The strongman p28_2025 Giorgia Meloni

 POLITICO 28: Class of 2025

Giorgia Meloni

Overall No. 1 — Italy

https://www.politico.eu/list/politico-28-class-of-2025/giorgia-meloni/

 

The strongman

p28_2025 Giorgia Meloni

 

Who do you call if you want to speak to Europe?

 

If you’re Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and a key adviser to United States President-elect Donald Trump — the number you dial belongs to Giorgia Meloni.

 

In less than a decade, the leader of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party has gone from being dismissed as an ultranationalist kook to being elected prime minister of Italy and establishing herself as a figure with whom Brussels, and now Washington, can do business.

 

Even as she has tacked to the center, Meloni — who began her political career as an activist in the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement and praised dictator Benito Mussolini as “a good politician who did everything he did for the good of Italy” — has been on the forefront of a wave that is dragging European politics toward the far right.

 

Indeed, since her election in 2022, the Italian prime minister has introduced policies on issues like migration and LGBTQ+ rights that would once have drawn condemnation from Brussels. Instead, the reaction from European Union leaders has ranged from indifference to approval, with many accepting Meloni as the palatable representative of the ever-more-radical zeitgeist blossoming on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

Conventional politicians’ inability to counter an increasingly popular ultranationalist narrative, and their willingness to collaborate with Meloni on the European stage, enable Italy’s 47-year-old prime minister — who insists on using the masculine form of her formal title, Il Presidente del Consiglio — to be a strongman capable of exerting tremendous power at a moment when the continent lacks powerful centrists capable of taking her on.

 

The alpha

Meloni made headlines around the world when she became Italy’s first female prime minister, but few predicted she would last long in office. Pundits expected infighting to inevitably split her governing coalition of right-wing parties, and there was little appetite for her in Brussels. After years enduring the antics of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, top EU figures were unenthusiastic about the arrival of a leader who had campaigned on “God, fatherland, and family” and formed a government with parties sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

 

But over the past two years Meloni consolidated her government as one of the most stable to have existed in postwar Italy. Although the country is saddled with a national debt equivalent to 137 percent of its gross domestic product, the economic forecast is not so dire as to scare off foreign investors attracted by the unusually tranquil political environment.

 

Meloni’s carefully cultivated, no-nonsense appearance contributes to the image of stability. After Campania region President Vincenzo De Luca referred to the prime minister as a “stronza” (“bitch”) at a campaign rally, the prime minister showed up to an event in his region and greeted the opposition politician by stating, “President De Luca, I am that bitch, Meloni. How are you doing?”

 

The clip of the exchange between a visibly unnerved De Luca and ice-cold Meloni, which quickly went viral in Italy, reinforced the image of the prime minister as a straight-talking “alpha” who, despite being physically diminutive, still manages to tower over her rivals. It’s clear that the appearance of dominance isn’t just superficial. No member of her coalition dares stage an internal challenge to her rule, and the hopelessly fractured opposition openly admits that it cannot defeat her.

 

The stability of the Italian government has been so surprising to observers outside the country that many have failed to notice the democratic backsliding — especially with regard to freedom of speech — that has occurred since Meloni took office.

 

The prime minister routinely uses the courts to try to silence critics, filing defamation suits against figures ranging from Placebo’s rockstar frontman Brian Molko — who called her a “fascist” during a concert in 2023 — to a teacher who referred to her as a “neo-Nazi” during a classroom discussion. She’s also gone after newspapers and journalists at Italy’s state broadcaster, who earlier this year went on strike to protest government censorship.

 

Additionally, Meloni has targeted the Italian judges who have ruled some of her government’s policies to be illegal and posted social media screeds accusing them of plotting against her. Several jurists have subsequently received death threats and required police protection. The Council of Europe, a top human rights body, recently warned that the “excessive criticism of individual judges … puts their independence at risk.”

 

Meloni has also used her power to target minority groups like the LGBTQ+ community, whom the prime minister derides as a “lobby” that is insidiously attempting to impose its “gender ideology” on her country. Shortly after assuming office, her government forbade mayors from issuing birth certificates to children born of surrogate mothers or to lesbian couples who used artificial insemination. In October, her coalition passed a law punishing people who have a baby via surrogacy anywhere in the world with a maximum penalty of two years in prison and fines of up to €1 million.

 

Data collected by Arcigay, Italy’s largest LGBTQ+ nongovernmental organization, finds a marked increase in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes since Meloni came to power. The prime minister’s policies against the community, and her refusal to reject hostile comments made by members of her party — like Senate President Ignazio La Russa, who said he would be sorry to have a gay son, or Senator Lucio Malan, who shared a social media post equating gay men to “pedophiles” — has resulted in Italy coming in at 22nd out of 27 EU countries in ILGA-Europe’s annual ranking of respect for the rights of LGBTQ+ people.

 

Willing partners

Rather than decry the erosion of civil liberties occurring in Meloni’s Italy, EU leaders have brushed it aside as an internal matter. The willingness to look the other way has a simple explanation: At the same time that the right-wing politician has consolidated her rule at home, she’s also worked hard to convince the bloc’s top brass that she’s a trusted partner who will back them on the key issues they care about.

 

Since coming to power, Meloni has pulled off an impressive ideological tightrope act. Even as she serves as president of the Euroskeptic European Conservatives and Reformists Party — a pan-European umbrella group that includes Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice party and the far-right Sweden Democrats — Italy’s prime minister has kept her own anti-EU rhetoric to a minimum and avoided clashes with Brussels.

 

And while as recently as 2018 Meloni celebrated Putin’s reelection as representing “the unequivocal will of the Russian people,” since taking office she instead befuddled her critics by emerging as one of Ukraine’s most die-hard supporters. Her image as a team player was secured last February, when she used her influence to convince Hungary’s Orbán to OK a critical, €50 billion aid package to Ukraine, earning praise from top officials.

 

Meloni’s rise has coincided with a bloc-wide reckoning with the migration crisis, and the politician has cannily used her palatable image to swing the EU toward her preferred approach to addressing the matter. A survey of 6,000 EU citizens ahead of last June’s European Parliament election listed “migration and asylum seekers” as the second-most important concern for them, and the far-right parties calling for restrictions made significant gains across the bloc.

 

Teaming up with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Meloni oversaw the forging of landmark deals with Tunisia, Mauritania and Egypt that funnel billions of euros to repressive regimes that keep migrants away from Europe by intercepting their boats, locking them in prisons or dumping them in the desert.

 

More recently, she’s launched an audacious plan to outsource the detainment of undocumented migrants to Albania. Italian judges have systematically ruled the scheme is illegal and ordered the return of the asylum-seekers deported to the Balkan country, effectively turning Meloni into the director of an expensive, government-sponsored cruise line ferrying migrants back and forth across the Adriatic. In November, the prime minister appeared to admit defeat, recalling the dozens of Italian police officers and social workers that had been posted to the empty detention centers.

 

Neither the scheme’s apparent failure, nor the fact that the Italian prime minister’s ideas aren’t necessarily new, has stopped Europe’s leaders from looking on admiringly at the “Meloni model.” Center-left leaders like Germany’s Olaf Scholz have parroted the Italian prime minister’s statements in favor of “returns.” The United Kingdom’s Keir Starmer even made a pilgrimage to Rome to learn more about the scheme, praising the hard-liner’s “remarkable progress” in cutting irregular migration.

 

The EU’s heads of government telegraphed their interest in Meloni’s approach at their meeting last October, where they agreed that “new ways to prevent and counter irregular migration should be considered.” Von der Leyen took that message to heart and is now planning on rolling out a draft directive on “returns” as soon as February.

 

Political winds are filling Meloni’s sails. With traditional power players in Paris and Berlin effectively out of commission, the Italian prime minister is benefiting from a vacuum of power that leaves room for her to push forward her policies. At a moment of weakness for conventional EU leaders, she has effectively positioned herself as a bridge between a far right whose presence in European governments is steadily growing, and liberal democratic leaders who see her as an acceptable representative of a movement they don’t entirely comprehend.

 

Meloni’s complicated relationship with von der Leyen underscores the power she currently wields. The Commission president spent months courting the right-wing leader in an attempt to get her to back her reelection to the top job last June. Although the Italian prime minister notably abstained when the key vote took place, von der Leyen has nonetheless kept bending over backward to stay on her good side.

 

This summer, Commission officials told POLITICO that, in a bid to protect Meloni, von der Leyen delayed the publication of the EU’s rule-of-law report because it noted the “negative trends” in media freedom in Italy. In September von der Leyen went even further to cater to the prime minister by making Italy’s nominee for the next Commission, Raffaele Fitto, one of the college’s six executive vice presidents and handing him the important cohesion portfolio.

 

There are those in Brussels who dismiss concerns about Meloni by arguing that, should she ever pose a threat to the EU, other leaders could move to isolate her as they’ve done with Hungary’s Orbán.

 

“The problem is that Meloni isn’t a new Orbán, but rather Orbán on steroids,” explained political extremism researcher Pietro Castelli Gattinara, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Sciences Po’s Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics. “She represents a bigger, richer country that is a founding member of the EU and has enormous bargaining power.”

 

Our American cousins

Trump’s reelection stands to give Meloni even more momentum.

 

To be sure, Italy’s prime minister is no “Trump whisperer.” Her Brothers of Italy party has worked to establish deep links with the Republican Party, and Meloni herself was invited to address the crowd at CPAC, the U.S.’ annual summit of hyper-conservatives, in 2022. But she has only interacted with the president-elect a handful of times and does not enjoy as intense a relationship with him as Hungary’s Orbán, who has visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago complex in Florida on numerous occasions.

 

Indeed, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon recently argued that Meloni’s efforts to ingratiate herself with centrists in Brussels had scuttled her shot at being relevant with the U.S.’ incoming administration. “We don’t need help from anyone in Europe,” he said, adding that if the MAGA movement ever required an interlocutor on the other side of the Atlantic, it would look to others.

 

“Le Pen, Farage and Orbán are with us,” Bannon said. Meloni, he underscored, would only be taken seriously by Trump’s “America First” die-hards when she publicly returned to the hard-line ultranationalist persona she had “when her Brothers of Italy was polling at 3 percent.”

 

Yet, while Italy’s prime minister may barely be on Trump’s radar, she’s seemingly adored by billionaire Musk, a fan of her immigration policies who has cheered her war on the judiciary and recently presented her with the Atlantic Council’s Global Citizen Award in New York. Shortly after the election, the Italian politician described the Tesla CEO as an “added value” in the current political landscape and a potential “interlocutor” with the Trump administration.

 

No one seriously believes Meloni’s link to Musk will enable her to persuade Trump to keep supporting Ukraine or to not impose promised across-the-board tariffs on EU goods. The president-elect has consistently shown he follows his own agenda, and his tendency to break with his close advisers means not even the SpaceX CEO is guaranteed to have his ear for long.

 

But Meloni’s stature in Europe benefits from the perception that she’s part of a winning political phenomenon, a global movement of ultranationalist populists. And her success in normalizing her presence at the apex of the bloc’s power structure serves as a roadmap for figures like French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

 

So far, Meloni has used her sway mostly in Italy. The question now is whether she will start to flex her muscles internationally, and whether — with a new wind blowing across the Atlantic — she will continue to play nice with institutions like the EU and NATO, or if, as Bannon suggests, she’ll return to her right-wing roots and challenge the s