Giorgia Meloni’s European moment comes with a price
Italy’s enigmatic leader holds a casting vote this week on two crucial issues for the EU
Volodymyr Zelenskyy had Europe’s leaders arrayed around him on Monday evening, but the one seated at the Ukrainian president’s side — right in the middle of the negotiation — was Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.
In diplomatic choreography, such seating decisions matter: at that dinner in Berlin, discussing the security of Ukraine and the continent, Italy’s leader had been cast as a core European player.
Meloni’s allies inside the EU are hoping she remains one as a high-stakes summit on Thursday looms. Europe’s leaders are wrestling with two crucial decisions to which the enigmatic Italian premier holds a casting vote: the financial viability of Ukraine and the future of EU trade policy.
“Get with the programme; act like a European,” said one senior European diplomat on the message being passed to Meloni. “It’s being made clear that this is where she needs to be.”
Since she took office in October 2022, EU capitals have harboured fears that Meloni — who entered politics as a teenage activist with the postwar neo-fascist movement started by comrades of Benito Mussolini — could break with the bloc’s pro-European consensus on key issues.
But despite her historical Euroscepticism, old friendships with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and pro-Russian parties in her coalition, Meloni has consistently reverted to a pro-European line at critical moments — and proven herself as one of Zelenskyy’s most staunch supporters.
“We have a decisive week ahead of us . . . that really might determine the EU’s relevance as an international actor,” said a senior German official. “Italy is quite crucial in that respect.”
Meloni is expected to outline her approach to the meetings during a speech and subsequent debate in the Italian parliament on Wednesday.
“Italy’s place in the world was usually taken for granted,” said Stefano Stefanini, Italy’s former ambassador to Nato. “But with Meloni, you can’t take it for granted. She is not strictly bound by the usual guidelines that Italy maintained in foreign policy, especially regarding her relations in Europe.”
Meloni’s first decision is her stance on a European Commission proposal to use frozen Russian sovereign assets to guarantee an EU loan to Ukraine, a lifeline without which it risks financial collapse. Last week, Rome sided with Belgium in expressing serious reservations about the plan and calling for last-minute alternative options to be tabled.
The second is how to vote on the Mercosur agreement, a pact with the South American trade bloc painfully hammered out over the past 25 years that is supposed to be signed this weekend. Meloni’s office has been tight-lipped over whether Rome will vote in favour — securing the required majority — or join France backing a delay that officials say is tantamount to ripping up the deal.
Given EU diplomats cast the issues as “existential” for the union, how Meloni votes could determine her future relations with European allies, just as the Italian premier has sought to leverage her global standing to bolster her image at home.
Officials in Brussels, Rome and other capitals suggest Meloni’s reticence in showing her hand before Thursday’s summit belies her true purpose: to use the threat of opposition to win unrelated concessions from the commission.
Two officials briefed on the discussions between Brussels and Rome said that Italy was seeking additional benefits from the EU’s shared budget, including sops to the country’s farming industry.
Meloni has already tasted success this week in opposing a Brussels consensus. On Tuesday the commission decided to weaken its landmark ban on new combustion engines from 2035 after Italy joined Germany and eastern European countries in demanding a partial rollback. Meloni had previously described the ban as “self-destructive”.
But for Meloni, this week’s decisions will force her to make painful choices of the kind she has typically tried to avoid.
A longtime admirer of Donald Trump, Meloni has cultivated closer bonds with the US president than most of her fellow EU leaders and has been touted by her supporters as a bridge between Washington and Brussels.
But the White House has pushed for Brussels to leave the frozen Russian assets for alternative use in a peace settlement to fund US-aligned investment projects — testing Meloni’s loyalty to Trump.
Nathalie Tocci, director of Rome’s Institute for International Affairs, believes that Meloni will ultimately side with Europe in allowing the asset-backed “reparations loans” to go ahead, provided Belgium is also persuaded.
“By delaying things, by creating confusion, it’s a nod and a wink to Trump,” Tocci said. “But if I were to place my bet, I think that Italy in the end will back down. The costs of being marginalised and ostracised in Europe for her are too high.”
Refusal to countenance the use of the assets for Ukraine, Tocci added, would be “very clearly seen as something acting against Europe’s interests”.
On the Mercosur decision, Meloni is caught between two powerful domestic interest groups.
Italy’s main industry association Confindustria wants the deal approved to boost exports, while Coldiretti, an influential farm lobby, is demanding changes to better safeguard against a feared wave of cheaper Latin American imports.
“The postponement proposed by Macron is absolutely necessary,” said Luigi Pio Scordamaglio, Coldiretti’s director of EU and international policy.
Coldiretti has backing from a well-connected ally: Francesco Lollobrigida, the agriculture minister. Lollobrigida is one of Meloni’s old comrades from the neo-fascist youth movement, and was the longtime partner of the premier’s sister, though the two have now split.
But ultimately Meloni’s biggest calculation is likely to be how her choices will leave her positioned on the global stage, and how that will be perceived by Italian voters. “In being respectable abroad,” Stefanini said, “she gets credibility at home.”