Giorgia Meloni emerges as Europe’s anti-Starmer: Adrian Wooldridge

Key topics:Giorgia Meloni rebrands as critic of strongmen, clashes with TrumpPragmatic populist bridges EU establishment, backs Ukraine, balances policiesFaces weak growth outlook but remains influential model for new populists.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Adrian Wooldridge.Meet the new Giorgia Meloni: better and, if anything, feistier than the old Meloni. A month or so ago, it looked as if the Italian prime minister was fizzling out. Her alliance with Donald Trump had become an encumbrance and she had lost an important referendum on judicial reform. Today she is reborn as Europe’s most vitriolic critic of strongmen.Meloni has turned insulting the US president into an art form and condemned Benjamin Netanyahu’s bellicose Israeli policies. Italy’s government has also given the Russian ambassador to Rome a dressing down after a Moscow TV presenter called Meloni a “wild beast” and “fascist creature.” As for the referendum, memories have faded. The shape-shifting right-wing populist remains the closest thing to a star in Europe’s grey political firmament — cracking jokes in a demotic Roman accent and rolling her eyes like a champion.She’s the anti-Keir Starmer of European politics, making her a fascinating study for others eager to usurp the mainstream. He is an establishment figure who climbed the greasy pole as a lawyer-cum-civil-servant. Meloni is an upstart whose party, the Brothers of Italy, has neo-fascist roots, and who got her break as part of the clownish Silvio Berlusconi administration..Read more:.UK government teeters as Mandelson affair reignites Starmer crisis.Starmer took a political system that was so desperate for stability that it gave him a huge majority, and he proceeded to create unnecessary turbulence and fragmentation. Meloni took a system that is famously unstable and held it together. During her three years in power, France has gone through five prime ministers and Britain three (and counting). Germany has had two chancellors.But she is also quite different from Starmer’s hard-right nemesis, Nigel Farage. He is the quintessential irresponsible populist who has led a succession of protest movements, but has never run a department of state and, as party leader, has fallen out with most people he has worked with. Meloni got her first government job back in 2008 when Berlusconi, under pressure to hire women, made her minister of youth, the youngest minister in Italian history.The UK politician she most resembles is from the opposite wing: Labour’s Angela Rayner, a potential replacement for the wounded Starmer. Like Rayner, Meloni is a working-class single mother who did not go to university. Like Rayner, she has preserved her regional accent even as she has climbed the political ladder.Her pragmatism offers a blueprint to both left and right at a time of political rupture, and has made her the European Union’s master of populist triangulation. She has a core group of loyal right-wing friends, many of whom grew up with her in Rome’s Garbatella district, where they endured the bullying of the Communists who lorded it over the area.She has proved a doughty culture warrior, defending “family values” and Western civilization against secular modernity. Child to a single mother, she’s opposed abortion on the grounds that her mother did not take that option. Her ill-fated referendum was part of the right’s war on Italy’s judiciary, which it regards, with some justification, as left-wing and self-indulgent.Yet she has built bridges to Europe’s establishment. She forged a good relationship with her technocratic predecessor, Mario Draghi, and broadly stuck to his economic guidelines. She has an equally good relationship with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, breaking with the pro-Russian wing of her coalition (her colleague Matteo Salvini has worn T-shirts with Putin’s face on them) and vigorously supporting Ukraine.This is sensible given that Italy got the biggest share of the EU’s €750 billion ($878 billion) Covid recovery fund. Pumping that money into housing and infrastructure has helped to drive growth and regenerate parts of the country.She has also been careful to balance populist policies with mainstream ones, for instance building detention centers in Albania for refugees while increasing the number of Italian work visas. She boosted the number of daycare centers for working mothers but banned surrogacy, spoke out against same-sex marriage and condemned gender ideology in schools.Whether this mixing and matching has an ideological core is unclear. Mario Calvo-Platero, a veteran Italian journalist, suggests she is trying to create something new in Italian politics: a respectable conservative party. We will have to wait to see if he is right. But her relationship with Trump shows there can be no doubt of her skill at triangulation..Read more:.Starmer shackled by Labour’s Brownite legacy: Martin Ivens.At first she positioned herself as a bridge between the EU and the White House to replace the one removed by Britain’s departure from the bloc. Trump called her “a real livewire” and “a fantastic leader and person.” But she has calculated that her relationship with the president was generating more difficulties than benefits. She seized on his bizarre attacks on the pope to criticize him in the name of cultural conservatism. “Meloni is no longer the old Meloni,” complains Trump, inadvertently playing into her hands. A bigger worry is that she has not fully addressed Italy’s structural problems such as poor productivity, an ageing population and too much debt. The International Monetary Fund has downgraded Italy’s growth prospects to 0.5% this year, even if the tensions in the Strait of Hormuz are resolved quickly, compared with a euro-area average of 1.1%. This leaves her little financial room to maneuver in the year before a national election.But economic weakness will not necessarily translate into political marginalization. The leader of the largest opposition group, Elly Schlein of the Democratic Party, lacks Meloni’s experience, and her coalition is split between the Democrats and the anarchic Five Star Movement.Even if Meloni loses the election, her influence will remain. She provides a model for a new generation of “clean skin” populists who are very different from the previous grumpy old men: France’s Jordan Bardella is young and telegenic, Germany’s Alice Weidel is in a same-sex relationship and Laila Cunningham, Farage’s candidate for London mayor, is a media-friendly Muslim. These are Meloni populists, not Trump populists.Italy has a remarkable record as a political laboratory. It pioneered fascism in the 1920s, the rule of the businessman entertainer in the 1990s and populism in the 2010s — in both its left-wing and right-wing guises. Meloni’s pragmatism also points the way to the future..Read more:.Epstein: Starmer must end Labour’s “boys’ club” culture — Rosa Prince.The vision of right-wing culture warriors marching lockstep behind Trump in a civilizational conflict is for the birds. Europe’s populists risk extinction if they indulge in such distractions rather than learning how to properly run things. France’s Marine Le Pen has already adopted Meloni’s gentler approach on everything from Brussels to NATO. As Trump’s model collapses alongside his poll numbers, expect more to follow that lead..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Giorgia Meloni emerges as Europe’s anti-Starmer: Adrian Wooldridge

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