Giorgia Meloni treads a careful path as Italy’s first woman prime minister
If the doomsayers are right, Italy, now led by the Far-Right populist Giorgia Meloni, has entered a death-spiral from which there can be no escape this side of the Second Coming. As usual, however, the doomsayers are wrong. Italy is certainly in trouble – which European county isn’t? – but though it is down, it certainly isn’t out.
Viewers of the travel and food show Searching for Italy, presented by the American film actor Stanley Tucci, will have been greatly cheered by its depiction of a country that, while trapped on the down escalator in recent years, remains united in its diversity and determined to get on with life as it should be lived.
Tucci – “Italian on both sides” – barely touches on the economy or politics of his ancestral homeland. He is much more concerned with the food and the people who make it. But the impression he manages to convey is decidedly upbeat, which is rare in these troubled times. As he remarks at the end of the final episode of the show’s second season, celebrating the produce and cuisine of the crescent-shaped province of Liguria, Italians know how to make do, sustained by their underlying belief that “enough is plenty”.
So much for the commercial. Now for the news. Italy is not in good shape. Politicians and the media are obsessed with two things: immigration and the economy. Meloni – at the head of a fragile right-wing coalition government since her confirmation on October 22 – is firm on the former, weak on the latter.
Like most of her fellow citizens, she has had enough of illegal emigrants from Africa and Asia, who arrive each day in their hundreds, even their thousands, demanding work, homes and access to the wider European Union. She says she will end the daily influx and, in short order, deport all those without a legal right to remain. She has no time for asylum-seekers and refuses in principle to consider attempts by non-Christians to build new lives in Italy.
Three weeks ago, she refused to allow the Ocean Viking, a humanitarian rescue ship with 230 would-be immigrants onboard, to dock in Italy. The ship had to travel on to the French port of Toulon, where its human cargo was reluctantly disembarked. Emmanuel Macron was furious, accusing Meloni of shirking her responsibilities and passing the buck to France. But the new prime minister was not to be moved. How her policy will work out as the pressure builds, both diplomatically and in terms of persuading migrants to scratch Italy from their Christmas list, is unclear. As Priti Patel and Suella Braverman discovered in the UK, it is one thing to declare a policy of zero tolerance, something else to make it a reality.
Prior to her election, Meloni’s view of Vladimir Putin was thought to be at the very least “complex”. Like many on the Far Right in Europe, she appeared to have a soft spot for the Russian president and may even have sympathised with his ambition to reincorporate Ukraine into his domain. But since taking office as prime minister, she has been careful to fall into line. “Italy, with its head high, is part of Europe and the Atlantic alliance,” she said in a recent statement following claims that Silvio Berlusconi, the leader of Forza Italia, one of her coalition partners, privately backs Putin. “Whoever doesn’t agree with this cornerstone cannot be part of the government, even at the cost of not having a government.”
In the same way, she has backed off from her much-publicised confrontation with Macron over the Ocean Viking affair. “I never had any problems with France, and I still don’t have any today,” she told the Corriere Della Sera yesterday.
Elsewhere, the evidence suggests that she is feeling her way. She has much to learn. Her predecessor as prime minister, Mario Draghi, was a former President of the European Central Bank, seen by many as the man who saved the euro after the financial crisis of 2008-12. In the wake of Covid, which hit Italy hard, “Super Mario” managed to retore a measure of economic stability and even oversaw growth in 2021 of 6.5 per cent. Since then, with Draghi gone and Italy suffering an acute energy crisis as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Meloni has been forced to acknowledge that “God, Fatherland and Family” is a slogan, not a policy. She has sent her minions out into the world in search of oil and gas and, while making peace with Macron, to dispel the fear that she was set to join the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban as co-leader of the EU’s awkward squad.
On the economy, two statistics stand out. The first, released today, is an annualised inflation rate of 3.9 per cent, down from 12.6 per cent in October, with the sharp fall in the cost of fuel imports the key factor. The other is a growth rate currently closing in on zero that according to the IMF will contract further in the year ahead before staging a modest recovery in 2024. Unemployment is officially recorded at 7.8 per cent of the working population, but with several million Italians, most of them in the south, working on the black, it is impossible to know the true situation.
Italy boasts, in spite of all, the tenth largest economy in the world, with a nominal GDP this year of some $2.1 trillion, plus whatever has been concealed in mattresses throughout the Mezzogiorno. The banking system, mired in corruption, is stuck in traction, with many banks under state or ECB supervision. But the country’ largest corporations are for the most part holding together. It is often forgotten that Italy is home to some of the biggest commerical success stories of the last hundred years. Companies such as Generali (insurance), ENI (oil and gas), Leonardo (aerospace and armaments), Fiat (now part of the multinational Stallantis group that includes Chrysler, Peugeot and Citroen), Iveco (trucks) and Pirelli (tyres) are global leaders. In fashion, the list is endless, headed by Versace, Gucci, Diesel, Dolce & Gabbana, Armani and Prada, matched by jewelry designers such as Bulgari, Valentino and Fendi.
No country with Italy’s DNA is doomed to fail. That said, the country’s political leadership since the 1970s has done little to encourage optimism.
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is a hodge-podge of quasi-fascism held together by nationalism that is itself dependent on anti-immigrant sentiment. Her two senior partners in government are Antonio Tajani, the vice president of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, now serving as foreign minister, and Matteo Salvini, of La Liga (The League), who previously worked in tandem with the Five Star movement and is currently minister for transport and infrastructure. What unites the three, however uneasily, is a sense of identity: Italy for the Italians or, in the case of Salvini, the North for northerners.
Meloni, aged 45, is opposed to abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia and same-sex marriage, but says she will advance legislation to protect LGBT rights on the basis that there is no such thing in Italy as homophobia. She has endorsed the Great Replacement theory, which holds that Muslims are bent on supplanting Christians across the European continent. She has spoken warmly of Viktor Orban and Donald Trump. Yet she is no narrow nationalist. Fluent in English, French and Spanish, she has called on Europe and Africa to come together in the war against climate change.
In service of her image, she can be prickly. She especially resents being seen as Mussolini-Lite – this in spite of the fact that in the past she praised the Duce as a great man who had always tried to do right by his country. When a journalist, Roberto Saviano, a long-standing opponent of the Mafia, called her una bastarda on television two years ago over her views on immigration, she sued and has not since relented. The case opened in Rome this week and, as prime minister, she could be called to the stand.
She is, of course, the first woman to be prime minister of Italy, which will mark her out in the history books no matter what else happens. In Brussels, Paris and Berlin, the hope is that she will be, above all else, “normal” – more like Angela Merkel, perhaps, than Margaret Thatcher, and definitely not Isabel Peron. If her rapprochement with Macron and criticism of Berlusconi are anything to go by, this may yet prove to be the case. But she promised much to voters during her election campaign, and it is too early to say that for Giorgia Meloni, unlike the peasant farmers of Liguria, enough will ever be plenty.