Giorgia Meloni, Trump’s Friend in Europe, Seeks Distance on Iran

 

Giorgia Meloni, Trump’s Friend in Europe, Seeks Distance on Iran

 

War in the Middle East has left Italy’s prime minister in a domestic bind, presenting her with one of the biggest challenges of a previously stable tenure.

 

Motoko Rich

By Motoko Rich

Reporting from Rome

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/world/europe/meloni-trump-iran-italy.html

March 12, 2026, 5:03 a.m. ET

 

During a visit to the White House last year, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy bonded with President Trump over their shared opposition to “woke” ideologies and migration. After the meeting, Ms. Meloni, the only sitting European leader to attend Mr. Trump’s second presidential inauguration, said she was proud of their “privileged relationship.”

 

Now, as an American war with Iran causes economic pain throughout Europe, Ms. Meloni’s once vaunted friendship with Mr. Trump is proving to be a liability, just as she is seeking to win a tight referendum later this month over a contentious judicial change.

 

Ms. Meloni has led one of the longest and most stable governments in Italy’s tumultuous postwar history — and her party still outperforms its rivals in the national polls. Yet the war and her handling of it is raising some of the thorniest political challenges she has faced since entering office in 2022.

 

Critics have condemned her for failing to wield any visible influence over President Trump’s wartime decisions and for her ambivalent response to his decision to attack Iran.

 

New surveys suggest the opposition is gaining ground in the referendum campaign and may even defeat the judicial proposal in the vote later this month. The proposed changes center on a plan to divide oversight of prosecutors and judges, who are currently jointly supervised by a single body, and to make it harder for lawyers to move between the two professions. Ms. Meloni’s government says the changes would help make judges more independent from prosecutors, while critics say the new system would make prosecutors and judges more beholden to politicians.

 

Because many voters and commentators find the details of the proposal arcane and confusing, the vote to approve them has instead been framed as a plebiscite on Ms. Meloni herself — presenting her with a moment of rare jeopardy.

 

“Politics is made of these kinds of moments in which at some point someone looks invincible and they slip on a first banana skin,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs, a Rome-based research group. “And all of a sudden they lose their luster.”

 

Ms. Meloni was caught on the back foot when the United States began bombing Iran late last month without consulting any European allies. While some European leaders received a courtesy call just before the attacks, the Italians were left unaware. Ms. Meloni’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, was in Dubai for a family vacation and had to be evacuated by military plane.

 

Her critics pounced. “For months, they’ve been telling us across all networks that Meloni was the bridge between Trump and Europe. Unfortunately, it was all fake news!” Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister and centrist opposition leader, wrote on social media. “What an embarrassment.”

 

Ms. Meloni has since been forced to triangulate between placating Mr. Trump by avoiding outright condemnation of the war; trying to fulfill defense cooperation agreements with Arab countries in the Persian Gulf; and assuaging Italian public opinion, which is firmly against the war. Polls show that about two-thirds of Italians have a negative view of the attacks on Iran.

 

Illustrating that balancing act, Ms. Meloni said in Parliament on Wednesday that the world was “facing an evident crisis in international law and multilateral organizations, and the collapse of a shared world order” but stopped short of explicitly condemning Mr. Trump’s decision to attack.

 

Her government has agreed to send naval ships to defend the Republic of Cyprus, a Mediterranean state that has come under retaliatory fire from Iran, and missile and drone defense systems to protect Arab allies in the Persian Gulf that have suffered Iranian bombardments. Still, Ms. Meloni said in Parliament, “Italy is not taking part and does not intend to take part” in the conflict.

 

From a strategic point of view, keeping a fluid position “is very rational to stay in power,” said Leila Simona Talani, director of the Center for Italian Politics at King’s College London. “Any position that she takes could be detrimental to her own role.”

 

Ms. Meloni has always been more aligned with Mr. Trump on culture war issues and immigration than on foreign policy, said Mariangela Zappia, Italy’s ambassador to the United States from 2021 to 2025.

 

“They see eye to eye on many things,” said Ms. Zappia, president of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, a research group in Milan. But in foreign policy, Ms. Meloni is “much more careful” and “much more European really than people tend to believe,” Ms. Zappia said.

 

Even before the war, the Italian public was cooling on Mr. Trump and his administration’s policies. Before the Winter Games in Milan last month, protesters objected to news that a special unit of ICE would accompany the U.S. delegation to the Olympics because they were angered by the conduct of ICE agents in Minneapolis. At the Games’ opening ceremony, some spectators booed when Vice President JD Vance appeared on large screens in the stadium.

 

Given public sentiment in Italy, Ms. Meloni has been “trying to distance herself, let’s say, from the Trumpian guys, because, you know, they are becoming a little bit more radioactive,” said Lorenzo Castellani, a political scientist at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. Now, he said, Ms. Meloni’s “ambition is more to maintain stability at home.” Rather than being left out of the loop by Mr. Trump, as some critics have suggested, Ms. Meloni is distancing herself from the American president’s inner circle as a shrewd political tactic, Mr. Castellani said.

 

Opposition leaders criticize Ms. Meloni for not being clearer in her censure of the attacks on Iran. If she is “claiming a privileged relationship she should use it to say openly to President Trump that what he is doing is wrong,” Elly Schlein, leader of the center-left Democratic Party, said in an interview. “The Italian government should work for a cease-fire to de-escalate the dramatic situation.”

 

The only criticism Ms. Meloni has clearly made is to condemn what she called a “massacre” at an elementary school in southern Iran. In her speech to Parliament, she called for “those responsible for this tragedy to be swiftly identified.”

 

With the upcoming referendum and a parliamentary election due next year, Ms. Meloni is counting on her continuing solid support — she has approval ratings of around 44 percent — to weather criticism from the left flank.

 

For now, Italians “don’t like this war, but these are things that they perceive as far away,” said Lorenzo Kamel, a professor of history of international relations at the University of Turin.

 

If the war lasts for much longer and the economy takes a steep stumble, he said, “she could have at that point a big backlash.”

 

Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting.

 

Motoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.