Italian PM Meloni poised to harness Europe’s hard-right charge

The Italian leader once said she wanted to bring down the EU, yet her influence within it is growing.

Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at a polling station in Rome. Picture: AFP.

Since taking power almost 18 months ago, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female leader and perhaps the most right-wing since the Second World War, has made her mark on her homeland. Now she is trying to do the same in Europe.

Ms Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party with post-Fascist roots, looks set to emerge victorious from elections to the European parliament, which culminated on Sunday (Monday AEST). Polls predict the party will win 25-27 per cent of the vote, four or five points ahead of the main opposition, the centre-left Democratic Party.

“Meloni has campaigned very hard, but not because she’s interested in the dynamics of the European parliament,” said Valerio Alfonso Bruno, a senior fellow at Polidemos, the Centre for the Study of Democracy and Political Change at the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. “She wants to show that hers is Italy’s leading party and that she is going to stay as Prime Minister for her full five-year term.”

Yet the result will undoubtedly help shift the balance of power in Europe – Ms Meloni’s members of the European parliament (MEPs) will form one of the largest contingents among a record number of representatives from radical and hard-right parties expected to win seats. Including France’s National Rally, the Dutch Party of Freedom and the Alternative for Germany, they are likely to push for a tougher line on immigration and a weakening of Europe’s “green deal”.

It will also enhance Ms Meloni’s own standing in Europe – putting her into an unusually strong position for an Italian leader at a time when the three-party coalition of the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is struggling and President Emmanuel Macron of France is hobbled by the lack of a parliamentary majority.

“She is in firm control of Italian domestic politics and is looking to wield extra influence at EU level, where Italy has historically punched below its weight,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, a Brussels-based senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States think tank.

“She’s a great politician – and also ruthless – and she is positioning herself as someone who is prepared to play ball with the traditional parties in Europe.”

On Wednesday Ms Meloni will advance on the world stage when she hosts President Joe Biden and other G7 leaders at a summit at Borgo Egnazia, a resort on the Puglian coast beloved of international celebrities. Almost uniquely among EU leaders, she has been assiduously courting Donald Trump.

“If Biden wins in November her relations will be great, but if Trump wins they will be great too,” said Teresa Coratella, of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Rome. “If you look at Scholz and Macron, that is absolutely not the case.”

A highly skilled political operator, Ms Meloni, 47, has come a long way since the last European election in 2019, when her party managed only a lowly fifth place, with less than 7 per cent of the vote.

In opposition at home at the time, she was a strident Eurosceptic. “Bring down this EU!” she declared during that year’s meeting of America’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

Since becoming Prime Minister, however, Ms Meloni has adopted a far more conciliatory tone and developed a close working relationship with Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president.
Ms von der Leyen’s German Christian Democrats sit in the European parliament within the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), while the Brothers of Italy are part of the Eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), once home to the British Tory party.

Ms Meloni has been rewarded by Ms von der Leyen with support for her government’s tougher line on immigration, which has included a controversial deal that as many as 36,000 migrants picked up in the Mediterranean each year on their way to Italy will be processed in Albania.

The Italian leader’s ideas helped inspire a recent toughening of EU migration policy, while the two women have also made trips to Egypt and Tunisia to conclude deals to curb the numbers trying to reach Europe.

This softer stance was reflected in Brothers of Italy’s relatively innocuous slogan for this year’s campaign: “With Giorgia, Italy will change Europe.” It is in sharp contrast to that of the League, headed by Matteo Salvini, Ms Meloni’s junior coalition partner and political rival, which is trying to restore flagging fortunes with a more confrontational: “More Italy and less Europe.”

Ms Meloni’s continued popularity at home – her approval ratings are still above 30 per cent – has been driven in part by her skill as a communicator, but also by the strength of the Italian economy, which has grown by 4.2 per cent since the eve of the Covid pandemic, far more than those of Britain, Germany and France. Overall debt, however, is an alarming 140 per cent of GDP.

Ms Meloni’s relationship with Ms von der Leyen will be key to what happens next for the EU, which will be plunged into weeks of wrangling over the choice of the next presidents of the European Commission, the European Council and the European parliament, as well as the EU’s next foreign policy chief. Ms von der Leyen, 65, wants a second five-year term and hopes to be endorsed by EU leaders. Italian backing would be useful, especially in the unlikely event another rival emerges.

More unpredictable will be the next stage of the process – probably in September – when Ms von der Leyen has to win the backing of a simple majority of the 720 newly elected members of the European parliament.

She secured her first term after scraping home with a majority of just nine votes, having drawn support largely from the mainstream parties. They will be weaker this time, with a predicted surge of the nationalist right – making the backing of Ms Meloni’s MEPs crucial.

Ms Meloni has yet to confirm her intentions, but the idea of Ms von der Leyen doing a deal with the far right is anathema to leaders of Europe’s left, especially Elly Schlein, who heads Italy’s Democratic Party and is no fan of Ms Meloni.

“It’s a slippery slope towards the right wing,” Ms Schlein said after an election rally in Florence. “In the past five years, we have seen Ursula von der Leyen and the EPP and Liberals running towards the extreme right and the nationalist right. There is a risk they will work together with the nationalist forces that want to weaken the European Union.”

For that reason, Mr Scholz, a Social Democrat, and others in the “socialist family” warned last month they would withdraw backing for Ms von der Leyen if she does a deal with the far right, though Mr Kirkegaard said: “Would the Socialists really be ready to take the blame for the EU to be paralysed for six months?”

Giving overt backing to Ms von der Leyen could come at a cost for Ms Meloni too, by undermining relations with other leaders to her right, who remain implacably opposed to the commission president.

This might complicate attempts to increase the right’s influence in Europe to form a “supergroup”, uniting its members, who are at present divided: some are in the ECR and others in the more radical Identity and Democracy group, while the remainder sit as independents.

Ms Meloni looks unlikely to let that bother her. Such is her newfound power, they may need her more than she needs them.

THE SUNDAY TIMES