Five years ago, when her party won 6 percent of the vote in the European Parliament elections, Giorgia Meloni tried to pop a bottle of sparkling wine, but the cork fell awkwardly among some supporters.
This week Ms Meloni, now Italy’s prime minister, emerged a big winner in the election and she and dozens of members of her Brothers of Italy party celebrated at a five-star hotel in Rome where waiters carried bottles of wine in silver basins filled with ice. The hard-right party took almost 29 percent of the vote. The victory was all the more significant because Ms. Meloni was the only leader of a major Western European country to emerge stronger from the polls.
For Ms. Meloni, the lift could hardly have come at a better time. All eyes are on Italy this week as Ms Meloni prepares to host a summit of the Group of 7 major economies for three days, starting on Thursday. It’s another chance to emerge as a legitimate member of the club of the world’s most influential leaders.
“This nation is going to the G7 and Europe with the strongest government of all,” she told supporters early Monday after the results emerged. “They couldn’t stop us.”
When she became prime minister in 2022, she sent shivers down the spine of the European establishment because of her far-right, Eurosceptic credentials and post-fascist roots. This establishment now sees it as a pragmatic partner on key international issues.
Ms. Meloni’s approach serves as a model for other far-right leaders who want to break into the mainstream.
In France, Marine Le Pen has softened her stance on major issues and polished her image. The National Rally party finished so strongly in the European elections, with more than 30 percent of the vote, that President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called new parliamentary elections.
“Giorgia Meloni’s government positively infected Europe,” said Giovanni Donzelli, a Brothers of Italy MP, on Sunday night. “A wall came down across Europe – they realized that the right can govern well.”
In recent months, Ms. Meloni has been courted both by the European center-right as a potential ally and by parties even further to her right as they try to forge a united nationalist front.
While the center is in the new European Parliament, Ms Meloni may yet emerge as a key figure in individual votes, including the immediate re-election of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, who needs the legislature’s approval to secure a second term.
Ms. Meloni, experts said, may decide to back Ms. von der Leyen as a way of exerting more influence in Brussels.
“Meloni will become a major player in Europe,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at consultancy Eurasia Group. “As Meloni leans into the center and is constructive, she will reap many rewards.”
On the wider international stage, Ms Meloni has also become a key player on issues such as support for Ukraine, which has set her apart from other parts of the hard right which tend to be more pro-Russian.
That has put her in good stead with the cohort of Western leaders who will gather this week in the southern Italian region of Puglia, especially in the wake of the election.
“All the lights are on her,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. “Her image is enhanced even more.”
G7 participants will include President Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, Rishi Sunak of Britain, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan. Ms von der Leyen and Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, also planned to attend.
Ms. Meloni has also invited Pope Francis. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine; India’s newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi. and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, among others, including several African leaders. It has pledged to focus the summit in part on its development and cooperation plan with Africa.
The meeting will take place at Borgo Egnazia, a luxury resort with sparkling pools surrounded by rosemary and olive groves. Its stone mansions and villas are filled with baskets of almonds and lemons, and its narrow streets are lined with rusty bicycles and wooden chariots, bearing the marks of time.
Except the whole place was built in the early 2000s on land leveled by Mussolini to build an air base. The resort recreates an ancient Apulian town and farmhouse in a project that some locals have likened to a Mediterranean Potemkin village.
World leaders will follow in the wake of guests including Madonna, the Beckhams and Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, who tied the knot at the resort.
“Meloni wanted to make a huge impression, and I’m sure she will,” said Romeo Di Bari, 41, a shop owner in the town of Alberobello, which the leaders’ partners are scheduled to visit, and where on a recent afternoon, friends they knelt down on the cobblestones to photograph their girlfriends doing pirouettes among the area’s distinctive pointed trulli huts.
Nearby, in the town of Bari, locals praised Ms. Meloni for bringing new prestige to their region and country.
“Our nation is on the front line,” said Giovanni Pirlo, 68, a retired surveyor. “Our nation has always been on the sidelines. now with Meloni something changes”.
Ms. Meloni has played a delicate balancing act of siding with the European establishment on international issues while satisfying her base at home with hard-line positions on abortion or LGBT rights that have cost her little in Europe (and in cash).
She has also juggled her roles as a woman of the people and an international statesman. She has insisted on a roll call with Italians, urging them to write “Giorgia” on their ballots, and has claimed to have defended Italy’s interests in Brussels by helping to pass conservative policies on immigration and the environment.
At home, Ms. Meloni presides over a stable coalition, supported by two weaker parties that desperately need her to stay in power. Forza Italia, whose founder Silvio Berlusconi died last year, took about 10 percent of the vote in European Parliament elections after running a concert-like campaign with Mr. Berlusconi’s name and photo on billboards. Matteo Salvini’s League party, which appealed to the right of Ms Meloni’s electorate, fell to 9 percent of the vote this year from 34 percent in 2019.
What remained Italy’s nationalist leader’s biggest challenge was perhaps her nation itself, experts said.
Italy’s productivity has lagged behind the European Union and wages are largely stagnant. While employment has increased, youth unemployment remains rampant in the South, and tens of thousands of young Italians leave the country every year.
In the town of Savelletri, around the corner from the G7 host resort, locals killed time in a cafe near two newly built helipads as military trucks patrolled.
Stefano Martellotta, a 51-year-old fisherman, said he was not too interested in what he called the G7 “show”. What he was worried about was that his two sons, aged 22 and 27, had to move to the Netherlands to work in restaurant kitchens because in Italy “nobody pays them a decent wage”, he said.
“It’s dramatic for us, our youth are abandoning us,” said Annamaria Santorsola, 75, a mother and grandmother, adding that her region needs “jobs, not the G7”.
