The testing of Giorgia Meloni

This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.

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Three-and-a-half years into her five-year term, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, is finally facing a crisis. She has been Donald Trump’s closest European ally. The only EU leader he invited to his inauguration, the US president lauded her as “fantastic” and “beautiful” and when she was his guest at the White House last April he praised her as “one of the real leaders of the world … I wish there were more like her”. 

But she has found it increasingly hard to stand by him. She called Trump’s tariff hikes “the wrong choice” and began asserting her own preferences: “I agreed with Trump on Venezuela. I do not agree with him on Greenland.” Though she neither condoned nor condemned the Iran war, it was, she said in March, “outside” international law, and Italy would not take part.

Trump had already heaped scorn on Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer for their unhelpfulness on Iran, but he now remained silent about hers. He could contain himself no longer, however, when in April she leapt to the defence of Pope Leo, whom he had attacked on social media as “weak” because he “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon”.

Meloni, who, though an unmarried single mother, is a practising Catholic, said Trump’s criticism was “unacceptable” as “it is right and normal” for a Pope “to condemn every form of war”. His reaction was swift. He dumped her in his gallery of good-for-nothing Europeans, telling Italy’s most important daily newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, “I’m shocked at her. I thought she had courage. But I was wrong.”

Gone is the assumption that, if Trump wanted to call Europe, he would first ring Meloni. He had not spoken to her “in a long time”, he said. Asked why not, he replied: “Because she doesn’t want to help us with NATO. She doesn’t want to help get rid of a nuclear weaponed Iran. Very sad. She’s much different than I thought … She was afraid to go into danger.”

The split with Trump, even if it proves only temporary, delivers a major blow to Meloni’s most cherished foreign policy objective of keeping Italy close to America come what may, given how incapable the EU has been at decisive action on the world stage. The bust-up ìs certainly welcomed by most Italians — four out of five of whom disapprove of Trump, according to polling. An equally serious blow — as it was a key election pledge — was the heavy defeat she suffered in a referendum in March to reform Italy’s sclerotic justice system.

SINS OF THE FATHER

Whatever now becomes of US-Italian relations, the 49-year-old once branded the most dangerous woman in Europe remains its most significant political leader. For Giorgia Meloni is the right, right-wing leader in the right place at the right time. She has, as Machiavelli demanded of a successful prince, both virtù and fortuna.

At 39 per cent in early April, her approval ratings still compare favourably with her principal European peers: Keir Starmer (27 per cent), Friedrich Merz (19 per cent) and Emmanuel Macron (18 per cent), a reality that sustains her domestic authority. She is also helped by the inability of Italy’s main opposition parties — the post-communist Partito Democratico (PD) and the alt-left 5 Stelle — to unite at national level, which they need to do to defeat Meloni’s coalition. Neither has a charismatic leader, nor a compelling story.

Unlike the late Silvio Berlusconi, Meloni is not ricattabile (blackmailable). She is not known for a bunga bunga private life, nor does she own a business, let alone a big business, so activist prosecuting judges have precious little to get their teeth into. In her youth, all she did was a variety of simple jobs such as babysitter, nightclub barista and market-stall holder (where she may have honed her talent for off-the-cuff public speaking). She also taught English privately (having honed her proficiency by listening to pop songs).

Yet she says she would never have achieved her rise from such unpromising beginnings to high office had not her late father Francesco, a wealthy accountant, abandoned her, her mother Anna and elder sister Arianna shortly after her birth in 1977. He sailed off to South America in his yacht, Cavallo Pazzo (Crazy Horse), before settling on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, where he opened a restaurant and discotheque. 

“It wasn’t just the abandonment of our home … No, what hurt the most was his indifference to us. His lack of love is what scarred me,” she wrote in her autobiography, published before she came to power in October 2022:

I grew up convinced I didn’t deserve anything. My reaction was to strive relentlessly to prove otherwise … Each day I grapple with fear — fear of inadequacy — of falling short in the eyes of others. But this fear is also my strength … This fear fuels my stubbornness, my commitment, my willingness to make sacrifices.

Meloni’s parents were not married, and her father had two other daughters with his estranged wife. Soon after he left, her mother had to move from La Camilluccia, an exclusive area in Rome, to La Garbatella, a working-class area. To make ends meet, she did a variety of jobs that included writing ill-paid bodice-rippers. To this day Meloni, who was a very promising student and dreamed of becoming an interpreter but could not afford to go to university, speaks with the Italian equivalent of a Cockney accent.

For several years in the late 1980s, she and Arianna flew on their own without adults to the Canaries for a few weeks each summer to stay with their father. But he had married a local woman and largely ignored them. When she was 11, she refused to ever go back after he told them something she will not reveal but says in her autobiography was “the death knell”.

In 1996, Francesco Meloni was jailed for nine years after police in Menorca found 1,500 kilos of hashish — at the time the largest haul ever seized in the Balearic Islands — on board his new yacht, Cool Star. He was said to be en route from Morocco to Italy to sell the drugs. He died in Majorca in 2012 aged 70. “If this is who I am today, it is thanks to my father — for better or worse,” she wrote. “When he died, I felt nothing. Writing these words is still painful.” 

It is telling that in her book she could not bring herself even to mention her father’s crime or time in prison, which emerged in the press only after she became prime minister. He had been a supporter of Italy’s communist party — and was thus a comunista al caviale (caviar communist). 

She does not say if this influenced her decision, aged 15, to join the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) whose sworn enemies, apart from capitalists, were communists. Nor does she say if being brought up in a single parent household caused her to become such a strident supporter of the traditional family.

Yet in their decade together, she and television presenter Andrea Giambruno — the father of Ginevra, their nine-year-old daughter — never married, despite her Catholicism. And how ruthless was her reaction when in October 2023 a satirical TV show broadcast off-air studio footage of him proposing a ménage à trois to female colleagues. “My relationship with Andrea Giambruno, after nearly 10 years ends here,” she proclaimed on social media to her 12 million followers.

MUSSOLINI’S HEIR?

Italy has had 69 governments since the fall of fascism, lasting on average little more than a year each. Remarkably, if it is still in office by September, Meloni’s will become the longest lasting of them all.

She is the first person to have become Italy’s prime minister by actually winning a general election since Silvio Berlusconi in 2008. The six PMs in between (nearly all of them left-wing) were each appointed as a result of back room deals. Four were not even members of parliament when appointed, yet those claiming that Meloni represents a far-right populist threat to democracy found nothing troubling about the undemocratic way in which her immediate predecessors were chosen. 

Nevertheless, in 2022, during and after her election triumph, her opponents and much of the international media including not just CNN, the BBC and the Economist but even the Telegraph, branded her “the heir to Mussolini” at the head of “the most right-wing government” in Italy since his fascist dictatorship. All chose to ignore 50 years of government by Italy’s centre-right party, the Democrazia Cristiana, which opposed the legalisation of both abortion and divorce. She was, if not actually fascist, at the very least far right, they told us, because she had been a member of Italy’s long defunct neo-fascist, then post-fascist, parties. 

Naturally, no one ever calls the PD, Italy’s main left-wing party, far left or its leader Elly Schlein — who has Italian, Swiss and American nationality — the heir to Stalin. They are described merely as centre-left. Yet the PD’s connection with communism is far more direct than FDI’s to fascism. It is full of people who were in the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), which was dissolved only in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its leader from 1938 to 1964, Palmiro Togliatti, spent two decades in exile in Moscow, where he was an active member of the Comintern. On his death in 1964, the Soviets renamed the city of Stavropol after him — Tolyatti.

Meloni joined the neo-fascist MSI in 1992, one of the most tumultuous years in Italy’s post-war history, which saw investigating magistrates launch a campaign against endemic political corruption that within two years led to the arrest of about 5,000 politicians and businessmen for bribery. 

Known as Mani Pulite (Clean Hands), it destroyed the dominant Democrazia Cristiana and the centre-left Partito Socialista, its main coalition ally. It was also the year that the Sicilian Mafia assassinated Italy’s top two anti-Mafia judges and committed a series of other atrocities. This was a declaration of war on the state by a parallel state. 

Like so many young Italians, Meloni felt “overwhelming anger” and decided, “I had to act.” She chose the MSI because it was a small party that had always been excluded from government, because it was deemed “outside the ark of the constitution” — and thus untainted by corruption or Mafia infiltration. 

The much larger PCI was also untainted, or so it was claimed. But to have become a communist would have been the fashionable thing to do. To join the neo-fascists, on the other hand, was an act of rebellion. 

“It might seem paradoxical to many, but the truth is I felt there was a freedom on the right I could not feel on the left.” she wrote by way of justification in her autobiography. “Freedom from conformity, freedom from having to bend to the ‘spirit of the time’, freedom from radical criticism which the left, because it was closed off in its ideological vision, did not allow.”

The MSI was founded in 1946 by Giorgio Almirante, a senior civil servant in Mussolini’s last government. By the 1990s, it had long renounced fascism’s most distasteful traits, such as dictatorship and anti-Semitism, but retained faith in big state intervention in the economy and a strong welfare state, coupled with the robust defence of country, culture and Italy’s traditional way of life.

Meloni quickly stood out for her boundless energy and passion, combined with a gift for oratory and her courage when surrounded by opponents on the street or at public events, and her organisational skills.

 In 1995, the MSI’s new leader, Gianfranco Fini, re-founded the party as Alleanza Nazionale (AN), turning what had been a national socialist party into a conservative party even though this — the antithesis of the so-called “Destra Sociale” (socialist right) and essentially an Anglo-Saxon or American concept — was hard to swallow for many on the Italian right. 

Fini had not long before called Mussolini “the greatest statesman of the 20th century”, but in 2003 he denounced his anti-Semitic laws of 1938 as “il male assoluto” (absolute evil), though he stopped short of denouncing fascism tout court as such.

When I interviewed Meloni in August 2022 shortly before she became prime minister, I tried to pin her down about why she and her colleagues found it so difficult to condemn fascism without equivocation. She responded: “When we founded Fratelli d’Italia, we founded it as a conservative party, with its head held high. When I am something, I declare it. I never hide. If I were fascist, I would say that I am fascist. Instead, I have never spoken of fascism because I am not fascist.” She showed me a text message on her mobile phone and explained:

Here’s a declaration I made in 2006, nearly 20 years ago, that an Italian journalist published, a left-wing journalist — and I told him, “Mussolini made various mistakes: the racial laws against the Jews, the declaration of war, an authoritarian regime. Historically, he also did other things that were good, but that does not save him.

But in general, Meloni and those around her, deal with their relationship with fascism by avoiding discussion of it. In her 270-page autobiography, for example, the word “fascism” appears just five times, and “Mussolini” three. When I asked her why, she replied: “It’s something that does not belong to me.”

THE LADY OF THE RINGS

Each year, until she became prime minister, Meloni posted on her Facebook page a message to mark the anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday (3 January 1892). “He brought up so many of us with his stories, so rich in values and meanings,” read one such message, “which taught us to believe and to dream — Thank you for everything.”

The quest to save Middle Earth from wicked Sauron enjoyed cult status amongst Italy’s neo-fascist youth in the 1970s. When Meloni was in the MSI’s youth group in the 1990s they used to put on Hobbit plays in the park, and she was always Sam Gamgee because she was short and fat. “But without Sam Gamgee, nothing, nothing could be done,” she told me. “The truth is Sam is much more useful than Frodo.” In a 2002 magazine interview, she said that for the existential and cultural formation of her party’s youth members “Our Bible is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” 

So what explains this reverence for Tolkien? After the death and destruction caused by fascism, post-fascists were determined to find a new mythology which did not hark back to the fascist past. So instead of Il Duce, the post-fascists idolised Il Piccolo — the little guy in his old-fashioned rural shire assailed by a faceless far-off industrialised evil force. Meanwhile, the caviar communists who had captured much of Italy’s mainstream culture swiftly decided that, regardless of what far-left hippies thought, such banal nonsense was reactionary, ergo fascist.

But Tolkien was most definitely not a fascist. He was a Catholic, a conservative and a monarchist who had an anarchical hatred of political power. “Above all, Tolkien has given me this understanding that power is not a conquest but an enemy, a problem that you must keep under control, on a leash,” she told me in 2022. “But you are about to get power,” I said. “It scares me,” she replied.

FRATELLI D’ITALIA

Berlusconi’s dream was to create a single party of the right. This he partially achieved when, as prime minister for the final time, he merged Forza Italia (FI) with AN in 2009 to form the Popolo della Libertà (PDL). His other coalition ally, the Lega Nord (as it was then called) remained independent as it was a regional separatist party. He appointed Meloni, aged 31 as his youth minister, making her the republic’s youngest-ever minister.

But the new party collapsed in 2011 after Berlusconi’s dramatic resignation in the wake of the euro crisis, which threatened to force Italy out of the single currency, and the bunga bunga sex scandal involving him most notably with a 17-year-old belly dancer nicknamed Ruby the Heart-Stealer.

Former members of the post-fascist AN left the PDL to form two new parties. One led by Fini sank without trace — the doomed merger had been his idea. The other, Fratelli d’Italia, co-founded by Meloni, fared little better. At its first general election in 2013, it got just 1.9 per cent of the vote; at its second in 2018, just 4.3 per cent.

Initially, it was Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord — which he renamed the Lega and transformed from a regional separatist to a national populist party — that filled the vacuum created by Berluscioni’s demise and the growing demand for a more right-wing party than FI.

The Lega reached its zenith at the 2018 general election, largely on a pledge to stop illegal immigrants arriving by sea from North Africa, when it polled well ahead of its two coalition allies (17.5 per cent) but together with them did not have enough seats to form a government. To their fury and that of many right-wing voters, Salvini then did so with the sworn enemy of all of them: the new alt-left Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, which had risen from nowhere to win the largest share of the vote (32.7 per cent) thanks to widespread popular revulsion with the political establishment whose sole objective, so many felt, was to line its own pockets.

Having betrayed his allies, Salvini fell victim to hubris. In the summer of 2019, he announced — bare-chested, at a beach club near Rimini — his resignation and demanded fresh elections. Instead, 5 Stelle — whose unique selling point was supposed to be its refusal to form coalitions with any other party in order to avoid contamination — promptly did so again, this time with its other sworn enemy, the post-communist PD. Within three years, Fratelli d’Italia not only took the Lega’s place as the top party of the right but became the dominant force in Italian politics.

The hypocrisy and incompetence in government of 5 Stelle, which had promised to tear down the temple and throw out la casta (the establishment), combined with Meloni’s charismatic leadership, played a part in this meteoric rise. A key moment came at a coalition rally in Rome on 19 October 2019 in a speech which turned her into a household name when she bellowed from the stage:

Now they’re talking about removing the words “father” and “mother” from documents. Because the family is an enemy, national identity is an enemy, gender identity is an enemy … They want us to be Parent 1, Parent 2, LGBT gender, Citizen X, code numbers. But we are not code numbers, we are people, and we will defend our identity. I am Giorgia. I am a woman. I am a mother. I am Italian. I am Christian. You won’t take that away from me! You won’t take that away from me!

Two DJs, aiming to ridicule Meloni, used these words to create a song that went viral on social media with 14 million views. Instead of damaging her, it made her hugely popular especially with the young. She regards the success of the song as proof that identity is the driving force in modern politics.

At the time of this speech, FDI was still polling only about six per cent, but within two years it would become more popular than any other party. At the 2022 general election, it topped the ballot with 26 per cent.

THE PRICE OF STABILITY

Many, including some supporters, say Giorgia Meloni is all mouth and no trousers and has failed to do anything significant in office. But what she has done is bring relative stability to a country that had become a byword for political and economic chaos. This is why she has survived.

Italy’s GDP growth remains very sluggish at less than one per cent a year, but so does that of Germany and France. Its government debt is stratospheric at 137 per cent of GDP, the second highest in Europe after Greece. But it is travelling in the right direction and is down from 158 per cent at its Covid pandemic peak — whereas French government debt has expanded from 98 per cent in 2016 to 117 per cent in 2025.

Furthermore, Italy is the only OECD country where real wages are lower than in the 1990s, before the introduction of the euro. And its population, thanks to one of the lowest fertility rates in the world combined with low net immigration, continues to fall: down 1.6 million from a peak of 60 million in 2016. By contrast, the population of the UK, which was similar in size to Italy at the millennium, has, through immigration, soared by 10 million.

Meloni’s determination to get Italian women breeding again — in her view the main crisis in Italy and the West — has amounted to not much more than tax breaks for working mothers. But crucially she has got the budget deficit down from eight per cent in 2022 to 3.1 per cent in 2025 (the EU limit is three per cent). France, for instance, remains consistently above the limit (5.5 per cent in 2025). The all-important spread between interest rates (yield) on German and Italian government 10-year bonds is at historically low levels (currently 75 basis points — i.e. 0.75 per cent — compared to 550 when Berlusconi resigned in 2011).

Though life has not improved dramatically for most Italians, unemployment has fallen from eight per cent when Meloni took office to just over five per cent today, though youth unemployment remains high at around 20 per cent and double that in parts of the south. But she takes credit for the creation of 1.2 million jobs since she came to power. She has more than tripled Italy’s temporary foreign worker quota to around 150,000 a year. But, in 2024, just eight per cent of the quota was filled.

No honest observer can say that Meloni has done anything that qualifies as far right, let alone fascist, unless you count her creation of a number of new ministries with jingoistic names like Food Sovereignty, Energy Security, Family and Birth Rate and Made in Italy or her partially successful crusade to honour a key election pledge: to stop illegal migrants arriving by sea from North Africa. The numbers have fallen by about 60 per cent in each of the past two years from a near record 157,000 in 2023. So far this year they are 80 per cent down on the same period in 2023.

This hefty reduction is largely due to a July 2023 EU deal with Tunisia that is potentially worth £1 billion in aid and investment and included £105 million to stop migrant departures. Meloni was the driving force behind the deal and persuaded EU president, Ursula von der Leyen, to back it. This was quite a turnaround, for when Meloni came to power Von der Leyen famously warned that the EU had the “tools” to stop her if necessary (a remarkable statement in itself).

Meanwhile, Meloni’s much discussed scheme to offshore migrants to purpose-built detention centres in Albania looks set to start this summer. The scheme is a potential game-changer as the aim is to process and deport up to 3,000 migrants a month from safe countries of origin (thus in theory not refugees) which will in turn act as a deterrent to others. Many EU leaders (plus Keir Starmer despite his cancellation of the Conservatives’ Rwanda scheme) have expressed interest in setting up similar schemes. 

Yet the Albania scheme has been on hold since 2024, when judges in Rome ruled that Bangladesh and Egypt — the countries of origin of the first migrants sent to Albania — could not be regarded as safe. But cajoled by Meloni (with Von der Leyen’s backing), the EU Commission has now drawn up a common list of safe countries of origin that includes both of them. Bangladesh tops the list of the country of origin of migrants reaching Italy by sea, and Egypt is fourth after Somalia and Pakistan. Once it becomes effective in June, the EU safe country list should make it much more difficult for Italy’s judges to declare such countries unsafe any more.

FIRST LADY OF EUROPE?

It is wishful thinking to imagine that Italy will replace France as Germany’s primary EU partner. But if Marine Le Pen (or if disqualified from standing, her designated heir, Jordan Bardella) becomes French president next year and Meloni wins a second term at the next general election (to be held before September 2027), it is feasible that Italy could form a new commanding relationship in Europe with France.

Feasible, but far from inevitable. Meloni has never got on with Le Pen and bristles at the snobbish attitude of the French towards Italians. And she objects to French domination, at the expense of Italy, in North and West Africa, where she is busy trying to complete aid and investment deals.

Nor are Meloni and Le Pen’s parties even in the same group at the European Parliament: Meloni’s FDI is in the Conservatives and Reformists and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in the Patriots. But her junior coalition partner, Salvini, could act as a bridge as his party, the Lega, is in Le Pen’s group. However, Le Pen’s party is still far more “post-fascist” than Meloni’s. It is in favour of high welfare spending and big state intervention in the economy and is far more instinctively anti-American and far less hostile to Vladimir Putin. 

Indeed, Meloni’s enduring and outspoken support for Ukraine marks her out from other European right-wing parties such as Hungary’s Fidesz and Germany’s AfD and turns the Eye of Sauron upon her. She was recently denounced as a “whore” and “fascist scum” by Putin’s mouthpiece, Vladimir Solovyov, on Russian state television. From such a source, she may wish to take this as a backhanded compliment, comparable to the denunciation by the Soviet armed forces newspaper, Red Star, of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher as the Iron Lady. Many wonder if Meloni is a Latin version of Lady T. 

But she would only begin to deserve such a comparison if she comes through this, her first big crisis. Falling out with Trump, her humiliating referendum rebuff and the dismissal at the end of April of her ally Beatrice Venezi as musical director of the Venice opera house — a significant defeat in her attempt to wrest control of the vital organs of Italian culture from the left — present huge challenges to her authority.

How she responds will reveal if she has enough virtù and fortuna to achieve what has eluded so many clever men before her: become the first prime minister in the history of the Italian republic to complete a five-year mandate. 

That she has survived this long proves how wrong were the dire warnings of her enemies about the havoc she would wreak once in power which — as she pointed out repeatedly — bore no resemblance to what she proposed in her election manifesto. She has endured thanks to her pragmatism.

She is a charismatic conservative realist and not a far right populist or crypto-fascist. Her hot-blooded personality and operatic oratory are distinctly Italian, as are her roots in post-fascism. But her favourite political thinker is a traditional English conservative: Sir Roger Scruton. 

This marks her out as a different type of conservative from the neoliberal free marketeers such as Thatcher: Scruton, unlike them, was in favour of rigid moral and legal control of the market to stop it corroding traditional institutions such as family and community through what he called “the stupidity of globalisation”. A prosperous economy, Scruton believed, is the by-product of a healthy society, not the other way round. Meloni’s efforts to prop up family and community have so far had limited measurable success, but they remain in measurably more robust health than in modern Britain. 

Whether or not this once fat, sullen and often bullied Sam Gamgee turns out to be the Iron Lady of the Mediterranean, she could not have got this far without iron in the soul.