{"id":92345,"date":"2026-08-23T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=92345"},"modified":"2026-08-22T16:35:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T22:35:44","slug":"giorgia-meloni-cuts-the-hard-right-a-path-to-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/giorgia-meloni-cuts-the-hard-right-a-path-to-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Giorgia Meloni cuts the hard right a path to power"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Giorgia<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Giorgia Meloni, daughter of the extreme right, likes to set records. As she settles into an armchair opposite a painting of rustic revelry inspired by Titian, she reflects on the secret of the political success that will soon make her the longest continually serving prime minister in the history of the Italian Republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am a person who imposes rules on herself,\u201d she says in a rare interview. \u201cThe first rule is that I never say something I don\u2019t think. There is no way to get me to say something I don\u2019t believe \u2014 my brain short-circuits.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She smiles, as if to say it\u2019s that simple, but of course it is not. She has remained something of an enigma, a tightly controlled one, as she has journeyed from post-Fascist roots to a pivotal place in the European politics she is changing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni has chosen to meet in a lounge adjacent to her Rome office. She is gracious to a fault. In such moments it is hard to recall the way she may roll her eyes and stare daggers when angry, as she has been of late with President Trump, her ideological ally, and Pedro S\u00e1nchez, the left-wing Spanish prime minister, an ideological foe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think people see the difference,\u201d says Ms. Meloni, who has been in office for almost four years, about four times the postwar Italian average. \u201cThey know if something\u2019s untrue, false \u2014 and I believe that\u2019s the biggest mistake a politician can make.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Truth is not exactly the political currency of this age, but Ms. Meloni has always marched to her own drum. The effect has been transformative. \u201cMelonization,\u201d or the numbing of horrifying history, has entered the lexicon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It denotes the process Ms. Meloni now personifies that allows a post-Fascist party, in this case her Brothers of Italy, to shed the threat of violent authoritarianism and gain acceptance in the mainstream through pragmatic conservatism, or at least its appearance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think what got me here\u201d \u2014 to her office at Palazzo Chigi \u2014 \u201cwas the courage to stand on the uncomfortable side of history,\u201d Ms. Meloni says, speaking Italian. \u201cTo opt to be against the current.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Courage is by some distance her favorite word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Marine Le Pen, of the once-outcast French far right, a strong candidate in next year\u2019s presidential election, and the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, leading polls in that country, the Meloni effect is about to be tested at the core of postwar European integration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Fascism in Italy, land of its birth, can be made to seem remote, even irrelevant to political success, so too perhaps can the Holocaust in Germany and the collaborationist wartime Vichy regime in France. It was Vichy\u2019s antisemitic nationalism that inspired Ms. Le Pen\u2019s father in founding the National Front, now rebranded as the National Rally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Le Pen, it seems, will have a ready retort as she seeks to reassure French voters: Just look at Italy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMeloni is not a visionary leader, but she has become a global star and the emblem of the possibility that far-right nationalists can be absorbed,\u201d said Giovanni Orsina, the director of the LUISS Guido Carli School of Government in Rome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Far from upheaval, Italy has found stability under Ms. Meloni, who has demonstrated the fiery talents of a demagogue anchored by a cool realism. France has had six governments and Britain three prime ministers since she took office in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With President Emmanuel Macron of France departing next year, Ms. Meloni could become the doyen of European politics, in the way former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany once was, at a time when a fragmenting world order is in profound and uneasy transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the question of what transformation Ms. Meloni seeks remains open. Has she really become a democratic moderate at the age of 49? Or does a 19-year-old Neo-Fascist still lurk inside her, the militant with an angelic face who told French TV in 1996 that \u201cMussolini was a good politician\u201d and \u201ceverything he did, he did for Italy\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Bridge Too Far<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni wanted to be the bridge over troubled waters. The only leader of a European Union government invited to Mr. Trump\u2019s inauguration, she aimed to build on their shared nationalism and hostility to immigration, and also to ensure that the Western alliance remained functional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So last year when Mr. Trump, in a tone of oleaginous flattery, called her \u201ca beautiful young woman,\u201d she feigned indifference. Bigger things were at stake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, provocations cascaded from the White House. The European Union had been created to \u201cscrew\u201d the United States, Mr. Trump declared. Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, should be handed to the United States. NATO\u2019s European allies were wimps, holding \u201ca little back\u201d in Afghanistan, where Italy lost 53 soldiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cInsulting Italy when we had paid a tribute in blood in Afghanistan was a brutal affront,\u201d said Fabio Rampelli, the vice-president of the lower house of Italy\u2019s Parliament and a longtime Meloni confidant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni did her best to turn the other cheek. \u201cIt\u2019s evident that with Donald Trump, I believed things would be easier, given our convergence on immigration and woke culture,\u201d she tells me. \u201cThings have turned out otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOtherwise\u201d is an understatement. In June she became the first of several insulted European leaders to hit back hard at Mr. Trump. As a result, she and Mr. Trump have not spoken in several weeks, she reveals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For her, the red line was crossed first in April when Mr. Trump attacked Pope Leo as \u201cWEAK on crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.\u201d Ms. Meloni responded that such remarks were \u201cunacceptable.\u201d Trump snapped back: She was \u201cunacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can criticize many things in Italy \u2014 the bureaucracy, a spaghetti carbonara, a once-glorious soccer team that for the third time running did not qualify for the World Cup \u2014 but not the Holy Father, and certainly not in ALL CAPS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was downhill from there. Mr. Trump floated a story that Ms. Meloni had \u201cbegged\u201d him for a photograph together in June at the Group of 7 summit in France.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was incandescent. She berated Mr. Trump: \u201cItaly and I never beg.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deliberate fusion of nation and self expressed her sense of a mission to change the perception of Italy, from land of beauty and inefficiency to land of serious intent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her shared values with Mr. Trump were eclipsed by her single biggest foreign-policy objective: to overcome Italy\u2019s longtime status as the least of the major powers and give the world\u2019s eighth largest economy geopolitical heft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t like the idea of a submissive Italy, an Italy that sees itself as lesser than others,\u201d she tells me in our interview. Her goal, she says, is to achieve \u201cthe biggest revolution that can happen in this nation \u2014 a revolution of pride.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She regrets nothing: \u201cI continue to believe that the unity of the West is something very important. I don\u2019t decide Italian strategy on the basis of my personal relations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked if she and Mr. Trump would speak after the summer break, she hesitates. \u201cWell, we will see.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Search of a Cause<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni learned early to shun passivity. \u201cI grew up with the idea that I was worthless,\u201d she writes in \u201cI Am Giorgia,\u201d her autobiography. \u201cMy reaction was to commit myself with all my being to demonstrate the contrary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abandoned as an infant by her father, who left for Spain and whose death in 2012 left her \u201cindifferent,\u201d Ms. Meloni buried in a \u201cblack hole\u201d the \u201cpain of not having been loved enough,\u201d as she puts it in her book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She hardened. At 13, she had decided never to see her father again. It was an irrevocable choice, as when in 2023 she dumped Andrea Giambruno, her partner and the father of her daughter, Ginevra. (A video and audio had caught what appeared to be his crude propositioning of female colleagues. The relationship \u201cends here,\u201d she wrote the next morning on social media.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The love of her mother, Anna Paratore, who wrote some 140 racy romance novels under the pen name Josie Bell, filled the void. Ms. Meloni grew up with her and an older sister in the Garbatella district of Rome, a working-class area with middle-class enclaves, including the one in which they lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second-floor apartment of her youth stands in a lovely courtyard of orange trees, pines, loquat trees and palms. A Palestinian flag is draped from one window; there are many in Rome. On a wall nearby is scrawled, \u201cThink poetically. Meloni out!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Garbatella belongs to the left and always has. Yet Ms. Meloni, just 15, opted for the right of Fascist roots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her decision stemmed from outrage, she explains. The Mafia\u2019s assassination in the space of two months in 1992 of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two Sicilian prosecutors threatening it, felt overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI remember on a hot July day watching the images on TV,\u201d she says, \u201cand thinking we can\u2019t go on like this. Basta!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Borsellino had once been close to the extreme-right Italian Social Movement, or M.S.I., founded in 1946 by former members of Benito Mussolini\u2019s Fascist party. The fringe party stood apart from the massive political corruption scandal sweeping Italy in the early 1990s, which added to its appeal, Ms. Meloni says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She called the headquarters of the M.S.I. and discovered that an office of its Youth Front was \u201cright around the corner.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day she walked in. At the time, the post-Fascist right had no chance of attaining power, and even two decades later, when she co-founded Brothers of Italy, the party hovered around 3 percent of the vote for seven years. Yet she persisted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t like others telling me what my limits are,\u201d she says. \u201cA \u2018No\u2019 is one of the things that mobilizes me the most.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A \u2018Complex\u2019 Time<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Garbatella office now houses a branch of Ms. Meloni\u2019s party. There, I found Marco Volponi in charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has known Ms. Meloni since they were teenagers. I asked him about the party logo outside with its tricolor flame in the green, white and red of the Italian flag, a symbol first adopted by the M.S.I. and widely seen today as representing the spirit of Fascism burning still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not Mussolini\u2019s,\u201d Mr. Volponi told me, echoing the party line. \u201cIt\u2019s the flame of our ardor from 1946 to where we are today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She used her inaugural speech to say that \u201cthe worst moment in Italian history\u201d was when Mussolini promulgated the anti-Jewish race laws of 1938; thousands of Italian Jews were ultimately sent to their deaths under partial Nazi occupation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our interview, however, she refers to the Fascist period merely as a \u201cparticularly complex\u201d time. So complex that its aftermath haunted her childhood and adolescence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the \u201cyears of lead,\u201d from the late 1960s into the 1980s, neo-Fascist and far-left groups were intent for different reasons on upending the postwar Republic. Bombings, assassinations and massacres left more than 400 dead, including one prime minister, Aldo Moro, killed in 1978 by the leftist Red Brigades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such was the instability in which Ms. Meloni was raised and that, in various, less violent forms, long haunted Italy. She made stability her watchword.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ushering her post-Fascist party into the mainstream, Ms. Meloni has refused to say that she is an anti-Fascist, which to her seems to denote the leftist groups of her youth for whom, in their words, \u201ckilling Fascists is not a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI know the name and the story of all the youths sacrificed on the altar of anti-Fascism,\u201d she has written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of neo-Fascist terrorism, Ms. Meloni has far less to say. Two rightist bombings left 102 people dead in attacks in Milan and Bologna alone. For her, the left was to blame for Italy\u2019s postwar troubles, and the \u201ccomplex\u201d period where her party found its roots was best set aside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of Italian Fascism, she says in the interview: \u201cClearly, if we look at this history today it\u2019s one thing. If we looked at it standing in the midst of it probably, we would have seen it differently, no?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The historian R.J.B. Bosworth, in his biography \u201cMussolini,\u201d writes that Il Duce\u2019s dictatorship \u201ccaused the premature deaths of at least one million people.\u201d They died in killing fields from Africa to Albania and Yugoslavia, and, not least, in Italy itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mussolini also drained the Pontine Marshes, built Milan\u2019s Central Station and, it is said, made the trains run on time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any moral appraisal of Mussolini\u2019s rule seem clear enough. But \u201cItaly never settled its accounts with Fascism,\u201d said Davide Conti, a historian. \u201cThere was no Nuremberg because nobody wanted it, and if you prosecuted Italian Fascists, you had to turn to the Resistance, most of them Communists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni benefited from this vacillation, navigating a narrow path between commitment to Italian democratic freedom and curious ambivalence over the period of its loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She did not open the door to the far right \u2014 Silvio Berlusconi, starting in the mid-1990s, did that as prime minister for a total of nine years at the head of four governments. But she was the ideal politician to step through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just 14 years after she walked into the Garbatella office, she was elected to Parliament and became the youngest deputy speaker in the history of the Republic. Two years later, in 2008, she set another record, as the youngest minister, age 31. The third record, for governmental longevity, awaits her on Sept. 4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The extreme right had always been seen as \u201cdangerous, nostalgic, Fascist, racist, xenophobic,\u201d said Mr. Rampelli, who headed the Roman Youth section of the M.S.I. when Ms. Meloni joined it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd here was a very young woman, 5 feet 3 inches tall, blonde and blue-eyed, smiling and sarcastic, who had nothing to do with Fascism \u2014 and from that moment on, all the people who continued insulting us just became ridiculous,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPerhaps I was the right person at the right time,\u201d Ms. Meloni suggests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meloni and the Tide of History<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand Ms. Meloni\u2019s ascent, I went to Piombino, on the Tuscan coast, a once-thriving steel town whose streets are now hushed. For decades after World War II, its steel industry employed more than 8,000 workers. Today, no more than 500 hang on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once a center of anti-Fascist resistance, Piombino was long a stronghold of the left and hard-line unions. Today, Ms. Meloni\u2019s party has taken over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Francesco Ferrari is the mayor. A suave lawyer, he was elected in 2019 as the first right-wing mayor since 1945 and re-elected two years ago. The left \u2014 through empty promises and poor management \u2014 exhausted the patience of Piombino\u2019s workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They joined a vast 21st-century migration from left to right across Europe of a working class angry at globalization and its cost in jobs, at uncontrolled immigration and at the alien values of a liberal urban elite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sign at the exit of the factory, a ghostly sprawl, says, \u201cThank you,\u201d alongside an image of a handshake. \u201cThanks for what?\u201d laughs Michele Nardini, who worked for 25 years on the blast furnace before losing his job in 2024. \u201cThey screwed us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Nardini now receives $1,250 a month in unemployment benefits. \u201cI was betrayed by an entire political class,\u201d he says over a coffee in the main square. \u201cWe were under the left for 70 years, so now I\u2019ll give the right 70 years!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Ferrari, the mayor, is trying to revive the steel industry and diversify the town into fish farming, tourism and other activities suited to its seafront location opposite the island of Elba.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have no problem pronouncing the word Fascist, or even anti-Fascist,\u201d Mr. Ferrari says. But surely, he suggests, the judgment of Piombino\u2019s people proves his party\u2019s complete break with its forebears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An agreement was reached in July for a Ukrainian company, an Italian steel producer and local authorities to invest $3.7 billion to create a cutting-edge plant. But Piombino has gone through too many promises for there to be much optimism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mirko Lami, a former senior official of the leftist C.G.I.L. union that once held sway, says Ms. Meloni has failed to deliver. Salaries are \u201camong the lowest in Europe\u201d and \u201cthe health service is going belly-up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Ferrari differs, arguing that an urban revival has begun, and he tells a story about his party\u2019s leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was 2020 and Meloni came to visit,\u201d Mr. Ferrari recalled. On the eve of his tenure, he said, the center-left Democratic Party had approved a project to expand a vast nearby garbage dump where stinking refuse rotted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDays before, she demanded the documentation on the dumpsite, details of the enlargement project, the nature of the garbage, my positions. And when we had meetings, she knew the dossier better than I did!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project was abandoned. The mayor beamed. \u201cThat is Giorgia Meloni.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Tight Inner Circle<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Ms. Meloni took office, Matteo Renzi, Italy\u2019s former center-left prime minister, decided to give her a smart ring. Bill Clinton had advised him that the worst decisions were the result of too little sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI said, \u2018Giorgia, this job is beautiful but agonizing, please keep track every night of how much you sleep.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni soon tossed the monitor. \u201cShe thought I was trying to control her,\u201d Mr. Renzi said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShe trusts nobody,\u201d Gianfranco Fini, the former M.S.I. leader who redefined the party as a democratic force in 1995 and steered Ms. Meloni toward a rapid ascent, told me. \u201cShe makes her own calculations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni works in a small cabal that includes her older sister, Arianna, and several of the extreme-right activists she met in her youth. They get the top jobs in the Senate, cultural institutions and elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her insular style has infuriated the left. Mr. Renzi, who heads a small center-left party called Italia Viva, recently caused a ruckus by suggesting that \u201cthe Addams Family\u201d was governing Italy. He is trying to unite the left to defeat Ms. Meloni in the elections next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elly Schlein, the leader of the Democratic Party, the largest party of the left, cited Italy\u2019s paltry economic growth rate of 0.5 percent, an 8 percent decline in real wages, some of Europe\u2019s highest energy bills and depleted public hospitals as evidence of a \u201cwasted historic opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cStability can be a value but when it\u2019s immobility, people are unforgiving,\u201d Ms. Schlein told me of Ms. Meloni.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prime minister hits back in our interview. She rattles off a long list of \u201cparameters\u201d \u2014 employment, inflation, illegal migrant landings, health spending, market spreads. \u201cTell me if they are not better!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These numbers have indeed moved in a positive direction, albeit sometimes fractionally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s possible,\u201d she says with characteristic sarcasm, \u201cthat I did nothing!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe best you can say is that there\u2019s been no disaster,\u201d said Veronica De Romanis, a professor of economics at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, noting that 1.2 million Italians are not in employment, education or training, with many leaving the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Ms. Meloni has brought is fiscal discipline. Under Giancarlo Giorgetti, a respected finance minister, the budget deficit has come down from 7 percent to close to the European Union\u2019s 3 percent limit. Italy\u2019s debt has been upgraded for the first time in 23 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Ms. Meloni, who said in 2014 that \u201cwe are for leaving the euro,\u201d the flip-flop to achieve this has been marked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She knew Italy needed E.U. money, including about $221 billion in pandemic recovery funds, an enormous boost to the economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So like a good European technocrat, the kind she had reviled, Ms. Meloni got in line on Italy\u2019s deficit. Like a good European NATO member, she backed Ukraine against Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJust about anything is reversible,\u201d said Salvatore Merlo, the deputy editor of Il Foglio newspaper, who knows Ms. Meloni well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018I Am Giorgia\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Ms. Meloni\u2019s father gave her little, he did, by living in Spain, afford her a perfect command of Spanish. On Oct. 7, 2021, in a 17-minute speech in Madrid, she uttered, not for the first time, words that have become her anthem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYo soy Giorgia! Soy una mujer!\u201d and on and on. \u201cI am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian. They cannot take this away from me! They will not take this away from me!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey\u201d were the objects of Ms. Meloni\u2019s loathing: the \u201cbarbarians of Black Lives Matter,\u201d as she put it; the left trying to \u201cturn Europe into a Soviet state\u201d; the Greens \u201cbankrupting us\u201d; the \u201cmonsters\u201d who propose the use of a surrogate uterus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked Ms. Meloni why her cri de coeur resonated. \u201cBecause it struck a chord that millions of people felt,\u201d she says. \u201cFeeling threatened in your most authentic, basic identity. It gave an easy slogan to an emotional rebellion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of that \u201cbasic identity\u201d is being a woman, Ms. Meloni says, without saying how it is threatened. She demurs when I inquire if she is a feminist. She tends to play to a sexist culture effectively, with arch self-deprecation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When an A.I.-generated deepfake photograph of her in lingerie spread online recently, she posted it on her Instagram account. She denounced it, sort of, while commenting that it \u201cimproved my appearance a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni has been criticized for choosing to be called \u201cil presidente\u201d in the masculine form. She tells me she thinks that feminists have fought \u201cthe wrong battles\u201d over things like gender quotas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat interests me is whether I\u2019m free to become president of the Council of Ministers,\u201d she says, using the formal name for the Italian cabinet and its prime minister. \u201cThat\u2019s equality, not being called \u2018la presidenta.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She argues for a similarly tough and practical path to global respect for her nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Italy had to stop acting as \u201cthe spare wheel to France and Germany,\u201d she says. It needed to be \u201cseated at the table of those who set the direction\u201d and it needed stability \u2014 \u201cnot a point of arrival but a point of departure,\u201d she tells me \u2014 to achieve this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni\u2019s quest to reshape Italy\u2019s self-image is evident in small details. She almost never refers to the \u201cRepublic\u201d or the \u201ccountry\u201d when speaking of Italy, but always to the \u201cnation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a marked shift from her predecessors designed to reinforce the idea of a community of blood and culture with every right to renewed national pride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course a Republic is the home of equal citizens; nation as understood by Ms. Meloni has a lot to do with immemorial Italian lineage. For this reason, immigration has been a central and divisive issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This month, Ms. Meloni led a broad E.U. assault on Mr. S\u00e1nchez, the Spanish prime minister, for supposedly lax immigration policies after thousands of migrants surged into Ceuta, the small Spanish territory in North Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The clash demonstrated Ms. Meloni\u2019s influence in pushing Europe rightward, as well as her capacity to engineer overheated emotion to feed her far-right base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At home, her immigration policies have been fiercely contested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She quietly authorized some 450,000 visas for migrants to work in Italy\u2019s fields and factories and to look after Europe\u2019s oldest population. She also devised an investment plan for Africa to increase the appeal of making it at home rather than leaving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A plan to send asylum seekers to Albania still faces legal challenges and has proved expensive with paltry results. It looked like a fiasco until, in June, the European Union approved the \u201cuse\u201d of \u201creturn hubs\u201d to asylum seekers in \u201csafe third countries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This has allowed Ms. Meloni to claim victory in European immigration policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Lingering Question<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Italians are surrounded by vestiges of the Roman Empire. They know the zenith of their power was reached long ago and they know the vanity of great ambition. \u201cItaly shall repudiate war,\u201d says its 1948 Constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One such reminder can be found at the Colle Oppio, an area behind the Colosseum that holds the ruins of the thermal baths of the Emperor Trajan, where Ms. Meloni and her far-right cadre used to convene. For a teenage Ms. Meloni, the place assumed near-mystical importance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn Colle Oppio I learned to defend my ideas,\u201d Ms. Meloni tells me. \u201cI became the person I am thanks to the years of youthful militancy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guido Crosetto, the defense minister and a co-founder with Ms. Meloni of Brothers of Italy, said in an interview at the ministry that she \u201chas sacrificed everything for what she built.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around him hung portraits of all past Italian defense ministers, including Mussolini. Having worked in Germany for some years, I tried to imagine an equivalent in Berlin. A Hitler portrait on display! I failed. Fascism is a different word to Germans and Italians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was reminded of this on May 22 when Ms. Meloni published a eulogy on Instagram for Giorgio Almirante, an ardent Fascist under Mussolini who was the founder in 1946 of the M.S.I., the neo-Fascist precursor to her party. His conception of politics lived \u201cwith passion, dignity and respect\u201d would live on, she promised on the 38th anniversary of his death, and be ever recalled by an Italian right determined to act \u201cwith courage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Almirante was a prominent contributor to a racist, antisemitic review, \u201cThe Defense of the Race,\u201d published under Mussolini. In it he wrote: \u201cOur racism must be that of the blood in our veins.\u201d Otherwise, he warned, Italy would fall to \u201cthe half-castes and the Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later in life, Mr. Almirante embraced democracy. \u201cHe taught us something very important in terms of values,\u201d Ms. Meloni tells me in the interview. \u201cThat you can fight your battle with dignity even from a very marginal initial position.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMeloni has never said or done anything Fascist,\u201d Stefano Feltri, who edits a Substack newsletter called \u201cAppunti\u201d (Notes), told me. \u201cBut she is not a part of anti-Fascist Italy, the culture of the Resistance that produced our Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni tried this year to change that Constitution in a referendum that would have brought Italy\u2019s judges, long resented by rightist leaders as a liberal force, under tighter political control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The shattering defeat she suffered on her most ambitious single piece of domestic legislation appeared to be an indicator that not all Italians trust her with power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA victory would have led later to more profound modifications to the Constitution, in the direction of a stronger executive, a more presidential system,\u201d said Mr. Conti, the historian. \u201cThat is her fundamental aim.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet there is no sign of her support crumbling. It hovers around 27 percent, slightly above her score in the 2022 election. For now, a divided left does not have a leader of her stature, leaving the next year\u2019s election wide open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A fresh challenge has emerged to her right in Roberto Vannacci, a retired general whose new party, National Future, has grown rapidly. \u201cNazism certainly had some negative sides, as did so many other historical periods,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has called for Italian \u201ccultural homogeneity,\u201d declared that gays are \u201cnot normal\u201d and urged \u201cremigration\u201d of 500,000 undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe basic mistake of Meloni is to have diluted herself,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Return of the Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Meloni\u2019s achievement as prime minister has demanded disciplined moderation. But her past positions and nationalist core suggest that if she were re-elected next year, and Marine Le Pen came to power in France, the uncertainties surrounding Europe\u2019s fate would grow. The AfD could also one day govern Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMemory fades after three generations,\u201d Thomas Bagger, the German ambassador to Italy, told me. \u201cEven the Holocaust does not resonate as it once did, and nor does the imperative of integration in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nazism and Fascism are not returning but nationalism, xenophobia and the war on its border present a serious challenge to the European Union, with Mr. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia also seeking to weaken or even undo it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAt best, Meloni wants a light-touch Europe,\u201d Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The balance of power has already changed. This summer, I watched Ms. Meloni stand beside Mr. Macron, her sometime critic, answering questions from journalists at the first Franco-Italian summit since 2020, held in a sumptuous villa on the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I am in a position to give advice to the French on what is best for them,\u201d she said, turning her gaze to Mr. Macron. \u201cBecause I do not forget what was done to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMemory fades after three generations,\u201d Thomas Bagger, the German ambassador to Italy, told me. \u201cEven the Holocaust does not resonate as it once did, and nor does the imperative of integration in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nazism and Fascism are not returning but nationalism, xenophobia and the war on its border present a serious challenge to the European Union, with Mr. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia also seeking to weaken or even undo it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAt best, Meloni wants a light-touch Europe,\u201d Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The balance of power has already changed. This summer, I watched Ms. Meloni stand beside Mr. Macron, her sometime critic, answering questions from journalists at the first Franco-Italian summit since 2020, held in a sumptuous villa on the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I am in a position to give advice to the French on what is best for them,\u201d she said, turning her gaze to Mr. Macron. \u201cBecause I do not forget what was done to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou know, people say to me, \u2018Giorgia, you must realize that you have made history!\u2019 and all I can think of is all these kids after my death who one day will say, \u201cMamma mia, this afternoon I have to study Giorgia Meloni!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history-maker laughed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n