For more than three years, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy appeared politically invincible.
After winning office in 2022 on a hard-right platform, Ms. Meloni emerged as an unexpectedly pragmatic leader, piloting one of Italy’s most stable governments since the end of World War II. She surprised critics by working with centrist leaders abroad and taking comparatively moderate positions at home — while placating her far-right base as she talked tough on issues like illegal migration.
Yet this week, Ms. Meloni’s authority is suddenly in question. Voters on Monday rejected her plan to overhaul Italy’s judiciary — after a referendum race in which she had seemed so confident of victory that, until just weeks ago, she left most campaigning to allies. Italy’s disorganized opposition now senses a moment to regroup, while the national press describes a newly hobbled government.
Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest circulation newspaper, described the defeat as a “clear and decisive” hit to Ms. Meloni’s “King Midas mode,” referring to the mythical monarch who turned everything he touched to gold. A headline in L’Unità, a left-wing newspaper, trumpeted: “Daughter of the People Crushed.”
Union leaders organized celebratory parties in major cities across the country. Amid growing recriminations, two senior officials resigned from the government after one of them drew flak during the campaign for insulting the judiciary and aggressively criticizing the opposition.
“Now there is a dent in her armor,” said Giovanni Orsina, the head of the political science department at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “Nothing changes immediately,” he added, “but certainly the gears are in motion, and they are in motion against Meloni.”
The question now, he said, is if this is a temporary blip — or the start of a longer challenge to her grip on power.
“Whether this dent will become a major crack, frankly I do not know,” Professor Orsina said.
Beyond the referendum loss, Ms. Meloni faces a series of accumulating challenges. She had touted her special relationship with the administration of President Trump. That relationship came under scrutiny when it emerged that Mr. Trump had not warned Ms. Meloni before the United States began bombing Iran late in February.
As the war drags on, rising energy prices have spurred domestic discontent — forcing her to strain government finances by cutting some taxes on fuel. To avoid further domestic backlash, she has declined to provide military support for the American campaign. But the longer the fighting continues, the greater the pressure on her to respond in politically unpopular ways, such as sending the Italian Navy to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, where ships face reciprocal attack from Iran.
“Her luck has run out because she had this referendum at a very bad time for her,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Florence.
Ms. Meloni has vowed to stay in office, unlike one of her predecessors, Matteo Renzi, who resigned a decade ago following a similar referendum defeat.
“We go forward as we always have, with responsibility and determination and, above all, with respect for Italy and her people,” she said in a video statement released after the vote on Monday.
Still, Ms. Meloni may have trouble pushing through her other flagship initiatives, including a plan to make it easier to form governing coalitions. Ms. Meloni proposes giving up to 70 additional seats in Parliament’s lower house to political alliances that win at least 40 percent of the vote in general elections.
Chastened by her loss this week, Ms. Meloni might now need to negotiate with the opposition in Parliament and avoid attracting too much attention to her personal leadership, analysts said.
Italians “want assertive leaders but it is quite clear they do not want a single politician to take too much power,” said Mr. Orsina. “The idea is if someone is growing too much there is a natural counterbalancing power.”
Ms. Meloni faces a particular challenge in southern Italy, which registered the lowest voter turnout. Of the southerners who did vote, more than 60 percent resoundingly rejected the judicial referendum — seven percentage points higher than in the rest of the country. On social media, opponents of Ms. Meloni and the referendum crowed that the south had saved the day.
Mr. Orsina said that Italy’s southerners are often skeptical of politics; they may have been particularly susceptible, he said, to the left’s framing of Ms. Meloni’s judicial overhaul as an attack on judicial independence.
Despite the recent curveballs, analysts said, Ms. Meloni still has some factors in her favor.
Her core supporters are unlikely to break with her over the judicial referendum’s failure to pass, since the measures were so technical that many voters did not understand them.
“Maybe in the next few weeks there will be some new lift for the left,” said Chiara Gentile, an expert on Italian constitutional law at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. “But I am not sure that voters of the right-wing parties will actually question their faith in the government because of the outcome of this referendum.”
The leaders of the other parties in Ms. Meloni’s coalition also have little to gain by destabilizing the government.
The other far-right group in her coalition, the League party, has occasionally undermined Ms. Meloni in recent years, particularly over her support for Ukraine. But the League is unlikely to push for early elections, since it has struggled to maintain national support after a defector set up a rival party that is even further to its right.
The largest opposition parties in Italy, the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement, have not agreed on how they might govern together, making it difficult for them to mount an effective attack on Ms. Meloni’s leadership.
“This is a great opportunity for the opposing parties,” said Ms. Gentile. “But they need to be wise enough to properly take advantage of it and build something meaningful.”
Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting.
Motoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.
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