Giorgia Meloni’s promise to her voters is contained in the three words of her campaign slogan for the European elections on June 8 and 9: “Italy changes Europe.” And Italy is her. As the lead candidate for her party – the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia – the prime minister has chosen to over-personalize her campaign, going so far as to ask her fellow citizens to write only her first name on their ballot papers. And for good reason: Meloni is playing for big stakes with this ballot, which is her first electoral appointment since her victory in the September 2022 elections.
On the Italian stage, it’s all about achieving a score as good as the one that propelled her to power and reasserting her dominance over her coalition partners, Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Antonio Tajani’s Forza Italia. With 27% of voting intentions for her party when the latter plateau at less than 9%, she could very well achieve this.
On the European stage, too, Meloni is hoping to strengthen her position with these elections. She wants to consolidate her place at the table of the European Council, which brings together the 27 heads of state and government of the European Union (EU), while giving herself a central position in Strasbourg, capable of making and breaking the majorities of the European Parliament. This, then, is how Meloni hopes to bring about, from within, a “change of identity” in Europe, as she proclaimed at the rally of the Spanish far-right party Vox, which she attended from a distance, on May 19, in Madrid.
Since taking up residence in the Palazzo Chigi in October 2022, Meloni has endeavored to convince her European counterparts that she has a rightful place at their side, that the Italy of Fratelli d’Italia deserves their consideration and is fully part of the concert of European nations. She wants to establish herself as a credible, reliable and respected interlocutor. “Meloni wants to assert herself as a leader of the classical right,” said a senior European official.
‘Bring down this European Union!’
It doesn’t matter that in Italy, on issues that fall outside EU competence, Meloni takes ultraconservative decisions – like the one to support the presence of anti-abortion protesters in hospitals to discourage women from having recourse to abortions. In Brussels, the Italian wants to be reputable. And it seems to be working: On May 23, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gave a sign of approval, assuring that Meloni “is clearly pro-European.”
When she took over the reins of her country in October 2022, Meloni’s past did not bode well for such satisfaction less than two years later. “Bring down this European Union!” she said as recently as 2019 at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States, to which she had been invited. She made no secret of being pro-Trump.
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