5 Years Ago Luigi Di Maio Was Living at Home. Now He May Lead Italy.

POMIGLIANO D’ARCO, Italy — After leading the anti-establishment Five Star Movement to a stunning result in Italy’s national elections, Luigi Di Maio returned triumphantly to his small hometown near Naples.

Thousands of adoring supporters chanted “Pres-i-dent” and “Lu-i-gi” and gave their local boy a bouquet of yellow flowers. But no one was more ecstatic at his success than his mother, Paola Esposito, who said she was “very, very proud.”

And to think, she added, he was living at home “until five years ago.”

Now Di Maio, 31, a college dropout and a former soccer stadium usher, may be first in line to become Italy’s next prime minister after the Five Star Movement won the most votes in the March 4 election.

His improbable ascent is a measure of Italy’s suddenly turbulent politics. But it also reflects the youthful, new-kid-on-the-block appeal of the Five Star Movement, as well as what critics say is one of its most glaring shortcomings — a lack of real-world experience.

Among his credentials, Gigi, as Di Maio is often called, was the treasurer of his elementary school class and the president of his high-school student body before he became vice president of the lower house of Parliament at 26, swept along on the coattails of his web-based party.

Five Star won the support of a third of Italian voters in this month’s election, by far the most of any political party. That was not enough to grant it a governing majority, leaving Italy in the midst of political paralysis that could force another election.

Di Maio is looking to form a government, despite Five Star’s pledge to shun coalitions. And there is a real possibility he will join forces with the anti-immigrant, anti-euro and hard-right League — together the parties won more than 50 percent of the Italian electorate.

That prospect strikes fear into the heart of the European Union, but Di Maio seems anything but scary. And that’s the point.

His groomed headshots are right out of an Italian barbershop, and it is a look that the party’s shaggy founders picked to take their party mainstream. Di Maio is reassuring, seeming more like an old-style centrist politician than a revolutionary. In his first public act after declaring his candidacy for prime minister, he made a pilgrimage to church to kiss a relic containing the blood of Naples’ patron, San Gennaro.

He has assured investors in London that his party isn’t dangerous. Di Maio didn’t just take lessons from the media consultant the party hired to coach candidates; he moved in with her.

But in becoming the inky-eyebrowed face of Five Star, Di Maio has also become invested with its power. Last Tuesday he wielded it with a menacing smile, saying the parties who refused to support a Five Star-led government ignored the election result at their peril.

“If the political forces have not understood this sign, then maybe they have need of an even stronger sign,” he said in an appearance at Rome’s foreign press association. “Maybe they are asking to vote again? This doesn’t scare us.”

During the appearance, he tried to put the foreign news media at ease. He said his priority was Italian stability and insisted that “we don’t want anything to do with the extremist parties of Europe.”

In the European Parliament, the Five Star Movement has aligned with UKIP, the British party that spearheaded Brexit, and has in the past urged an exit from the euro and a tough line on immigration. (Di Maio once called migrant rescue ships a “sea taxi service.”)

Critics note that the party, buoyed by near-total support in the economically frustrated south, is animated by anger, led by an Orwellian power structure and slippery because of its strategic vagueness on issues as varied as Russia and vaccines.

Party dissidents have described orchestrated mudslinging campaigns disseminated across the vast constellation of Five Star blogs and supportive websites, some of which have propagated fake news.

Those attacks have complicated Di Maio’s initial efforts to find a governing partner. Former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who resigned as head of the Democratic Party after its disastrous showing in the election, has urged his party not to be “the crutch” for those that promote a “culture of hate.”

But on Wednesday, Di Maio accepted a call from Matteo Salvini, the leader of the anti-immigrant League, who said that it would be “possible” to form a government with Five Star.

While some potential political partners are hesitant, in his hometown everyone wants to embrace Di Maio.

“He’s one of us,” Nadia Toscano, 18, said, pointing from the takeout pizza place where she works to Di Maio’s home above a gas station across the street. “It’s nice to have someone so young, so close to my generation.”

Born in 1986, Di Maio, the oldest of three siblings, was raised in the shadow of Vesuvius. His mother taught Latin while his father, Antonio, worked in the construction business and dabbled in post-fascist politics as an activist with the Italian Social Movement.

Asked if politics was new to his family, the elder Di Maio grinned. “At these levels, it’s new.” Luigi Di Maio says he had different ideas from his strict father. What everyone agrees on is that the young Di Maio was a Beaver Cleaver sort — a polite boy, a throwback to another era — though his hometown was known less for its idyllic neighborhoods than for its industrial plants and the buried toxins that lent the area the name Land of Fires.

His mother’s friends described him as a “good boy,” and one recalled that when the neighborhood kids came over to watch the Napoli soccer club’s games with her son, Di Maio was the one to bring her chocolates.

As student body president he won acclaim for securing more class trips and fighting for a more modern school building. He wanted to right society’s wrongs and practiced his rhetoric in the barber shop that served as the town’s political salon.

“We were always there,” said Dario De Falco, a confidant of Di Maio’s whose father owned the barber shop and who is now also an official in the Five Star Movement. He said they had hung out there for hours and debated the professors and neighborhood guys in the barber’s chair.

“That is where we made our bones,” he said.

After high school, Di Maio, a fan of Formula One racing and computers, enrolled in university in Naples, studying engineering and then law. He dabbled in documentaries, and for extra cash worked as a steward at Naples’ soccer stadium, showing VIPs to their seats.

Around that time, comedian Beppe Grillo, whose enormously popular blog helped spawn the Five Star Movement, had captured Di Maio’s imagination with his denouncements of the political elite.

In 2010, when Di Maio campaigned for local office, he and De Falco ran cables from the barbershop to the neighboring piazza to power the lights and speakers for their mini rallies. Di Maio fell well short in that race. Not even his father voted for him.

But he impressed the movement’s leaders and in the next election, the 189 votes he received on the party’s online nomination platform sufficed to put him on the national ballot and he landed in Parliament.

The party chose him as its leader, in part, he said, because he promised, “I will never call MPs ‘Honorable.'”

Di Maio’s just-stepped-out-of-the-salon polish and ease on television, admired even by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, also won over the party’s founders. Paolo Picone, who wrote a flattering biography of Di Maio, said that Grillo and the party’s other founder, the late Gianroberto Casaleggio, saw him as the movement’s ticket to the mainstream.

Di Maio has remained close to Casaleggio’s son, Davide, the enigmatic and powerful keeper of the web platform upon which the party votes and decides its policies.

“He has a special relationship with Casaleggio,” Picone said.

Last year, Di Maio won another web vote to become the party’s candidate for prime minister. A hacker who breached the system claimed to have voted for Di Maio several times, and some members of the party grumbled about the party’s new power-hungry phase.

Since the election, the party has made it clear that it is Di Maio who speaks for it now.

“It’s very moving to be here,” he said in his hometown. The crowd clamored to touch his arm as he descended the stage. As his black van waded through the throng, Di Maio’s father turned to a friend.

“Say hello to Luigi now,” he suggested, “because soon it will be impossible.”