In early September, Giorgia Meloni is expected to reach a milestone that once seemed almost anomalous in postwar Italy: leading the longest continuously serving government in the history of the republic. Her cabinet has been in office since October 22, 2022, and is on course to surpass Silvio Berlusconi’s second government.
The approaching record matters because Italian politics has long been defined by short-lived coalitions, abrupt collapses and frequent changes of prime minister. Meloni has reversed that pattern without abandoning the political identity that carried her from a marginal nationalist movement to the centre of power in Rome.
Her rise began far from European summits. Raised in Rome’s Garbatella district, Meloni joined the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, or MSI, at 15. The party had been created after World War II by figures linked to, or emerging from, the political world of Benito Mussolini’s defeated Fascist regime.
Her ascent was unusually rapid. She entered parliament, became a deputy speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and, in 2008, joined the cabinet at just 31, making her the youngest minister in the republic’s history. Four years later, she helped found Brothers of Italy, the party that would win the 2022 general election.
Daycom’s analysis indicates that the central significance of Meloni’s career lies not only in her personal success. She has shown how a party with post-fascist roots can move from the political fringe to government while preserving parts of its symbolic inheritance and adapting itself to the rules of the EU, NATO and market economics.
That inheritance remains the most contested element of her political identity. Brothers of Italy still uses the tricolour flame associated with the MSI. Meloni has repeatedly rejected nostalgia for Fascism and condemned dictatorship, antisemitism and Mussolini’s racial laws, while resisting a complete symbolic rupture with the postwar right.
That ambiguity has proved politically useful. To her core supporters, Meloni has not abandoned the language of nation, family, tradition and cultural identity. To a broader electorate, however, she has presented herself not as an insurgent determined to overturn institutions, but as a disciplined and comparatively predictable conservative leader.
Her most obvious domestic achievement has been stability. For decades, Italy was a shorthand for fragile cabinets and shifting parliamentary alliances. By 2026, Meloni’s government had already become one of the longest-lasting of the republican era, an accomplishment that has strengthened her claim to have restored political seriousness to Rome.
Stability, however, has not produced an economic renaissance. Italy still carries one of the largest public-debt burdens in the European Union, at roughly 137 percent of gross domestic product. Her government has nevertheless narrowed the budget deficit and pursued a fiscal discipline markedly different from the anti-Brussels rhetoric of her earlier career.
That relative macroeconomic stability has not erased pressures felt by households. Real wages have recovered slowly, public services remain strained, and opposition parties point to high energy costs and weakened hospitals as evidence that political durability has not translated into a dramatic improvement in daily living standards.
Migration offers another example of Meloni’s evolution in office. Her political identity was built in part on fierce opposition to irregular arrivals, yet Italy’s ageing population and labour shortages have forced her government to expand legal migration channels for hundreds of thousands of foreign workers over the coming years.
The result is not a retreat from a hard-line position so much as a division of migration policy into two tracks: tighter control of irregular entry and wider legal pathways for workers the economy needs. That allows Meloni to speak simultaneously to conservative voters and to employers struggling with shortages in agriculture, industry and care work.
Some policies once treated as distinctly Italian have meanwhile shifted into the European mainstream. Proposals involving migrant returns and processing arrangements with third countries, once associated mainly with governments on the hard right, are increasingly part of broader EU debates about asylum, borders and deportation.
Meloni’s relationship with Europe has undergone a similar transformation. A politician who once entertained the idea of Italy leaving the euro has not pursued confrontation with Brussels as prime minister. Instead, she has protected access to EU funding, backed Ukraine and anchored Italy firmly inside NATO and the wider transatlantic alliance.
Her relationship with Donald Trump was supposed to demonstrate that nationalism and Western unity could be reconciled. Meloni was the only EU head of government invited to his inauguration, and their ideological overlap on immigration and cultural issues initially appeared to give Rome unusual access to the new White House.
By 2026, that calculation had become far more complicated. Meloni publicly defended Pope Leo XIV after Trump attacked him, while disagreements over Iran and the broader direction of American foreign policy widened the distance between the two leaders. Shared rhetoric proved insufficient to guarantee aligned national interests.
For Meloni, that tension is revealing. Ideological affinity has mattered less than her determination to increase Italy’s geopolitical weight. She continues to argue for Western unity, but she has drawn a clearer line between sympathy for American conservatives and decisions she believes serve Italy’s strategic interests.
This ability to adjust without fully abandoning her original political language has given rise to the idea of “Melonisation.” The term is increasingly used to describe the process by which a hard-right party retains nationalist and culturally conservative themes while adapting itself to European institutions, fiscal constraints and Atlantic alliances.
The model matters because the traditional political cordon around far-right parties is weakening across Europe. Italy suggests that a nationalist party does not necessarily have to surrender its ideological core if it can convince voters, markets and allies that its arrival in government will not produce institutional breakdown.
That example is being watched closely in France, Germany and elsewhere. National Rally remains a major contender for power in France, while Alternative for Germany has strengthened its position. Across the continent, parties once treated as permanently excluded are testing whether the Italian path can be reproduced.
Meloni, however, now faces pressure from her own right. Roberto Vannacci, a former general, has built support for a new nationalist movement that accuses the prime minister of becoming too moderate. His appeal rests on a more aggressive language of cultural homogeneity, “remigration” and confrontation.
The paradox is clear. Meloni reached power partly by making a radical-right tradition more acceptable to centrist voters. Now some of the voters who helped sustain that tradition accuse her of having diluted it. The political technique that broadened her coalition has also created space for challengers further to the right.
The limits of her authority were exposed in the March referendum on judicial reform. Voters rejected the proposed constitutional changes by roughly 54 percent to 46 percent. The government presented the package as a necessary restructuring, while opponents warned that it could weaken judicial independence and shift power toward the executive.
The defeat did not bring down the coalition or collapse Meloni’s standing. It did, however, underline the distinction between a stable government and an unlimited mandate to remake the state. Italy’s constitutional order, shaped by the memory of dictatorship, still contains strong barriers against rapid concentration of executive power.
That is where the central argument over Meloni now lies. Supporters see a politician who has matured with her party, accepted democratic constraints, supported Ukraine, tightened fiscal policy and restored a degree of international authority to a country long perceived as politically fragile.
Critics see something different: a leader who has made a post-fascist political tradition respectable without fully severing its symbolic ties to the past. Their concern is less that Meloni is preparing an authoritarian turn today than that her success may normalise ideas once considered beyond the limits of mainstream European politics.
Both interpretations help explain her durability. She has not become the destroyer of the European order that some opponents feared in 2022, but neither has she turned into a conventional centre-right prime minister. Much of her strength lies in occupying the uncertain space between those two identities.
If her government does set a longevity record in early September, the symbolism will extend far beyond a calendar statistic. A party that spent years polling in the low single digits, and that emerged from one of the most disputed traditions in modern Italian politics, will have produced the most durable cabinet of the republican era.
That is why Meloni’s story is no longer merely Italian. Italy has become a test case for a question confronting Europe more broadly: what happens when the hard right stops promising to tear down the political system and instead learns to operate it more effectively than the parties that once kept it out?
Пані Мелоні прагнула дистанціюватися від пана Трампа, оскільки їхня дружба стала політичним тягарем для італійських виборців — Хайюнь Цзян
