Is this Trump’s woman in Europe?

Outside national borders, Meloni is increasingly portrayed as an emerging political star, savvy, self-confident, capable of walking the tightrope between ideological illiberalism and shrewd pragmatism.

A veteran activist with the Italian neo-fascist right since her high school days, Meloni has never hidden her political origins or apologised for them. A French TV programme shot when she was just 19 shows her campaigning for the far right Alleanza Nazionale during the 1996 Italian election campaign, speaking fluent French with the interviewer and describing Benito Mussolini as a “good politician”.

Hers is indeed Italy’s most right wing administration since the war, and yet her party and leadership have also been accepted by Europe’s predominantly centrist governments. Rishi Sunak and, rather more surprisingly, Keir Starmer, both consulted her on Italy’s controversial deal with Albania, building two new migration centres to process asylum applications offshore in a bid to crack down on sea arrivals. In the US, Time magazine placed her on its 100 most influential people list of 2024; the Washington Post described her as a “rising star of the far right”; CNN called her a “political heavyweight” who had proved herself a stable western ally. 

A profile written by the historian and European communism expert David Broder in the New York Times, concedes she has become a significant force in Europe, offering a new model of leadership for the right. Despite ideological ties with Donald Trump’s Maga movement and a public friendship and collaboration with his former strategy chief, Steve Bannon (and more recently with a fawning Elon Musk), on foreign policy, too, Meloni has chosen not to dissent on any major European political question. Instead, she has settled in as a junior ally to the Joe Biden administration. But soon, she might find herself dealing with a very different kind of US leader.

But Meloni would be cautious about re-configuring her government’s international posture. After two years of Meloni’s government, Italy’s economy is performing a little better than was forecast. Employment is up and exports and productivity are growing faster than in European nations of comparable size. With almost €200bn in loans and grants, Rome received the lion’s share of Next Generation EU, the European aid package created in the wake of the pandemic. This was designed to boost growth, particularly by financing infrastructure, but will end in 2026. 

In direct contrast with Liz Truss’s approach at around the time of Meloni’s election, the Italian PM has reassured markets, introducing relatively minor financial tweaks: short-term cuts in social security contributions, a limited, one-year tax cut thanks to an adjustment of tax thresholds, and the abolition of the so-called “citizens basic income” payment, originally introduced by the leftist Five Star Movement, but the subject of continuing complaint from small businesses, which complained they lost workers.

Italy’s huge national debt does of course weigh heavily but, according to Sabino Cassese, a former minister in the Christian Democrat Ciampi government and Constitutional Court judge, this has also played a useful role acting as a fiscal brake, forcing the Meloni administration to stick to a prudent economic path – one led by the market rather than the demands of Brussels.

Stefano Folli, a former editor of Corriere della Sera and one of Italy’s most respected political commentators, says the determination and tenacity shown by Meloni as she took on her leadership role, particularly considering she had no previous experience in government, has surprised many: “Even her political enemies have had to recognise these qualities in the prime minister’s temperament.”

Meloni, he says, began her premiership from a position of isolation, kept at the margins “almost like an Italian Viktor Orbán”. However, her innate pragmatism saw her work hard to build a solid relationship with the US, showing consistency on Ukraine and working collaboratively with the EU and Ursula von der Leyen “despite not voting for her or being part of the dominant liberal Euro parliamentary political families”.

“This may not have helped her achieve any great political legitimacy at home – the opposition’s bitter attacks continue to revolve around her being the daughter and the product of the politics of fascism – but without doubt, her success internationally has helped her in the court of public opinion. Equally, however, her pragmatism has not assisted her in hanging on to those on the right, often the extreme right, in her wider electorate…”

When Meloni was swept to victory at the helm of Fratelli d’Italia, the party fashioned from the ashes of the Alleanza Nazionale – itself a successor of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) founded after the war by Mussolini supporters – Meloni’s electoral win divided Europe. The left warned that Italy would be plunged into a new era of neo-fascist populism, Euroscepticism and Hungary-style authoritarian democracy, while the right welcomed, indeed applauded, her ascendancy, seeing it as harbinger of a new and credible threat to the EU and its “globalist socialism”.

Meloni herself told the parliament during her inaugural speech that she was “what the British would call an outsider, an underdog, the one who must upset all predictions” and promptly did just that, denouncing fascism as one of the “worst moments in Italian history” and assuring allies of Italy’s continuing commitment to the European Union.

Her supporters argue that this easy embrace of political ambiguity – moderation on economic policy and the international stage, combined with ultra-conservative views on identity, family and immigration – shows a canny pragmatism. Her critics say it’s nothing to do with political acuity, and everything to do with being two-faced.

Prof Leila Talani, professor of International Political Economy at King’s College London, is adamant that Meloni’s stance on immigration, her attacks on the rights of LGBTQI+ communities, and throwing doubts on the right to abortion are clear evidence that her “far right credentials are intact”.

Talani is blunt in her assessment and describes her as a polarising force in Italy: “She has been hugely disappointing, but it is also true that she has done exactly what she said she would do. She has behaved in a way that is entirely consistent with the politics of the right while trying to find alliances and playing the pragmatic card.

“If you cannot achieve growth with hundreds of millions in EU funds to spend… let’s see what happens when the money finishes.”

Meloni’s own story raises as many questions as answers about her views. Despite a fierce defence of traditional family structures, she was raised by a single mother in a tough working-class area of Rome. Her mother, Anna Paratore, wrote romance novels to survive and her two girls spent summers in the Canary Islands where their father, Francesco, had moved, but lost contact with him altogether by the time Meloni turned 12. (He later served prison time for drug importation, and died in 2012). 

In her 2021 autobiography, Io sono Giorgia, she writes that her mother considered aborting her when she realised the relationship with their father was ending. She already had an 18-month-old daughter, named Arianna. Meloni’s older sister is a key player in the Fratelli party and was, until recently, married to Francesco Lollobrigida, the current agriculture minister. Giorgia’s mother decided at the 11th hour, apparently over a coffee and croissant, that she wanted to keep her second child. “I owe her everything,” Meloni wrote. 

This year, she has insisted publicly several times that she has no intention of amending or changing the nation’s already stringent abortion laws (known as Legge 194), but doubts were raised about her stance when a commitment made last year by G7 nations to address access to “safe and legal abortion” was deliberately left out of the final statement at this year’s summit in Puglia.

Meloni has a daughter, Ginevra, aged seven, with the TV presenter Andrea Giambruno. The couple stayed together for a decade but chose never to live together or marry, splitting formally late last year when he was caught on camera propositioning another woman.

Since the creation of Fratelli d’Italia in 2013 – the party’s name taken from the first words of the Italian national anthem – Meloni has grown her party’s vote share from just 4.35% in the 2018 poll to the resounding 28.76% which, with its two allies, Forza Italia and Lega, propelled her into a decisive parliamentary majority and the prime ministership on September 25, 2022. She is the first Italian politician in 12 years to become premier without the need to horse-trade to build a workable coalition. This June, her electoral strength was given a further fillip when the Conservative and Reformist group she also leads delivered a strong showing in the European elections.

On the world stage, 2024 has been a good year, too: she held court as host of the G7 summit in the southern Italian region of Puglia, taking selfies with a stellar cast of fellow leaders from Joe Biden and Canada’s Justin Trudeau to Emmanuel Macron and the Indian PM, Narendra Modi, and, for the first time ever, she also welcomed a beaming Pope Francis. The papal visit represented a personal win for the avowedly Catholic Meloni, whose declaration “I am Giorgia. I am a woman. I am a mother. I am Italian. I am Christian,” at a party rally in 2019 has become a leitmotif for her political brand, even being re-mixed into a chart-busting dance track.

Meloni’s “fascism”, it seems at least for now, does not worry the wider Italian electorate: she loves to call the opposition “communists” and her capacity to gel with conservative voters is beginning to rival even that of Berlusconi in his heyday. The most recent opinion polls may show a slight drop in voter satisfaction with the government, but both her party and her personal approval ratings are still rising.

Still, observes Folli, the former editor of Corriere della Sera, the past few weeks have not been the easiest of her tenure and she has suffered several significant setbacks, including the parliament’s refusal to approve her chosen candidate to the Constitutional Court, and the Bank of Italy’s grim, downward revision of growth estimates. 

Despite taking up the rotating presidency of the G7, she also failed to score an invitation to the October 13 Biden-Macron-Scholz-Starmer meeting in Berlin, saved from public embarrassment by the US president’s cancellation, as Hurricane Milton threatened havoc across the American south-east. Chances are that while Macron and Scholz may not have been thrilled at sharing the stage with Meloni, her excessive familiarity with Musk might also have weighed heavily, particularly with just weeks to go before the US election.

And that election might just come to define Meloni’s place in European politics and on the global political stage. So far she has played her cards carefully with the US, courting Trump when he was president and positioning herself as a bridge between Washington and Europe. If he wins a second term, Meloni could fulfil that role. 

However, it would not be all roses between the ultra-conservative duoi. Trump has long insisted that Nato members should pay more and spend at least 2% of GDP on defence. Italy has been a chronic under-spender, even with the Ukraine war raging. 

In 2017, when he took office, just four of Nato’s then 29 nations hit the 2% target – now, 23 out of the now 32-strong EU club are likely to manage this year. Meloni’s government is nowhere near that target and last month forecast that its defence spend would hover at 1.49% of GDP this year, down from 1.5% in 2023 and may slip further to 1.44% next year.

So, is Italy entering a new phase in its political history? Getting close to Trump would be fraught with danger. Folli also believes Meloni must not underestimate the fickleness of Italian public opinion, nor lose sight of the internal weakness and inexperience at the top echelons of the ruling right. “The prime minister tends to trust very few colleagues, and most are from her most extremist political period. This may well create problems in time. Then again, the left needs to find a way to really speak to the nation. To date it has not found a way to do so… at least not well enough.”

Talani concedes that Meloni is reaping the benefits of being new, playing the outsider and presenting well on the international stage, but has yet to show how she will manage the really big issues: her plan to introduce major, controversial reforms to the constitution; the decision to continue funding arms to Ukraine; national finances when the huge EU aid package ends in 2026; and the growing national debt.

“These are all big question marks,” says Folli. “Being fresh and new won’t work a second time around.”