It’s late afternoon on July 4 in Rome’s Palazzo Chigi, seat of the Italian government, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is walking the marble-floored halls. She has spent the past hour answering questions about her personal history, rise to power, and record in office with disarming directness. But now, as the interview winds down, she has a question of her own. “You are an honest person,” she begins in the crisp English that she says she learned from Michael Jackson songs. “Is there something about Fascism that my experience reminds you of, about what I’m doing in government?”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Fascism is a subject Meloni can’t escape. When she came to power in October 2022 atop a movement founded by Benito Mussolini’s last devoted followers, critics in Italy and across Europe said her calls for national pride and the defense of “Western civilization” portended a far-right turn for the world’s eighth largest economy. President Joe Biden cited her election as an example of the threat authoritarianism poses to global democracy.
But Meloni has confounded her critics. At home, she has tacked to the center on some of her more dramatic campaign promises, like imposing a naval blockade to stop shipborne illegal immigrants. On the international stage, she has behaved less like a right-wing revolutionary than a pragmatic conservative. Meloni has embraced the European Union, NATO, and Ukraine, worked to isolate China, and labored deftly to reconcile the fractious relationships between America and Europe during the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. Along the way, she has won over leaders from across the ideological spectrum, from Biden to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to Vice President J.D. Vance.
Nearly three years into her term, Meloni, 48, has emerged as one of Europe’s most interesting figures: a 5-ft. 3-in., working-class unmarried mother without a college degree whose rise has defied the expectations of her peers. She opposes what she calls “homogenizing” globalism, yet champions European integration. She is the first female leader of Italy and says that in her career she has “had to confront ridiculous stereotypes,” but rejects government attempts to fix that or other forms of discrimination, which she labels “quotas.” She claims conservative victories in stabilizing Italy’s famously chaotic government and improving its debt rating, while also pursuing a policy agenda in step with the global cadre of rising authoritarian leaders: consolidating executive power, cracking down on the media, exerting control over the judiciary, targeting undocumented immigrants, and limiting some forms of protest.
Read More: How Giorgia Meloni Became Europe’s Trump Whisperer.
From all these contradictions, Meloni is constructing a new kind of nationalism: populist, nativist, and pro-Western, but committed to European and Atlantic alliances. “First of all, we have to defend what we are, our culture, our identity, our civilization,” she says, sitting with arms and legs crossed in front of an Italian flag. Where exactly that leads matters beyond Italy. From Portugal to Romania, once ostracized extremists on the far right are overtaking traditional conservative parties, much like the MAGA movement in the U.S. That has presented a crisis for centrist European governments whose populations for decades after World War II shunned far-right parties.
Meloni’s admirers say she has found a way to incorporate those rising far-right forces into the democratic process, neutralizing their threat. “We are the heirs of the right-wing party,” says Meloni’s top political adviser Giovanbattista Fazzolari. But the offshoot she founded, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), has, Fazzolari says, “become the party grouping together people from the right, people who are patriots of our country, people who are moderate, regardless of their previous political background.”
Her critics see a darker prospect. Having established a moderate reputation at the start, they say, she is tacking back to the right now that Trump is in power, taking small but familiar steps to erode democracy and paving the way for a rising international alliance of right-wing extremists that threatens postwar European liberalism. “If you look at the way other authoritarian leaders behave, they are incremental,” says Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna. What’s worrying about Meloni, Tocci adds, “is the direction of travel.”
It is a quirk of history that Meloni is fashioning a 21st century nationalism in the country that embodied the liberalizing 19th century version through its unification and, in Mussolini, created the catastrophic Fascist model in the 20th. Meloni has repeatedly rejected the latter. But she embraces the former in almost irredentist terms, declaring her intention to “rebuild our identity, rebuild pride, the pride of being who we are … whatever it takes.” Because Italy is one of the world’s wealthiest countries and is a founding member of the European Union, the nationalism she unleashes stands to influence where Western democracy heads next.
Meloni’s abilities were evident in mid-April, when she arrived in Washington for her ritual turn in the Oval Office hot seat. During Trump’s first six months in office, he has sought to demonstrate his alpha status by inviting foreign leaders into the West Wing and then bringing in the press for extended performances of domination. Visitors who fail to perform the requisite display of obeisance have faced consequences, as in the Feb. 28 blowup with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. When Meloni arrived for her turn, she went the extra mile to avoid missteps. “I’m a Capricorn,” she says. “So let’s say I’m fixed on some things.” She prepared a stack of cards with her positions on every issue that might come up, and survived the public test with poise.
Yet the telling moment came after the press had left, when the topic turned to Ukraine’s war with Russia. Meloni fiercely defended Zelensky and the need to support Ukraine to the end. Trump listened and responded, but without the exchange becoming contentious, Meloni says. “He’s a fighter, and I’m a fighter,” she says.
The episode stuck with Vance, who was in the meeting. “She’s extraordinarily direct,” Vance told NBC News on May 20. “She actually reminds me a little bit of [Vance’s wife] Usha in that way, where she can deliver an extraordinarily direct message without coming across as offensive. That’s just a skill, right?”
Meloni’s candor has long been one of her defining traits. “She’s always been like this, since when she was child,” says her sister, Arianna, her closest adviser and now the head of Brothers of Italy. Their parents broke up when Giorgia was 3. Their father abandoned the family to sail around the world, ended up living in the Canary Islands, and was reportedly later convicted in Spanish court for drug smuggling. Later attempts by the sisters to reconcile with him failed. “Honestly, he simply didn’t care about us,” says Arianna.
After his departure, the family lived in a nice apartment in a well-to-do Roman neighborhood. One evening the two girls were playing house with stuffed animals and, not wanting to turn on the lights, lit a series of candles. “We had actually placed bowls of water close to every candle, but then we covered them with a duvet and stuffed animals, and then we went to watch cartoons on television,” Arianna recalls. The room was engulfed in flames. When the fire brigade came, “they destroyed what was left of our poor apartment,” Arianna says.
The fire set the family on a harder course. They moved to a working-class part of Rome called Garbatella, built in the early 1920s for rail- and dockworkers. The sisters slept on a mattress on the floor of their maternal grandparents’ small apartment, while their mother lived with a friend until she got her own place nearby. The girls were deeply affected by the fire and its impact on their lives. It “gave her a greater grit,” Arianna says of her sister, “that made her the Giorgia she is today.”
Meloni makes light of the incident in her interview with TIME, linking it to the flame logo of the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), whose youth group she joined some years later. “Maybe that’s why I joined the MSI, because of the flame,” she laughs. In fact, neither Meloni nor her sister has explained what motivated her to join the Garbatella branch of Fronte della Gioventu (Youth Front) in 1992 at age 15, though Meloni says the chaos of late-’80s mafia killings was one of her motivations to enter politics. The decision was unorthodox for the time. MSI had been founded and led until a few years earlier by Giorgio Almirante, a Mussolini follower who had written widely for the antisemitic paper Defense of the Race in the 1930s. The party was not popular, least of all with young people from a left-leaning section of Rome.
Read More: Giorgia Meloni Is On the 2024 TIME 100 List.
Yet Meloni found a home among a small group of Youth Front outsiders who dubbed themselves “the Seagulls” after the 1970 novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull, an allegory by the American writer Richard Bach about an outcast bird who achieves transcendence by going his own way. “We were a strange group,” says Nicola Procaccini, who now leads Meloni’s party in the European Parliament in Brussels. “We were seen sometimes as a sort of danger, sort of communist group inside the right-wing party.” At night, they regularly went out around Rome to put up posters, often confronting opposing groups from the political left doing the same thing. “Often it ended in a very heated fight,” says Fazzolari.
Meloni didn’t go to college because she couldn’t afford it, her sister says. She sold CDs and took babysitting jobs to earn money instead. But at youth meetings and rallies, she emerged as an effective orator and political operator. Her rise through the ranks was rapid. In 2004, at age 27, she won the leadership of the youth group of the party, which had renamed itself the National Alliance. Two years later, she won a seat in the lower house of Parliament representing Garbatella. Two years after that, she was named Minister for Youth in the center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi. At 31, she became the youngest Cabinet member in postwar Italy.
She retained an independent streak. In 2012, Meloni and a hardcore group of former Seagulls bolted from Berlusconi’s coalition. It was a risky undertaking. Meloni’s startup party, Fratelli d’Italia—named for the first lines of the country’s national anthem—began life with 2% support. She built a national reputation by running for mayor of Rome while pregnant with her daughter in 2016. Meloni lost, but by 2018 the party had won dozens of seats in Parliament and rejoined a center-right alliance. The following year, she gave a defining speech, declaring in a tone of defiance, “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian. You can’t take that away from me.”
When the nation united behind a caretaker government during the COVID-19 crisis, Meloni declined to support it. The move paved the way for her final rise to power. In 2022, she led a right-wing coalition and promised to impose a naval blockade on migrants in the Mediterranean and to stand up to “globalists.” Meloni’s alliance trounced its rivals by 18 points, with Fratelli d’Italia winning 26% of the vote and far outpacing other right-wing parties. They quickly united behind her, giving her comfortable majorities in both chambers of Parliament. Observers noted that Meloni was taking power nearly 100 years to the day after Mussolini’s march on Rome.
Less than two years later, at an event on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York last September, the prominent pro-Europe think tank the Atlantic Council bestowed on Meloni its “Global Citizen Award.” After a moderator lauded her for “championing democracy and justice around the world,” Meloni was introduced by Elon Musk, who called her “authentic, honest, and truthful.” Meloni had chosen Musk to do the introductions, and the two huddled at their table in focused conversation, according to one attendee, then went backstage for champagne. (Her critics say she was planning to hand some Italian national-security responsibilities to SpaceX; Meloni denies the charge and says she’s never discussed the matter with Musk.)
It had been work to get there. Her election had been viewed as a jump ball for Italy’s role in Europe and the West, with Washington and some European capitals worrying she might go the way of Hungary’s Viktor Orban on international affairs, adopting a soft approach to the world’s autocracies. “Russia and China saw the opportunity to push Italy to their side,” says Maurizio Molinari, former editor in chief of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. “The reality is that nobody knew what was going to happen.” Referring to the spread of authoritarianism around the world and China’s efforts to undermine democracy, Biden told the audience at a fundraiser on Sept. 27, 2022, for the Democratic Governors Association, “You just saw what’s happened in Italy.”
Meloni shrugs off Biden’s barb now. “I simply thought that he didn’t know what he was talking about,” she says. Her first trip was to Brussels to meet with the traditionally conservative von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, who had been skeptical of Meloni’s rise. Italian diplomats worked the White House and the State Department, setting up a meeting for her with Biden at the G-20 in Bali. By the time she went to Washington for a one-on-one with the U.S. President in March 2024, he was among her most vocal global supporters.
Meloni’s ability to win over skeptics is partly a testament to her evident talents. “You can smell when someone’s a political animal,” says one Brussels-based diplomat who watched her work the halls of the E.U. But she was also taking substantive positions in favor of Western alliances. Despite Italy’s long relations with Moscow, Meloni was vocal about the need to support Ukraine. Just as important for the U.S., she distanced herself from China. Italy was the only G-7 country that had signed on for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a far-reaching infrastructure-loan program meant to increase Beijing’s global influence at Washington’s expense. In December 2023, Meloni pulled Italy out. “There was obviously concern when she came in, given her party’s background,” says a senior Biden aide. The Belt and Road move, the aide says, was “very welcome.” Across the West, left-of-center leaders concluded that in power, she had become a traditional European conservative.
Read More: Why Europe’s Far Right Keeps Rising.
At home Meloni has taken a harder line. She has tried to expand the Prime Minister’s powers and passed a security bill that limits some kinds of protest and expands punishment for others. She’s attempting to “reform” the judiciary through a complicated set of moves that would expand the Prime Minister’s control over prosecutions. Last October, Italy codified her long-standing opposition to surrogacy, outlawing the procedure abroad, a move decried by gay-rights advocates. She has attacked the independent media, suing journalists and media outlets for defamation multiple times. “They’re doing the same things in all the states that are ruled now by the extreme right,” says Elly Schlein, leader of Italy’s center-left Democratic Party.
Meloni’s signature position has been to crack down on illegal immigration. The courts have blocked much of what she has tried to do, including an expensive misadventure where she paid 67.5 million euros to build and maintain a facility in Albania at which to detain migrants, only to have it ruled a violation of the law. Human-rights advocates have found that undocumented immigrants who were intercepted and returned to Libya in a program championed by Meloni were in some cases tortured. “In rhetoric and policy, she has created a hostile environment for migrants and refugees,” says Judith Sunderland of Human Rights Watch.
Yet others in Europe are interested in replicating an approach that Meloni claims has resulted in a 64% drop in illegal immigration. “You’ve made remarkable progress working with countries along migration routes,” the left-of-center U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer told her on a visit to Rome last September. “I’m pleased that we’re deepening our cooperation here.”
Meloni has also forged an alliance with von der Leyen, who leaned on Meloni to stabilize Europe’s relations with Trump after his opening trade-war salvos. The budding partnership has led to speculation that Meloni and her far-right allies may eventually usurp power from the more traditional conservative bloc in Brussels, just as she has united the center and far-right parties in Italy. Says La Repubblica’s Molinari: “Her majority is the only example in Europe where all the different identities of the right sit together in a government. They don’t fight. This is her political strength in European terms. She is in the middle.”
Italy is a long way from the authoritarian government that Meloni’s critics claim she wants. Meloni has disavowed fascism and anti-semitism. Her fiercest political critics acknowledge her tangible turn to the center. There are checks in place to prevent the kind of turn toward illiberal authoritarianism that has occurred elsewhere in Europe. After World War II, Italy’s political system was restructured to be hard to govern, heavily weighted to parliamentary power at the expense of the executive. Even many on the Italian left acknowledge that 80 years after the fall of Fascism, it is time for reform. Agenda items that receive support from the electorate and in Parliament can take years to enact, and by then the country’s famously ephemeral governments often have changed.
Meloni wants a system with stronger executive power, and she advocates for a democratic model that can accommodate parties on the far right instead of gatekeeping. Figures like Vance have argued that doing so is the best way to guard against rising authoritarianism. But there is another possibility. By knitting together the array of right-wing blocs in Italy, critics say, Meloni may unleash forces that her nation and Europe as a whole have long fought to keep in check. “Every time I come [to Europe] I get more and more uncomfortable,” says Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as President Barack Obama’s top Europe adviser. “In Germany and in Italy and in France, and in Portugal and in Romania, the center holds. But then it shrinks. And then it shrinks again. And the closer you get to what you have in poor old America, where there is no center.”
Meloni says her critics have invoked her far-right background as a weapon against any policy she adopts. “They’ve been accusing me of every possible thing, from the war in Ukraine to the people dying in the Mediterranean. It’s simply because they don’t have arguments,” she says. But the attacks bother her, and she comes back to them as she strolls through the Palazzo Chigi. “I’m not racist,” she says. “I’m not homophobic. I’m not all the things they’ve been saying.”
But there are plenty of members of her party who still nurse a nostalgia for fascism. The second in line to the presidency behind Meloni, Ignazio La Russa, once kept a bust of Mussolini in his apartment. Asked what kind of nationalism she espouses, Meloni says hers is “mainly a way to defend ourselves from a globalization that didn’t work.” A moment later, however, she admiringly quotes the 19th century French nationalist Ernest Renan, an influential antisemite.
What is unsettling about Meloni is not so much her behavior as her accommodation of the forces that nationalism has unleashed in the past, at a moment when postwar norms are fading away. Even she seems to grasp this. Once again after the interview, Meloni wonders how she appears to outsiders. “Are you sincerely concerned about something?” she asks. “That is my question.” In Europe, where the ghosts of authoritarianism and its tens of millions of victims haunt every corner of the continent, it’s hard not to be.