Giorgia Meloni has just marked her first year as Italy’s prime minister. When elected, she was described as a far-right leader, the most right-wing that Italy has had since Mussolini. So after a year in office, were these labels justified? What kind of leader has she been? And has she done anything to justify the ‘far-right’ label still lazily applied to her?
While running for office, Meloni asked to be judged by her words and policies, not by the fact that as a teenager she had joined Italy’s long disbanded post-fascist party. ‘Usually, Italian politics are somewhat comical,’ Giovanni Orsina of Luiss University in Rome recently admitted. ‘But by Italian standards, we’re in a moment of unusual stability.’ So not, as breathlessly warned, a descent into far-right chaos.
Meloni’s personal approval remains relatively high at 43 per cent. Rishi Sunak would kill for such figures
Let’s start with foreign policy. Many right-wing populists have a weakness for Putin and begrudge backing Ukraine.
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