It would be a stretch to call it a changing of the guard in international politics. Yet Forbes Magazine’s annual ranking of “the world’s most powerful women” offers eye-catching evidence of the extraordinary rise, and impact, of the first far-right populist to lead a Western European country since World War II.
She is Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. And on the latest list, she comes in at No. 3 – displacing Kamala Harris, defeated last November by Ms. Meloni’s old friend, Donald Trump.
Still, it’s the ways in which she has differentiated herself from Mr. Trump – and from longtime far-right allies in Europe such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen in France – that are giving Ms. Meloni growing clout in Western halls of power.
Why We Wrote This
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party has a fascist background, has proved unexpectedly ready to work with moderate European leaders. Is she shaping a new mold for far-right politicians?
She is now a key figure in Europe as it confronts a trio of daunting challenges: managing immigration, ensuring support for Ukraine, and avoiding an all-out break with the Trump administration.
Things could yet go wrong on any one of those fronts. Europe could find it hard to sustain its support for Kyiv, for instance, if Mr. Trump softens or abandons his recent pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end his war on Ukraine.
Yet Ms. Meloni has been positioning herself as a new kind of far-right leader within the 27-nation European Union, favoring pragmatism over euroskepticism, and building alliances with more moderate leaders in the hope of securing top-table influence on its longer-term policy choices.
She has been helped by the fact that – unlike Mr. Orbán, Ms. Le Pen, and surging far-right parties in Germany, Spain, and other EU countries – she condemned Russia’s aggression from the moment Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, eight months before she assumed office.
That has given her a key role in holding the EU together on Ukraine, especially in convincing Mr. Orbán to abandon a threatened veto of a $60 billion aid package last year.
But she has also traded cannily on her ties with Mr. Trump: She was the only EU leader invited to his inauguration.
Rather than act as his cheerleader or acolyte, like Mr. Orbán or Germany’s far-right AfD party, she has positioned herself as a bridge-builder with Washington on issues including the Ukraine war and President Trump’s tariff demands.
And while her Brothers of Italy party won the last elections on the strength of its opposition to the tight fiscal measures on which the EU conditions access to its funds, she has largely kept the policies in place.
It has been a remarkable political feat for the leader of a party descended from postwar supporters of Italy’s Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP
Once feared, she is now feted by mainstream European politicians, from center-right figures such as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU executive commission, to center-left leaders like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
And amid centrist alarm over far-right gains at the polls, they have joined her in promoting a tougher union-wide approach to migrants fleeing war, poverty, or the effects of climate change.
Critics and rivals in Italy have cautioned that she has by no means abandoned the views that made her a leading light in far-right circles around the world while her party was in opposition.
She has echoed other far-right parties’ opposition to LGBTQ+ rights. Her government has replaced the top managers of the state broadcaster, RAI. It has moved to put new limits on public protest. And she has plans – though requiring a national referendum that she seems unlikely to win – to centralize power by having Italians directly elect their prime minister.
Still, so far she has attempted nothing like President Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” that has gutted judicial and media independence.
Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press/AP
And her shift in tone, since she took office, has been dramatic.
In a fiery campaign rally speech in 2022, she declared: “Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby! Yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology. … Yes to the universality of the cross, no to the Islamist violence!
“Yes to peoples’ sovereignty. No to Brussels’ bureaucracy!”
Yet by jettisoning such rhetorical exhortations, and working within the EU’s framework, Ms. Meloni has done more than strengthen her hand in Europe.
Her new approach, offering the rare prospect of governmental stability in a country where the average post-war government has lasted barely a year, has buoyed support for her party at home.
Though her coalition partners have bridled at her outsize role, opinion polls give Brothers of Italy a comfortable lead over its rivals: The party currently enjoys a 30% approval rating, an improvement on the 26% share of the vote that it secured in the 2022 election.
The question now, in Europe and beyond, assuming this new-model Meloni stays the course, is whether she will become a model for other far-right political populist leaders.
One, in particular, to watch is Ms. Le Pen.
For years, she has been attempting a Meloni-style repositioning exercise. And she still hopes to contest, and win, France’s presidency in two years’ time.
