The Movement claims it had no option but to opt out of a key confidence vote last week, fracturing Draghi's fragile coalition, because it could no longer stand fellow parties trampling over its policies.
The vote was on an aid package to combat inflation, but included a provision for a garbage incinerator to be built in Rome, something Five Star has long opposed and a red line it said it could not cross.
Experts described it instead as a tactical attempt to win back grassroots backing by a party that won 33 percent of the vote at the last national election in 2018, but has since seen its popularity plummet.
Five Star leader Giuseppe Conte gambled that Draghi would carry on without them in the coalition, doing whatever necessary to keep Italy stable during a cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine, experts said.
'Disbelief'
The Movement seized the chance to try and become an opposition party "to 'wash' the government off themselves" ahead of the next election in May 2023, Daniela Preziosi, political journalist for the Domani daily, told AFP.
It was a risky move. Draghi immediately handed in his resignation, only for it to be refused by President Sergio Mattarella.
Several coalition parties and over 1,000 mayors have urged Draghi to stay on.
The mayors expressed their "disbelief and concern" over the "irresponsible behaviour" of the Five Star Movement.
Draghi's final decision, expected Wednesday, could prompt tricky snap elections in October, a period traditionally used to pass the government budget.
Keeping the government alive may not be an option.
Matteo Renzi, head of coalition member Italia Viva, said Monday that Five Star "lied, insulted and attacked opponents" and must take responsibility for "destroying everything".
Ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi and far-right leader Matteo Salvini, both in Draghi's coalition, slammed the Movement's "incompetence and unreliability".
'Irrelevant'
It was Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio's split last month from the Movement -- with around 60 lawmakers joining him in protest over Five Star's policy on Ukraine, that set this crisis in motion, Preziosi said.
"It was no longer the biggest party in the (government) majority, and subsequently became irrelevant".
Giovanni Orsina, head of the Luiss School of Government in Rome, agreed that "the Five Star was provoked (by Di Maio), but it fell for it and must now accept responsibility".
Founded in 2009 as an anti-establishment movement, the Five Star Movement began haemorrhaging votes after entering government, first in partnership with the far right and then with the centre-left.
Lawyer Conte was prime minister of both coalitions. His attempt to form a third cabinet failed in 2021, at which point former European Central Bank chief Draghi was asked to head a national unity government.
'Political Vendetta'
Di Maio on Sunday told the Messaggero daily that Conte was "carrying out a political vendetta against Draghi" because "he has not got over having to leave Palazzo Chigi", the prime minister's office.
If so, it may have backfired. Whether or not the government survives the next few months, "the Five Star Movement, the mother ship, will radicalise" in a bid to survive, Preziosi said.
"That is why the next victim will be Conte, a leader with an all-institutional profile, who cannot captain a movement that has returned to its anti-establishment roots".
Orsina went further, saying the Five Star Movement, founded by comedian Beppe Grillo on the back of protests against the political class entitled "Vaffanculo Day" ("Fuck Off Day"), was itself dead in the water.
The Movement had suffered "a deep identity crisis... (and) no longer exists as we know it", he said.
The party had been "a great collector of dissatisfaction, which was then unable to translate that into a positive project. And so it has ended, dissolving into nothingness, into thin air".
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