Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni marks three years in office this week. She finds herself in enviable political shape, with the country’s economy improved on several fronts and her popularity high. The days when Italy’s spending largesse and political volatility made it the bane of Europe’s fiscal hawks seem long gone. Today, admirers across the continent are praising the economic results and internal stability that the far-right Meloni has brought about.
In the last two years, Meloni has more than halved Italy’s deficit, which is now on track to sink to less than 3 percent of GDP in 2026. That would allow Italy to exit an excessive deficit procedure that the European Union initiated with the country last year. Italy’s 10-year bond yields—the cost of borrowing money from the government—have dropped on Meloni’s watch and are now virtually at the same level as those of France. The job market is doing relatively well, too. Unemployment, already falling when Meloni took office, has dropped from 8 to 6 percent, creating higher tax revenues.
In September, credit rating agency Fitch bumped up Italy’s grade, citing its political stability and improved financial shape. Italians are not used to either. In the five years before Meloni’s election in 2022, the country saw four different coalition governments, and in the last quarter century, Italian public debt has ballooned to well above 130 percent of GDP, the second highest in the eurozone after Greece. Italy’s last right-wing prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, resigned in 2011 amid fears that borrowing costs would spiral out of control.
Meloni’s government is now one of Italy’s longest lasting since the end of World War II. The country’s reputational shift is striking considering the political chaos unfolding in neighboring France, which is rotating through a seemingly endless series of short-lived prime ministers and struggling to bring its public finances under control.
Compared to its own past, “there’s no doubt that Italy comes across as in much better shape, which makes Meloni look good,” said Giovanni Orsina, a historian and political scientist at Luiss University in Rome. “In a way, it’s as if Italy had already gone through a sickness that is now affecting others.”
Meloni’s popularity has remained high since she took office: Her party, the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, tops opinion polls—well ahead of the center-left Democratic Party, its main rival. One of Meloni’s strengths is her ability to keep her far-right base happy while reassuring moderates (and bond markets) of her fiscal prudence.
“Like the Roman god Janus, she has two faces,” said Marc Lazar, a political scientist at Luiss University and Sciences Po in Paris. “The hard-right one, the tribune capable of speaking to the emotions, and the respectable stateswoman with international credibility.”
Meloni spent years blasting the EU’s fiscal rules as a member of Italy’s opposition. But since taking office, she has been careful not to spook markets or EU bureaucrats, making fiscal consolidation the primary goal of her economic policy. On the international level, she strives to appear dependable and pragmatic, siding firmly with Ukraine and building a constructive, albeit at times rocky, working relationship with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Yet when addressing her base, Meloni barely tones down the anti-LGBTQ, Euroskeptic, and xenophobic dog whistles that fueled her political rise. She maintains excellent relations with populist foreign leaders, including Donald Trump, who this month praised her as a “very successful politician” and described her as a “beautiful young woman.”
Meloni is pressing forward with an ultraconservative domestic agenda. She has increased barriers to abortion; categorized surrogacy as a “universal offense” punishable by prison, even when Italians seek it abroad; and prohibited the legal recognition of same-sex couples as parents. Her government has made Italy’s legal framework more repressive, introducing tough sentences for protesters who block roads and harsher punishments for threatening a police officer. And it is pushing through reforms that could jeopardize judicial independence and expand the prime minister’s executive power at the expense of parliament and the presidency.
Meloni has been busy reshaping the EU, too, particularly after European Parliament elections last year saw a far-right surge across the bloc. In her crusade against illegal immigration, she has brought down arrivals by brokering controversial deals between the EU and North African leaders with questionable human rights records, such as Tunisian President Kais Saied. In 2023, the EU pledged some $1.3 billion for Tunisia in exchange for the country’s help in preventing migrant departures from its shores.
Meloni’s plan to process thousands of asylum-seekers in specially built detention centers in Albania has been much less effective. After critics slammed the scheme as inhumane, costly, and inefficient, a series of Italian and EU court rulings largely brought it to a standstill. Inspired in part by Meloni, however, the bloc is currently mulling ways to send rejected asylum seekers to non-EU countries. Her approach has even drawn interest from leaders elsewhere, such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Meloni’s government is also at the forefront of the European right’s efforts to curtail the EU’s Green Deal, which aims to make the bloc climate neutral by 2050. She has warned of industrial “desertification” if new rules are imposed too quickly on manufacturers, particularly in the automotive sector. As with immigration, mainstream conservatives have increasingly aligned themselves with the far right on these issues. In one example, Germany’s center-right government joined forces with Italy to demand that the EU loosen a ban on new gas and diesel cars scheduled for 2035.
“The rift that there used to be a few years ago between the pro-European establishment and the Euroskeptic, anti-establishment right is changing deeply,” Orsina said. “This helps [Meloni], because she is no longer a teetering exception, but a pathbreaker.”
Far-right leaders across Europe hail Meloni as a model for taking and holding onto the reins of power. “Everywhere in the world, we are ready to take on the responsibility of government,” the Italian leader said at an event organized last month by her French ally Marion Maréchal, the niece of Marine Le Pen.
“There’s a form of ‘Meloni-mania’ growing in Europe, particularly in France,” Lazar said. This admiration for Meloni goes beyond French political leaders: Recently, after finding out my Italian origins, a barber in Paris started praising Meloni for “speaking her mind,” unlike “the politicians we have over here.”
Since the 1950s, France has gotten used to relative political and economic stability, at least compared to its southern neighbor. But in the last year, Paris has been mired in a political crisis triggered by President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election, which yielded a deadlocked parliament with no clear majority. France has since whirled through three prime ministers; the current one faces an uncertain future as he tries to pass a budget aimed at reining in the runaway French deficit.
The irony of France and Italy seemingly trading places hasn’t gone unnoticed in either country, with a fair amount of gloating on the Italian side. “Whatever happened to the grandeur?” the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero taunted in an editorial last month. “The anarchy isn’t here, it’s there.”
To be sure, Meloni’s record is hardly all roses. Italy’s deficit may be down, but its public debt has reached a whopping 137 percent of GDP and continues to climb. Economic growth this year has barely reached 0.5 percent, dismal even by EU standards—and despite the more than $200 billion in post-pandemic funds that Italy is receiving from the bloc. “When it comes to fostering a solid, long-lasting growth, the Meloni government has done very little,” said Francesco Papadia, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank.
Once inflation is taken into account, Italian salaries have shrunk since 2021 and are currently much lower than the EU average. (An Italian specialized doctor earns about $90,000 before taxes, compared to more than $172,000 in Germany.) Last year, Italy replaced minimum income welfare payments known as “citizens income” with a less hefty scheme. That move has been a blessing for state coffers, but it has also raised the number of people in poverty as a share of Italy’s total population.
Meloni faces political headaches, too. Her government ally Matteo Salvini is an admirer of Vladimir Putin and has repeatedly sought to undermine Meloni’s pro-Kyiv, Atlanticist stance in a bid to exploit public fatigue with the war in Ukraine. And amid her support for Israel during its military campaign in Gaza, hundreds of thousands of outraged pro-Palestinian protesters have taken to the streets.
Luckily for Meloni, her left-wing opposition is divided, and its leaders also often come across as detached from the daily lives of struggling Italians. During the 2022 campaign, the left focused largely on Meloni’s post-fascist roots, a strategy that proved ineffective. Ahead of a vote in the Marche region last month, the opposition tried to ride the wave of discontent against Meloni’s Israel policy, at the risk of appearing less focused on domestic problems such as inflation or the shortcomings of the health care system. The Meloni-backed candidate ended up with a decisive victory.
Italy “is not looking for a savior, but a good administrator,” Orsina said. “And in this respect, Meloni is seen as the least bad option around.”
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