Giorgia Meloni’s ascendancy to the Italian premiership last year sent a shiver down the spines of centrists across the Continent and beyond. Brussels braced for a member of a post-fascist party getting a seat (and a vote) at its top tables, bolstering the ranks of the EU’s problem children. Kyiv prepared for Italy to break from the pack and seek to soften support for Ukraine and wind back Russia sanctions. But a year after becoming the leader of the EU’s third-largest economy, Meloni has defied expectations — and built a significant (if cautious) fan club.
Meloni has moved to implement constitutional reforms that would significantly boost prime ministerial powers. And she still throws plenty of red meat to her far-right base: She has banned raves, rails against immigration, ordered local authorities to stop registering same-sex couples as parents, criminalized surrogacy, and introduced a series of policies that were supposed to improve the lot of low-earning women (though there are questions about whether they’ve actually backfired).
But Meloni, a die-hard “Lord of the Rings” fan who reportedly called herself the “little dragon of the Italian undernet” in online chatrooms in her early 20s, appears to have undergone a transformation over the past year in power. While previously calling for Italy to abandon the euro currency and repeatedly taking aim at “the bureaucrats in Brussels,” today’s Meloni appears to be on good terms with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, even working closely with her and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to strike an ill-fated deal with Tunisia seeking to limit migrant departures. There were fears Meloni would use her premiership to weaken access to abortion. But while members of her coalition have drafted a law giving legal standing to the fetus from conception (raising concerns more restrictions are on the way), Meloni hasn’t touched the constitutional provision that allows abortion within 90 days under certain conditions.
The biggest surprises have come in foreign policy. Before she became prime minister, Meloni appeared to be yet another of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s far-right pals: She opposed sanctioning Moscow after it illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, and in 2018 she congratulated Putin for his “reelection,” saying it represented “the unequivocal will of the Russian people.” As recently as 2022, just before Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Meloni said in an interview that Italy needed “a secular peace with Russia” and accused U.S. President Joe Biden, whose administration had been issuing urgent warnings of the coming offensive, of “using foreign policy to cover up the problems he has at home.” It’s no wonder Meloni’s rise to power concerned the White House.
Yet those fears haven’t been realized. Meloni, the ultimate political chameleon, has reinvented herself as a Russia hard-liner. Shortly after the full-scale invasion, she slammed the “unacceptable large-scale act of war by Putin’s Russia against Ukraine,” then traveled to Kyiv earlier this year in a show of solidarity. In May at the G7 summit in Japan, Meloni pleasantly surprised U.S. officials in her eagerness to build a strong relationship with Biden; two months later, she visited the White House, where she received the full VIP treatment.
Meloni’s transformation into a security hawk was complete when she moved to pull Italy out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative — after the country became the only G7 nation to join the controversial program in 2019. With Italy set to take over the presidency of the G7 in January, Meloni’s U-turn has prompted relief from both sides of the Atlantic.
Still, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing: Earlier this year, the 46-year-old suffered significant embarrassment after she was recorded telling two Russian pranksters pretending to be African Union officials that European leaders are “tired” of the war in Ukraine. That said, Meloni is hardly the first high-profile politician to have fallen for the trick: Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson have also been duped.
The coming election year will be crucial for Meloni, who is also the president of the EU-level European Conservatives and Reformists, a political family that includes Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice party and the far-right Sweden Democrats. With voters around the EU heading to the ballots in June and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy looking stronger than ever, it’s no secret that the center-right European People’s Party has been courting the Italian leader — perhaps with an eye on a post-election tie-up that could redraw the European political landscape.
Check out the full POLITICO 28: Class of 2024, and read the Letter from the Editors for an explanation of the thinking behind the ranking.
