Pressure builds on Italy’s Meloni to shun Trump as she gears up for 2027 election

 

Pressure builds on Italy’s Meloni to shun Trump as she gears up for 2027 election

 

The prime minister’s adversaries say she is making a mistake by prioritizing military spending to please the U.S.

 

June 2, 2026 9:06 pm CET

By Hannah Roberts and Jacopo Barigazzi

https://www.politico.eu/article/pressure-builds-on-italy-giorgia-meloni-to-shun-us-donald-trump-as-she-gears-up-for-2027-election/

 

ROME — Italy's right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni can no longer afford to keep U.S. President Donald Trump happy when she faces a battle to win reelection next year.

 

In the first year of Trump's presidency, the instinctively transatlanticist Meloni styled herself as the European leader best placed to build bridges with MAGA. And over the course of 2025, she embraced a relationship in which the U.S. leader praised her as "highly respected" and a "friend."

 

But the bills from the war in Iran are now coming due, and a weakening economy poses a grave threat to her electoral prospects in 2027. Many Italian voters blame Trump for their households' soaring energy costs, and there is a growing political consensus that U.S. demands for increased military spending are simply unaffordable in Rome.

 

Facing up to her domestic political and economic realities, the Italian leader has already started to pivot away from Trump, publicly criticizing him and blocking U.S. jets from access to an Italian airbase.

 

Meloni understands her electorate — an Ipsos survey in May found 77 percent of Italians had a negative view of Trump — and the spurned president has grumbled she is "no longer the same person."

 

But Meloni's big strategic headache is military spending — and it threatens to be the decisive make-or-break factor looming over the U.S.-Italian relationship.

 

Italy currently spends barely 2 percent of its economic output on defense, but Trump is pressing all NATO countries to raise that to 5 percent by 2035. Meloni has signed up to the 5 percent goal, but Italy's economy is creaking, and her opponents are quick to point out that Rome has more critical spending goals than Trump's demands for NATO.

 

Prioritizing Trump-aligned military spending over support for companies and businesses hammered by sky-high energy bills is becoming an increasingly tough sell.

 

"The NATO commitment to 5 percent is completely unrealistic for Italy," said Antonio Misiani, a former deputy finance minister and a senator for the center-left Democratic Party. "For a year, Giorgia Meloni told us she was the bridge to Trump, but that bridge never existed, and now the chickens are coming home to roost."

 

Claudio Borghi, a senator from the far-right League in the governing coalition and a critic of high defense spending, said: “It is politically difficult to explain that you can spend on tanks and not on [helping with] bills.”

 

Meloni concedes there needs to be a balance in spending, but she also insists Rome cannot simply row back on military commitments.

 

"The truth is that if you don't know how to defend yourself, if you ask someone else to guarantee your security, you'll pay for it in terms of autonomy, in terms of sovereignty, in terms of the ability to defend your national interests," she said in a speech to Italy's main business federation this week. "Defense spending is the price of freedom, and I want Italy to be a free nation."

 

Cash crunch

Meloni, who has been in office for an unusually stable four years, suddenly looks vulnerable.

 

The almost €200 billion post-pandemic recovery program that helped sustain growth is nearing its end, productivity is weak and public finances are under renewed scrutiny from Brussels.

 

This economic malaise comes as her political star is also waning. A failed justice referendum exposed new political weaknesses, and previously despondent opposition parties have now started to believe they could have a chance against her in 2027.

 

Meloni's government has spent much of its term pursuing fiscal prudence, hoping that economic stability would eventually create room for tax cuts and spending measures before voters return to the polls.

 

The fallout from the war in Iran has derailed those plans.

 

“Italy is in the last place in Europe for growth and more indebted than Greece," said Mario Turco, a senator for the left-populist 5Star Movement. “This shows us that Giorgia Meloni’s economic policy has failed."

 

In that context, Italy's efforts to increase its military spending are proving particularly tough politically.

 

Rome had planned to use €15 billion in EU loans from the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) scheme in order to raise its defense spending from 2 percent to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2030. 

 

But the country's stubbornly high deficit makes it difficult to take on SAFE loans, said Enrico Borghi, a center-left opposition senator who sits on the parliament’s security committee.

 

“Italy is in very serious difficulty in terms of maintaining its commitments,” he told POLITICO.

 

Rome is now considering requesting only about €5 billion of the €15 billion initially earmarked under SAFE, according to a senior coalition figure.

 

But that has an immediate knock-on effect. Absent the €15 billion in loans, dozens of projects already agreed between defense companies and the Italian defense ministry will have to be reviewed, said Alessandro Marrone, head of the defense program at the Istituto Affari Internazionali think tank.

 

Something's got to give

Stefano Stefanini, Italy’s former ambassador to NATO, said the country's debt and deficit levels left Meloni "no choice" but to slow the pace of military spending.

 

According to Stefanini, Meloni risked being seen as in the same camp as Spain, which was attacked by Trump after refusing to commit to the 5 percent defense spending target. However, the former ambassador reckoned Rome was more at risk of criticism than a full-scale rupture with the White House.

 

The challenge for Rome is that the debate looks very different depending on which side of the Atlantic it is viewed from. Where Rome sees it as a question of timing, Trump may well doubt Italy's commitment.

 

For Beniamino Irdi, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, "the debate in Rome is not between rearmament and disarmament but rather about finding a balance between strategic credibility and internal political sustainability."

 

"Washington does not read nuance well when it comes to burden-sharing," he added. "For Trump, the test of an ally is measured in numbers, not in arguments."

 

Still, a confrontation with Trump may not be entirely unwelcome in Rome.

 

Marrone said criticism from the White House over military spending could even strengthen Meloni domestically, given the U.S. president's deep unpopularity among Italian voters.

 

"Should Trump criticize Meloni for not spending enough on defense, that will probably bolster her in Italian public opinion and with the electorate," he said.

 

For a leader who once positioned herself as Trump's closest ally in Europe, the irony is hard to miss. The surest way for Meloni to protect her standing with Italian voters may be to disappoint the White House.