian turned leader of the Five Star Movement, a protest party backed by nearly one in four Italians, picked the place because he’s on a two-week holiday in the area. He says he doesn’t play golf himself, though, as “You need to be calm.”
He is dressed in classic summer clothes: white short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned at the top, and very light blue jeans, with a small tear above the knee. At 66, his hair is white, curly and wild but his glasses are stylish and I can smell his cologne. When his phone rings, the tone plays the guitar riff from “Bad to the Bone”, a 1982 rocker by George Thorogood and the Destroyers.