Five years ago, when her party won 6 percent of the vote in the European Parliament elections, Giorgia Meloni tried to open a bottle of sparkling wine, but the cork landed awkwardly among some of her supporters.
This week Meloni, now Italy’s prime minister, emerged as a big winner in the election, and she and dozens of members of her Brothers of Italy party celebrated at a five-star hotel in Rome where waiters carried bottles of wine in basins silver. full of ice The far-right party won almost 29 percent of the vote. The victory was even more significant because Meloni was the only leader of a major Western European country to emerge stronger from the elections.
For Meloni, the promotion couldn’t have come at a better time. All eyes are on Italy this week as Meloni prepares to host a summit of the Group of 7 major economies for three days starting Thursday. It’s another opportunity to present yourself as a legitimate member of the club of the world’s most influential leaders.
“This nation is going to the G7 and Europe with the strongest government ever,” he told supporters early Monday after learning the results. “They couldn’t stop us.”
When she became prime minister in 2022, she sent shivers through the European establishment due to her far-right, Eurosceptic credentials and post-fascist roots. That establishment now considers her a pragmatic partner on key international issues.
Meloni’s approach is serving as a model of sorts for other far-right leaders seeking to break through into the mainstream.
In France, Marine Le Pen has softened her own stance on important issues and polished her image. Her National Rally party finished so strongly in the European elections, with more than 30 percent of the vote, that President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called new parliamentary elections.
“Giorgia Meloni’s government positively contaminated Europe,” Giovanni Donzelli, a legislator for the Brothers of Italy, said Sunday night. “A wall fell across Europe; they realized that the right can govern well.”
In recent months, Meloni has been courted both by the European centre-right as a potential ally and by parties even further to its right in their attempt to create a united nationalist front.
While the center occupies the center of the new European Parliament, Meloni may still emerge as a key figure in individual votes, including the most immediate one for the re-election of Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, which needs the approval of the Parliament. legislature to secure a second term.
Meloni, experts said, could decide to support von der Leyen as a way to exert more influence in Brussels.
“Meloni is going to be a major player in Europe,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at consulting firm Eurasia Group. “As Meloni leans toward the center and is constructive, he will receive many rewards.”
On the broader international stage, Meloni has also become a critical player on issues such as support for Ukraine, something that has distinguished her from other sectors of the far right that tend to be more pro-Russian.
That has put her in good standing with the group of Western leaders who will meet this week in the Apulia region of southern Italy, especially after the elections.
“All the lights are on it,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist at the LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. “His image of her is even more enhanced.”
Among those attending the G7 are President Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, Rishi Sunak of Britain, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan. Ms von der Leyen and Charles Michel, President of the European Council, were also scheduled to attend.
Meloni has also invited Pope Francis; President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine; the recently re-elected Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi; and the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, among others, including several African leaders. He has promised to focus the summit in part on his development and cooperation plan with Africa.
The meeting will take place at Borgo Egnazia, a luxury resort with sparkling pools surrounded by rosemary and olive trees. Its stone houses and villas are filled with baskets of almonds and lemons, and its narrow streets are lined with rusty bicycles and wooden carts that bear the signs of time.
Except the whole place was built in the early 2000s on land razed by Mussolini to build an air base. The complex reproduces an ancient Apulian town and farm in a project that some locals have compared to a Mediterranean Potemkin village.
The world leaders will follow guests including Madonna, the Beckhams, Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, who tied the knot at the resort.
“Meloni wanted to make a great impression, and I’m sure he will,” said Romeo Di Bari, 41, owner of a store in the town of Alberobello, which the leaders’ partners plan to visit, and where one afternoon Recently, grooms knelt on the cobblestones to photograph their brides pirouetting among the area’s distinctive pointed huts.
Nearby, in the city of Bari, locals praised Ms. Meloni for bringing new prestige to their region and their country.
“Our nation is at the forefront,” said Giovanni Pirlo, 68, a retired surveyor. “Our nation was always marginalized; Now with Meloni something is changing.”
Meloni has played a delicate balancing act of joining the European establishment on international issues while pleasing his base at home with hardline positions on abortion or LGBT rights that cost him little in Europe (and cash).
She has also combined her roles as a woman of the people and as an international statesman. She has insisted on speaking on her behalf to Italians, urging them to write “Giorgia” on her ballot, and she has claimed that she has defended Italy’s interests in Brussels by helping to pass conservative policies on immigration and the environment. .
At home, Meloni presides over a stable coalition, supported by two weaker parties that desperately need her to remain in power. Forza Italia, whose founder Silvio Berlusconi died last year, won about 10 percent of the vote in the European Parliament election after running a seance-like campaign with Berlusconi’s name and photo on billboards. Matteo Salvini’s League party, which appealed to the right flank of Meloni’s electorate, fell to 9 percent of the vote this year from 34 percent in 2019.
What remained the biggest challenge for the Italian nationalist leader was perhaps her own nation, experts said.
Italy’s productivity has lagged behind that of the European Union and wages are largely stagnant. While employment has increased, youth unemployment remains rampant in the south and tens of thousands of young Italians leave the country each year.
In the town of Savelletri, just around the corner from the complex that will host the G7, locals killed time in a cafe near two newly built helipads as military trucks patrolled.
Stefano Martellotta, a 51-year-old fisherman, said he didn’t care much about what he called the G7 “spectacle.” What worried him was that his two sons, ages 22 and 27, would have to move to Holland to work in restaurant kitchens because in Italy “no one gives them a decent salary,” he said.
“It is dramatic for us that our youth is abandoning us,” said Annamaria Santorsola, 75, a mother and grandmother, adding that her region needed “jobs, not the G7.”