Why Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is the new queen of European politics
Prime Minister Meloni has become one of the key figures in European politics and an influential voice on the right throughout the West.
There was a time when new leaders in Europe began life in office by visiting the three great centres of power: Brussels, Berlin and Paris. Yet when UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s plane touched down in the evening of December 13 on a mission to plug the holes in Britain’s borders, it did so in Rome.
Cooper was following a path trodden by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who visited Italy in September. Cooper spent the next day with her Italian counterpart, Matteo Piantedosi, before they jointly addressed the Atreju festival, an event organised by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, on how they can tackle migration together. Cooper’s presence will cement the growing view in diplomatic circles that Meloni has become one of the key figures in European politics and an influential voice on the right throughout the West.
Cooper discussed plans with Meloni’s team to work with Italy to combat illicit financing for the criminal gangs behind migrant trafficking. Italy has vast expertise from decades of countering the mafia, while London, thanks to the city, has the best expertise in Europe on dark finance and money laundering.
Meloni’s emergence has coincided with the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s centre-left coalition in Germany and domestic strife for Emmanuel Macron, the French president, who had to appoint a new prime minister on December 13 after Michel Barnier was forced out.
When Meloni first came to power, in October 2022, she was seen as riding the populist wave sweeping the West and some wondered how long she would last in a country notorious for the fragility of its governments. Yet two years on, Meloni is one of the most secure leaders in the EU – and one of the most influential. With Angela Merkel gone, some see Meloni succeeding the former German chancellor as the new queen of European politics.
Roberto D’Alimonte, a politics professor at Rome’s Luiss University, said: “She is the only prime minister of a major EU country who can expect to be there in three years – it’s a kind of stability Italy is not known for.” A senior official in the British Tory government put it more bluntly: “When she hosted the G7 meeting (in July), everyone else was a dead man walking.”
Meloni’s government has also surprised many of its allies with the way she has combined a tough and effective crackdown on immigration without embracing the hardline approach associated with Italy’s neo-fascists (12 of whom were arrested recently for trying to assassinate her). Meloni has avoided the race baiting of her coalition ally Matteo Salvini.
She has also grown her power by quietly forming an effective alliance with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, to tackle immigration – an issue that brought Brussels out in hives when former UK prime minister David Cameron sought curbs on free movement before the EU referendum in 2016.
D’Alimonte said: “Even Scandinavian social democratic parties are waking up to the issue. She is on the right side of the right issue at the right time.”
Francesco Galietti, an analyst at the Policy Sonar consultancy in Rome, added: “Italy has been ahead of the curve, a petri dish for European politics.”
Which explains why Cooper was in Rome. In addition to her talks about illicit gang finance, the Home Office is launching new “upstream communications campaigns” aimed at exposing the lies told by criminal smuggling gangs. This will include warnings to prospective migrants about the exploitative practices of employers and the dire and inhumane living conditions some of those found to be working illegally face, based on real testimonies.
That is an echo of the deal Meloni and von der Leyen struck with Tunisia to halt sailings across the Mediterranean (which dwarf in scale and danger those across the Channel). That has helped cut arrivals in Italy to about 64,000 landings in 2024, less than half the 153,000 registered by this time in 2023.
The deal focuses not just on enforcement, but Meloni has also persuaded the rest of the EU to share more of the refugees burden. And she has focused on upstream working with countries in North Africa to persuade people not to leave. Her phrase is that people should have “the right not to migrate” rather than feel compelled to do so.
Cooper stressed that Italy had led the way in urging greater co-operation across Europe to tackle migration and that talks with the so-called Calais group of countries (the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium) were showing progress. “There’s been a real gear shift,” she said, “and Italy has been a leading voice in that. What Meloni will say is that this is something which has to be done in partnership between countries.”
Even Meloni has faced setbacks. Her Tunisian deal has reportedly led to police officers raping migrants and dumping them in the desert. And her flagship deal to return migrants to Albania has been put on hold after her plans were blocked by Italian courts, based on a European Court of Justice ruling on what constitutes a safe country.
But in two other ways, Meloni has emerged as a serious player. First, her pragmatism – and a willingness to work with the EC – has distinguished her from other populist leaders in Europe, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and France’s Marine Le Pen.
“She has shown populists can be pragmatists,” D’Alimonte said. “She is smart enough to know populism wins elections but is not the way to govern. She has been pragmatic about the EU, NATO and her budgets, which are not packed with giveaways.”
Second, Meloni has emerged as one of the world’s best proponents of personal diplomacy. After she sat next to Donald Trump following the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the president-elect called her “a real live wire”. A day later he said: “She’s fantastic. She is a fantastic leader and person.”
Meloni is also close to Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and key Trump whisperer who has been appointed by the president-elect to slash US government waste. In September, when Musk presented her with an award at a Washington ceremony, she praised his “precious genius”, while Musk called Meloni “more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside”.
A British official who has seen her in action said: “She’s funny, she’s flirty, she’s charismatic with quite a gravelly voice. She gets on with people who are different from her. Rishi [Sunak] is teetotal but she would sit with him and have an Aperol and a fag. When she hosted the G7 it was in Puglia, which is a less grand part of Italy. She held it in the hotel where she likes to stay herself. Her daughter was always there at these summits and they would greet each other with ‘Mama!’ and ‘Bambina!’”
Fabio Rampelli, an MP in Meloni’s party who has known her since she was a teenager, attributes her success to her working-class upbringing in Rome’s Garbatella district: “World leaders are not used to someone who is informal, who has not been changed by politics and who says things the way they are. Her sense of humour, her ability to poke fun comes from being very Roman, because she grew up in council houses, not on a board of directors. She has an irresistible self-irony that opens doors.”
From a British point of view, however, Meloni is no Trump clone and has staked out a politically brave position in support of Ukraine. A British diplomat said: “She’s maintaining a very robust position in a country where public opinion is, frankly, much more equivocal. Italy has sent nine tranches of weapons to Ukraine.”
When Orban sought to block European aid to Ukraine, it was Meloni who talked him out of vetoing it. Might she lean on Trump too?
A former Downing Street official said: “What’s really consequential about her is that she’s on the right, but she’s on the Atlanticist right – the Thatcher right.”
Meloni’s admiration for Sir Roger Scruton, an influential Tory thinker in the 1980s and 1990s, was a point of bonding with Sunak when they first met. When Meloni visited No.10, officials showed her papers from the Thatcher archive in the Thatcher study, a library on the first floor of Downing Street that the former prime minister used as her office.
Anglo-Italian relations are in as good a shape as they have been for years following the signing, in the days of the Sunak government, with Italy and Japan to build a new fighter jet together. Since the general election, 18 Labour ministers have visited Italy. Britain’s ambassador in Rome, Lord Llewellyn of Steep, is seen as a key link man, and the Italian envoy in London, Inigo Lambertini, is described by Lord Godson, director of the Policy Exchange think tank, as “the outstanding diplomatist of the time”.
Godson presented Meloni with the Grotius Prize, named after Hugo Grotius, one of the founders of international law. He said: “She broke with some of the more discreditable traditions of the Italian right of uncritical support for aspects of Russia’s policies. That’s a big deal. It’s striking that the Prime Minister of Italy should be the leader of the European right today. She has impressed herself on the consciousness of the times in a way that very few other people have done.”
THE SUNDAY TIMES
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