The ‘Meloni Model’ Won’t Tame France’s Populist Right

 

The ‘Meloni Model’ Won’t Tame France’s Populist Right

 

France and Italy are profoundly different nations with different political cultures, whatever some people might imagine.

 

By Arthur de Liedekerke

April 2, 2026

https://cepa.org/article/the-meloni-model-wont-tame-frances-populist-right/

 

A reassuring idea has been taking hold in Paris. Many observers, especially in economic and industrial circles, harbor a quiet hope: that a victorious Rassemblement National (RN) might emulate the trajectory of Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

 

The assumption is increasingly explicit: if Marine Le Pen, the party’s longtime standard-bearer, or Jordan Bardella, its young president, wins, they will mirror the Italian prime minister’s pragmatic governance by tempering their rhetoric, reassuring markets, and largely falling into step with Brussels.

 

“Faced with the prospect of a Rassemblement National government, French business circles are looking across the Alps for reassurance,” according to a piece in the business magazine, Challenge.

 

This reading is not just optimistic. It is profoundly misguided.

 

The notion that France’s far right would follow a similar path overlooks three critical structural differences between the two countries.

 

First, there is the nature of the governing coalition. Meloni governs as part of a broader right-wing alliance comprising her Brothers of Italy, Matteo Salvini’s Lega, and Forza Italia (FI), the party founded by Silvio Berlusconi. The presence of FI, particularly under the leadership of Antonio Tajani — a former president of the European Parliament and European Commissioner — provides a distinctly pro-European, center-right anchor. It serves as the coalition’s moderating partner, tempering more radical impulses and helping keep the government within the bounds of mainstream European politics. The Rassemblement National, by contrast, seeks to govern on its own terms and with far fewer built-in constraints.

 

Second, Italy has a far more deeply embedded tradition of technocratic correction. Figures such as Mario Monti and Mario Draghi — respectively a former European Commissioner and a former president of the European Central Bank, both called in to serve as prime minister at moments of acute national strain — embody the country’s recurring willingness to hand power to non-partisan technocratic figures in times of crisis. 

 

That wider culture, embedded across the state apparatus, acts as a meaningful check on political excess. France, too, has a formidable technocratic tradition, but its grands corps de l’État have historically been more tightly woven into the machinery of executive power and are therefore less an independent brake on a determined government than one of the instruments through which it governs.

 

Finally, there is the relationship between business and politics. In Italy, a more decentralized structure, in which power often rests on dense arrangements between firms, territories, and political-economic networks, gives business multiple points of leverage over politics, from the local level upward. 

 

Matteo Salvini’s retreat from euro-exit rhetoric is a case in point: when his position veered too far into economic brinkmanship, pressure from Italy’s business establishment helped force a return to realism. France, by contrast, is far more centralized, the relationship between major corporations and the state is more distant, and French industry is ultimately less well placed to cajole a radical administration back towards moderation.

 

The so-called “Meloni model” rests on specifically Italian conditions: coalition constraints, technocratic counterweights, and a decentralized economic fabric that can help contain political excess. 

 

France offers no such guarantees. To assume that the Rassemblement National would be moderated by power in the same way is not prudent – It is wishful thinking.

 

Arthur de Liedekerke is a Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a Senior Director at Rasmussen Global, the political advisory firm founded by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, where he oversees the firm’s leading European Affairs team. He previously served as a Strategy Officer in the French Ministry for the Armed Forces.

 

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.