ROME — One date has always loomed large in Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s political calendar: Friday, Sept. 4.
As she gathers with her allies for a jamboree in the southern port city of Bari, Meloni will overtake Silvio Berlusconi’s record for the longest unbroken stretch running a government in the history of the Italian Republic: 1,412 days.
The big question — with a general election due next year — is how far Meloni’s right-wing dominance of Italy’s politics will endure. She still has a long way to go to rival Berlusconi’s total of 3,340 days in charge across all his mandates.
Berlusconi’s extraordinary endurance rested on his ability to survive electoral defeats, collapsed governments, criminal trials and repeated predictions of his political death. His wealth, television empire and a party constructed around himself gave him resources independent of his popularity at any particular moment.
Meloni lacks those tycoon-style advantages, but she is still only 49 years old, tops the polls and is planning an electoral reform that could make it easier for her to keep her grip on power. Nearly four years after taking office, she towers over her coalition partners without an obvious challenger on the right.
Italo Bocchino, a former conservative parliamentarian and prominent Meloni supporter, predicted her era “will last 30 years” — even if some of those years are in opposition.
Her appeal, he argued, lies in her unfiltered authenticity: She complains in dialect about high heels and needing the toilet at international summits and press conferences, embraces her “fishwife” nickname and is notorious for eye-rolls that betray what she is thinking.
“She is sincere, she is transparent as glass,” he said. Her image as a petite blonde woman, Bocchino argued, also made a leader from Italy’s post-fascist right appear less threatening to wary voters.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Laura Boldrini, a center-left Democratic Party MP and former speaker of the lower house, insisted Meloni had not yet earned the comparison with Berlusconi.
“I don’t think she will last a long time because she has failed,” she said. “I think the results are very modest and very disappointing for those who supported her and voted for her.”
Meloni’s opponents accuse her of failing to revive the country’s stagnant economy and low wages and of wasting money on futile efforts to reduce migration. Critics say she focused her efforts on measures intended to cement her power, such as electoral reform and a failed shakeup of the judiciary, while failing to tackle a cost of living crisis.
Boldrini argued that the rise of former General Roberto Vannacci as a force on the far right also showed that disillusioned right-wing voters were already looking elsewhere.
“The right-wing coalition has a big problem called Vannacci: a fascist, racist, misogynist, who is collecting a lot of resentment from those who have been disappointed by Meloni’s government. They say they won’t run together but I think they will or they won’t win,” she said.
More credible than Silvio
On the international stage, Meloni has established far more credibility than her predecessor Berlusconi.
While Berlusconi cultivated allies across the political spectrum, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Britain’s Tony Blair, his gaffes, Bunga Bunga parties and sex scandals frequently made him an object of ridicule abroad. Meloni is regarded as a pragmatist at European summits and has built strong relationships with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
Berlusconi, by contrast, had a bumpy relationship with then German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Meloni has also proved successful in pulling the EU closer to positions she has advocated on migration, trade deals, industry and green policy. Four years of political stability under her leadership have themselves increased Italy’s weight abroad, analysts argue.
That influence is now being tested, however, as Germany, Ireland and several other European countries press Italy to take back asylum seekers who first entered the EU there under the bloc’s new migration rules, reopening an old fault line between Italy and northern European governments.
Lorenzo Pregliasco, a political analyst and pollster, said voters continue to give Meloni credit for her stewardship of the government and her handling of international affairs. “She is seen as fit to be prime minister in a way other party leaders maybe are not.”
Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist who has compared Meloni to Merkel, said: “She has become the center of gravity for the right,” adding that “there is no alternative leader in that coalition.”
But whether that dominance can survive a more uncertain political landscape is only beginning to be tested.
Much of the vote of her party, Brothers of Italy, comes from volatile center-right voters who have previously moved between parties.
Meloni also faces growing economic headwinds. The economy is forecast to enter recession later this year and Italy is on course to overtake Greece as Europe’s most indebted country. With energy prices high and pressure mounting to increase defense spending, she has little room for generous handouts to shore up support in her final pre-election budget this autumn.
Her coalition partners have meanwhile lost ground to Vannacci’s new force, leaving a united left potentially competitive if it can agree on a program and candidate before the election. Meloni may ultimately be forced to bring an unruly Vannacci inside the tent.
Next stop: the presidency?
For Pregliasco, Meloni has yet to have the overarching impact of Berlusconi, who created the modern center-right coalition in 1994 and helped reshape Italian politics around his highly personalized leadership.
Meloni has so far inherited and dominated that architecture rather than creating her own.
“I wouldn’t consider her as defining a figure as Berlusconi,” Pregliasco said.
That could yet change. Meloni’s majority is pursuing an electoral reform that would replace single-member constituencies with proportional representation and award a bonus to the winning coalition, potentially giving her a more commanding majority if the center-right wins again. That approach closely echoes Berlusconi’s 2005 reform, which also combined proportional representation with a majority bonus.
A second term with a reinforced parliamentary majority could strengthen her hand in the 2029 election of the president of the Republic and could allow her to revive her stalled plans for the direct election of the prime minister.
Neither would be straightforward: constitutional reform remains politically hazardous, while the president is elected by secret ballot. But success would give Meloni the opportunity to leave a more lasting institutional mark by reshaping the political system herself.
Her ambitions may also not end with a long tenure as premier.
Nicola Procaccini, a senior politician from Brothers of Italy who has known Meloni since their time in youth politics, said she could ultimately climb to the venerated role of president.
He explained that after three decades in public life, Italians know both her strengths and flaws. “She is not a leader by chance,” he said. “Everyone knows what to expect from her.”
