Is PM Meloni of Italy the leader Europe needs?

Newswire

Rome: Donald Trump’s return to the White House has made Giorgia Meloni an unlikely leader of the European Union in its dealings with the United States. Italy’s prime minister may hail from a far-right nationalist party, but she is siding squarely with the EU, arguing that it is “childish” to think that Italy must choose between Trump and Europe.

Meloni was the first European leader to visit the White House after Trump announced his sweeping tariff plan – which he soon paused under market pressure, claiming that it was all intended to force others to the negotiating table. She was then back in Rome the next day to host Vice President J.D. Vance, who had made his own opinion of Europeans clear in a scathing speech at the Munich Security Conference in February.

Although Meloni’s ideological instincts align with the current US administration, she has framed her diplomacy as part of a carefully coordinated effort with the European Commission, which leads trade policy. She and the president of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, spoke several times by phone before and after her meeting at the White House, and they briefly exchanged words at Pope Francis’s funeral on April 26. Meloni is lobbying to arrange a meeting between Trump and von der Leyen in Rome, positioning herself as a broker between Washington and Brussels.

Although she has promised to import more liquified natural gas from the US, and to boost Italy’s defense budget, she is being a European team player, not just a national leader. “The first thing Meloni will do in dealing with Trump is call Brussels and have the EU involved in the decision,” a senior Italian official told me last November, right after Trump was elected. The implication was that her institutionalist side would prevail over her populist instincts. So far, it has.

This outcome was far from assured. In principle, Meloni does not disagree with Trump’s description of the EU as a “pathetic” institution that exists solely to rip off America, or with Vance’s image of a den of grifters who have betrayed their own values. “I’ve been saying this for years,” she remarked after Vance’s Munich speech. “Europe has a bit lost itself.”

The question is whether EU power brokers will trust her enough to give her a leading negotiating role when the time comes. “The great irony here is that Germany and France acted as informal representatives of the EU for decades, and no one objected to that,” a Meloni adviser told me. “But if Italy tries to take that role, suddenly it’s a problem – even though Italy’s leader is objectively in an advantageous position to talk to the White House.”

Meloni is walking a fine line. A regular guest at the American Conservative Political Action Conference, she was the only European leader invited to Trump’s inauguration. She is so confident in her MAGA bona fides that, a few days before Trump was sworn in, she flew to Mar-a-Lago to press him to release an Iranian engineer that Italy had arrested at the US Department of Justice’s behest. Iran had jailed an Italian journalist in retaliation, and the two prisoners were soon exchanged.

Trump has praised Meloni as someone who can “straighten out the world a little bit,” and her advisers have built strong ties in Trumpworld. Her relationship with Elon Musk is so warm that Musk once had to deny any romantic involvement. Meloni is the first post-fascist leader to rule Italy. Until a few years ago, her Fratelli d’Italia (“Brothers of Italy”) party thrived on bashing Brussels bureaucrats and openly advocated dismantling the eurozone.

But things have changed radically since Meloni rose to power in 2022. She has moderated her stance on the EU and abandoned her harsh rhetoric toward the European Commission. Her staunch support for Ukraine has boosted her credibility with other European governments, and leading figures in the pro-European establishment have vouched for her reliability. In her two and a half years as prime minister, Meloni has gone from being a threat to the EU to becoming an internationally recognized European leader (though many confer this status on her only reluctantly). She has inverted the approach taken by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who regularly obstructs EU projects to secure national advantages.

Meloni also has very practical reasons for remaining aligned with the EU. The Italian government is still supposed to receive €72 billion ($81 billion) from the NextGenerationEU fund. Moreover, Meloni managed to secure von der Leyen’s blessing for her controversial plan to detain migrants in Albania, outside the EU’s borders, and she has installed her close ally, Raffaele Fitto, as a vice president of the Commission.

At this point, Meloni’s ties in Brussels are too close to sever in the name of nationalist posturing. It suits her to play the loyal pro-European leader. Ultimately, the real source of her political power lies in the European institutions she once despised – not in any fleeting sympathies she may harbor for a populist in the White House.