Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s ‘far-Right’ PM, doesn’t seem so dangerous after all

When Giorgia Meloni became prime minister of Italy, the outside world was in shock. The most Right-wing Italian leader since Mussolini, it was said she was “far-Right” or “post-fascist”. Germany’s Stern magazine proclaimed her “the most dangerous woman in Europe”. It seemed that Italy, where fascism was born, was about to stage its rebirth. She would disguise it, of course: such people always do. Ursula von der Leyen stood ready, warning that the EU had the “tools” to deal with Italy’s new leader should the need arise.

There was only one problem with Meloni-the-Monster analysis: it has been rather hard to find anything she has actually done – or proposes to do – that can really be seen as far-Right. She certainly veers from the traditional political script, talking about Italy’s declining birth rate and proclaiming herself in favour of God and motherhood. She can fire shots in culture wars when it suits her. But if politicians can be judged by what they do, then the woman who met Rishi Sunak in No 10 on Thursday is a moderate – and, if anything, a stabilising force in Europe.

Since coming to power, Sunak has been on an Italian charm offensive. Giorgio Silli, Meloni’s deputy foreign minister, was in London last month. Ignazio Visco, governor of the Bank of Italy, visited earlier this year. Carlo Nordio, her justice minister, has been twice. James Cleverly, Ben Wallace and Kemi Badenoch have all been to Rome in recent months. Sunak is keen to strengthen one-to-one links with European allies after Brexit and Meloni is a great believer in alliances between nation states.

She is quite the Anglophile, speaking better English than any of her predecessors. Sunak set aside three hours for her yesterday: almost a record, by British standards. She shares with him a desire to “stop the boats”, a mission which takes on a bit more resonance in Italy where more arrive in a day than Britain sees in a week. She wants more powers to prosecute people-traffickers; Sunak already has them. He wants to deport illegal arrivals to Rwanda; she would never dare make such a proposal. If she did, says the historian David Broder, it would surely expose her fascist past.

But this is the problem when placing new parties on the political spectrum. When Denmark’s Social Democrats asked Rwanda to take refugees, did that expose its fascist side? Or simply that the Danes, like the Brits, are trying to stop the modern slave trade by breaking its financial model? When Meloni proclaims, “I am Giorgia! I am a woman! I am a mother! I am a Christian,” it is certainly unusual. So much so that it was made into a dance music track. But are any of these sentiments really far-Right? Might a bit more evidence be needed for such an allegation?

Lazy use of such labels can serve to cloud the view of European politics at a moment when clarity is needed most. Huge changes are afoot. In several countries, we see parties in power that didn’t exist even a decade ago. Some of the new upstarts genuinely are far-Right. Others are more centrist but with a cruder, more direct style of speaking – and are willing to discuss demographic change. So how to distinguish the populist from the proto-extremist?

One tell-tale sign is having been cosy with Vladimir Putin. Marine Le Pen had her picture taken with him. Matteo Salvini gave a thumbs-up while wearing a Putin T-shirt in Red Square. Silvio Berlusconi (one of Meloni’s coalition partners) exchanged birthday gifts with him. But Meloni has denounced Putin from day one and describes the Ukraine war as a struggle of democracy against autocracy. Which is rare, in a country that’s sometimes suspicious of whether to arm Kyiv. For Meloni, this is a matter of principle; she wants her country on America’s side. She has no Macron-style urges to overhaul Nato.

Another marker of populists is high spending: think Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain or the Five Star Movement in Italy. But Meloni has been almost Sunak-like in pursuing fiscal orthodoxy, looking to cut welfare and keeping deficit reduction targets. She is using her trip to London to assure creditors that she’s perfectly sensible and that Italy does not deserve a credit downgrade. The markets, so far, agree. Italian bond markets have been calm. Liz Truss would have loved to have had the same said about her.

So six months in, where is this great danger that Meloni poses? Her party, the Brothers of Italy, does share DNA with the Italian Social Movement, set up in the post-war years to carry on aspects of Mussolini’s agenda. Meloni was a member of the party as a student and still uses its tricolour logo. Today, she disavows any nostalgia for fascism but in her teenage years, she was more equivocal. And there’s video footage to prove it.

My own hunch is that such controversy is helpful to her. Italians exasperated at the state of their country want a protest vote – and being attacked as a closet fascist will help burnish her rebel credentials. Now and again, she says something to enrage her enemies. Five years ago, for example, she went through a phase of describing immigration as “ethnic substitution” and was duly condemned. But such incendiary language attracts voters worried about immigration, and may even have made them overlook the fact that her actual immigration policy is pretty mainstream.

Let’s not pretend that Sunak is above all of this. He hired Lee Anderson as his deputy party chairman who provides a regular supply of controversies: on the death penalty, food banks, nurses’ pay and more. Sunak knows his own weakness – he can come across as someone trying to sell you a timeshare – so he needs to balance his managerialism with some controlled explosions. When Suella Braverman goes a bit far and is attacked as an immigration hardliner, this helps. It deflects attention from the fact that the Tories are letting in more than New Labour ever dared. Centrism, nowadays, needs to come with spikes attached.

So Sunak has, in Meloni, an ally with whom he has more in common than it suits either of them to admit. And one who, unlike most Italian leaders, may be around for a while given her rising popularity and divided opposition. It may well all be a ruse; she may one day emerge an extremist in disguise. But judging on her first six months, it’s a rather convincing disguise.