The post-fascist outsider who became a European insider - how Italy’s first woman prime minister turned the politics of the border into power, and what her transformation reveals about Europe

When Giorgia Meloni became Prime Minister of Italy in October 2022, much of the European establishment greeted her arrival with alarm. She led a party with roots in Italy’s post-fascist tradition, she had built her career on hard-edged nationalist and anti-immigration politics, and she belonged to the family of European populist movements that the mainstream regarded as a threat to the European project itself. Her victory was read, in many European capitals, as the arrival of the populist danger at the head of one of the Union’s largest and most important member states.

Several years later, that alarm has given way to something more complicated. Meloni has governed as one of the most durable leaders in modern Italian history - heading the second-longest-serving government in the history of the Italian Republic, a remarkable achievement in a country famous for the instability of its governments. She has become, in many respects, a constructive and even pivotal figure in European politics, working within the institutions she once attacked and earning the wary respect of leaders who had expected to oppose her. The firebrand outsider has become, to a degree few predicted, a European insider.

This transformation is the subject worth understanding, because it illuminates several things at once: the politics of migration that propelled her rise, the way the European system absorbs and moderates the forces that threaten it, and the question of what it means that one of Europe’s most successful populists has become one of its most effective operators. Meloni’s trajectory is a window onto the central political dynamics of contemporary Europe.

Giorgia Meloni was born in Rome in 1977 and grew up in Garbatella, a working-class neighbourhood of the capital, raised by her mother after her father left the family. Her background was not one of privilege, and the experience of growing up outside the comfortable Italian establishment shaped a political identity defined, from the beginning, by opposition to elites and identification with ordinary people who felt unheard.

She entered politics extraordinarily young, becoming involved in nationalist youth movements as a teenager - in the youth wing of a party descended from Italy’s post-fascist tradition. This origin has followed her throughout her career, and the question of her relationship to that tradition - whether she represents its continuation or its transformation into something compatible with democratic, mainstream conservatism - has been a constant theme of analysis of her politics. She has consistently distanced herself from fascism while building on the nationalist political tradition from which her movement emerged, a positioning that her critics find inadequate and her supporters consider definitive.

Her rise through Italian politics was steady and determined. She became the youngest minister in the history of the Italian Republic, serving as Minister for Youth in her early thirties. In 2012 she co-founded Brothers of Italy, the party she has led ever since, and over the following decade she built it from a marginal force into the dominant party of the Italian right - a feat of political construction that required patience, discipline, and a sharp instinct for the currents of Italian and European politics. By the time she reached the premiership, she had spent three decades building toward it.

Central to Meloni’s rise was the issue that this week’s analysis has examined: migration. Her politics placed opposition to uncontrolled immigration at the centre of her appeal, and her ascent reflected, in substantial part, Italian frustration with the country’s position as a frontline state bearing a disproportionate share of Mediterranean arrivals.

Meloni understood, as the most successful populist leaders have understood across Europe, the political potency of migration - its capacity to fuse economic anxiety, cultural concern, and a sense of lost control into a powerful electoral force. She channelled the frustration of Italians who felt that their country had been left to manage an overwhelming burden while the rest of Europe offered rhetoric instead of help. Her message combined a demand for stronger borders, a critique of the European establishment’s handling of migration, and an appeal to national identity and sovereignty that resonated with voters across the traditional political spectrum.

In government, she has pursued the migration agenda that brought her to power - pushing for stronger external border controls, pursuing arrangements with third countries to reduce arrivals, and advocating at the European level for approaches that emphasise control. Her championing of deals to externalise migration management, and her advocacy of processing arrangements outside European territory, have made her an influential voice in the European migration debate - shaping, rather than merely opposing, the direction of European policy. The frontline leader has become an agenda-setter on the issue that defined her rise.

The most interesting aspect of Meloni’s premiership is the gap between the radical figure many expected and the pragmatic operator she has largely proven to be in government - a transformation that reveals much about how the European system works.

On the issues that most alarmed her critics, she has governed more cautiously than her rhetoric had suggested. On the European Union itself, the once-Eurosceptic firebrand has worked within the system, maintaining Italy’s commitments, managing the relationship with the European institutions constructively, and avoiding the confrontations that many had feared. On economic policy, she has been notably orthodox, maintaining fiscal discipline and reassuring markets and European partners rather than pursuing the disruptive populist economics that her movement’s history might have predicted. On foreign policy, she has been a firm supporter of the Western alliance and of support for Ukraine, positioning herself as a reliable partner rather than a disruptive force.

This moderation in government has several explanations, and they illuminate the dynamics of European politics. Part of it is the discipline of power - the constraints that governing imposes on a leader who must manage a real economy, maintain market confidence, and work within the European system on which Italy depends. Part of it is strategic - Meloni’s evident ambition to be a consequential and durable leader rather than a flash of populist protest, which requires the respect and cooperation of the partners she once attacked. And part of it is the absorptive capacity of the European system itself, which tends to moderate the forces that enter it, channelling opposition into participation and rewarding constructive engagement over confrontation.

Giorgia Meloni’s significance extends well beyond Italy, and several aspects of what she represents are worth drawing out.

She represents the mainstreaming of the European populist right - its movement from the margins to the centre of power, and its partial transformation in the process. Meloni has demonstrated that a leader from the populist, nationalist tradition can govern a major European country, work within the European system, and achieve durability and influence - not by abandoning her identity but by adapting it to the responsibilities of power. This is a model that populist leaders across Europe are studying, and it suggests that the relationship between the populist right and the European mainstream is more complex than a simple opposition between the two.

She represents, too, the political power of migration and the way it has reshaped European politics. Meloni’s rise is inconceivable without the migration issue and the frustrations it generated, and her trajectory is the clearest illustration of how the politics of the border can carry a leader from the margins to the summit of power. She is the foremost example of the phenomenon that this week’s analysis examined - the capacity of migration to transform European politics and empower the movements that have made it their cause.

And she represents a question that Europe has not resolved: what it means that the forces once regarded as threats to the European project are now among its most powerful actors, governing its member states and shaping its policies. Is this the absorption and moderation of those forces by a resilient European system, or is it the gradual transformation of Europe itself in the direction those forces represent? Meloni’s premiership can be read either way, and the ambiguity is the point. She is simultaneously evidence that Europe can absorb and moderate the populist challenge and evidence of how far that challenge has advanced. Which reading proves correct - whether figures like Meloni are being changed by Europe or are changing it - is among the most consequential open questions about the continent’s future.

What is beyond dispute is that Giorgia Meloni has become one of the most significant political figures in Europe - a leader who rose on the politics of the border, governs with unexpected pragmatism, and embodies, more clearly than anyone, the central political transformation of her time. Whatever Europe becomes in the coming years, she will have helped to shape it.

Europe’s Power Figures is a monthly supplement to EuroTasteDaily, profiling the individuals who shape the continent’s direction.

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