Italy: Meloni, the Far Right & a Pragmatic EU Bet

When Giorgia Meloni led her Fratelli d'Italia party to victory in the September 2022 Italian general elections, alarm bells rang across European capitals. Meloni had spent years at the radical fringes of Italian politics, rooted in the post-fascist tradition of the Italian Social Movement (MSI). Her party's name, its use of the tricolor flame symbol inherited from MSI, and her past statements on immigration, LGBTQ rights, and European institutions led many observers to predict a Meloni government would be as disruptive to EU institutions as Hungary's Viktor Orbán. That prediction, at least at the institutional level, has proven largely wrong. Meloni formed a coalition with Matteo Salvini's Lega and the rump of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (Berlusconi died in June 2023 but the party has continued under new leadership), and has governed with considerable pragmatism on the EU stage.

Italy's most critical relationship with the EU involves money. The country is the largest recipient of the EU's post-pandemic NextGenerationEU recovery fund, receiving €191 billion through Italy's PNRR plan. This creates a powerful structural incentive for any Italian government to stay on the right side of EU institutions, regardless of political ideology. Meloni's government has largely met the milestones required to unlock tranches of this funding, avoiding the confrontations with Brussels that some expected. Where Meloni has pushed back against the EU, it has primarily been on migration and border policy — demanding more EU support for managing Mediterranean arrivals and stronger external border enforcement. She has also been broadly supportive of Ukraine against Russia, a position that has aligned her with the mainstream EU consensus rather than isolating her as a disruptor.

Domestically, Meloni's main vulnerabilities are Italy's chronic structural weaknesses: a national debt of around 135% of GDP, persistently low productivity growth, demographic decline, and persistent north-south economic disparities. These challenges predate her government and will outlast it. Within her coalition, tensions between Lega (led by Salvini, who has been more openly pro-Putin and euroskeptic) and the more internationalist instincts of Forza Italia represent an ongoing internal management challenge. Meloni's own approval ratings have held up reasonably well by the standards of Italian politics, and she is considered one of the more stable Italian leaders of the past decade — a low bar given that Italy has averaged roughly one government per year since 1945.

Italy is a founding EU member and the bloc's third-largest economy, giving it significant weight in EU decision-making that its chronic political instability has historically prevented it from fully leveraging. Meloni's tenure has given Italy a more consistent voice in European affairs than many recent predecessors. Through her chairmanship of the ECR group in the European Parliament, Meloni has become the de facto leader of the European right-wing conservative bloc — a position distinct from Orbán's more radical patriot alignment and from the mainstream EPP.

Meloni's relationship with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (EPP) has been described as "transactional." While the ECR is not part of the governing coalition at EU level (which relies on EPP + S&D + Renew), Meloni has been able to influence specific policy decisions — particularly on migration — by positioning herself as a necessary interlocutor rather than an outsider. This gives Italy more EU influence under Meloni than a purely oppositional posture would allow, while maintaining her political brand as a conservative challenger to the liberal establishment.

Italy under Meloni occupies one of the most strategically advantageous positions of any EU member in relation to the Trump administration. Meloni's politics — nationalist, culturally conservative, skeptical of liberal internationalism — align broadly with Trump's ideological preferences, and the two leaders have cultivated a personal rapport. Meloni was among the first European leaders to be received warmly at Mar-a-Lago after Trump's November 2024 re-election. This relationship gives Italy a channel to Washington that few other EU governments possess, and Meloni has leveraged it to avoid Italy being targeted disproportionately in US trade pressure on the EU. On tariffs, Italy as an EU member is subject to the bloc's collective response, but Meloni's access to Trump has been used to argue for moderation.

On NATO, Meloni's position is notably different from her coalition partner Salvini's. Despite leading a party rooted in post-fascist Italian nationalism, Meloni has been consistently pro-NATO and pro-Ukraine — a stance that aligns with the mainstream EU and US position and distinguishes her from Orbán's more pro-Russian tilt. Italy increased its defense budget under the Meloni government, though it remains below the 2% NATO target. The combination of ideological affinity with Trump and institutional commitment to NATO and Ukraine has made Meloni an unusual figure: a far-right European leader who is simultaneously less disruptive to the Western alliance than many liberal commentators predicted.

Fratelli d'Italia's rise from 4% in the 2018 elections to 26% in 2022 and its current position at 29–31% in polls represents one of the most dramatic far-right electoral trajectories in modern European history. FdI was not always a major party: it spent most of the post-war period as the radical fringe of Italian politics, inheriting the organizational structures and symbolic language of the post-Mussolini MSI (Italian Social Movement). Meloni herself has roots in this tradition, having been president of the youth wing of the MSI-successor party as a teenager. Her evolution toward a more mainstream conservative posture — without fully abandoning the cultural-nationalist core of her politics — is the key political story of Italian conservatism in the 2020s.

In government since October 2022, FdI has governed more pragmatically than its opposition rhetoric suggested. The party accepted EU PNRR recovery funds rather than confronting Brussels, supported Ukraine rather than aligning with Russia, and maintained Italy's NATO commitments. Where Meloni has delivered on her pre-election platform is primarily in domestic social policy (opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, restrictive migration policies, nationalist cultural agenda) and in setting the ECR group's direction in the EU Parliament. The party polls at 29–31% heading into the 2027 elections — a level that, with coalition partners Lega and Forza Italia adding another 15–16%, gives the centre-right bloc a comfortable governing majority barring a serious internal rupture.