We can get a sense of how this works by looking to Italy, where in 2016 the newly-elected mayor of Rome, a member of the Five Star Movement, killed the city’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics. The enraged mandarin at the head of the national Olympic committee called the decision “demagogic and populist.”140 He lives in a city of palaces and hierarchies—the mayor, in the Rome of trash removal and sewage disposal.
