What Meloni wants: Bringing home results

As negotiations among EU leaders kick off in Brussels, recent messaging from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her government’s sources threatened a rejection – probably in the form of abstention – of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s bid for a second term. 

Official sources have hinted that Italy might not support the upcoming proposals on EU top jobs – “at this point nothing is certain” – if the two-day summit in Brussels fails to yield concrete guarantees on topics such as defence, critical investments, and migration – related to the bloc’s strategic agenda for the next five years. 

But it’s Meloni’s own words that better explain the actual stakes underlying her current hardline diplomatic positioning. 

Italy must be recognised a role that “rightfully belongs to us”, Meloni told the national Parliament on Wednesday (26 June), “without begging for it”.  

Dusting off the Eurosceptic rhetoric and bringing home results

In the few weeks following the EU elections results, Meloni’s political family (ECR) has turned from potential king-maker of the top roles and key portfolios in the upcoming EU mandate to being excluded from negotiations – as the three traditional centrist groups (EPP, S&D, and the Liberals) were able to gather a large-enough majority without having to seek an alliance with far-right parties. 

After two years of softening her own and her party’s posturing towards Brussels, this post-EU election ostracism has prompted Meloni to return to her original Eurosceptic narrative. 

Such messaging, which replicates at the EU level her traditional “underdog” rhetoric of vindicating the interests of the common people, now benefits her populist politics more as it enables her to pitch “citizens” against an undemocratic oligarchy of Brussels bureaucrats. 

On top of leading the ECR, Meloni is first and foremost the head of Fratelli D’Italia, a party that used to consistently chastise the EU as a group of power-hungry and authoritarian elitists, far removed from the interests of those they rule over. 

She perfectly epitomised this message when addressing the Italian Parliament. “The logic of consensus is being overshadowed by backroom decisions, where a few decide for everyone,” she said, adding she had contested this logic “on behalf of the Italian government”. 

“I am not surprised that this approach emerged before, during, and after the election campaign,” Meloni said. “No true democrat who believes in popular sovereignty can find it acceptable.” 

The message is perfectly aligned with what her close political partner, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, conveyed earlier this month when he said the first talks among EU leaders after the European elections ignored “the will of the European people”. 

Far from abandoning its anti-EU rhetoric since she took office in 2022, Meloni’s party’ merely gave it a strategic revamp. 

Her elected ministers, in fact, have built a successful narrative through their visits to Brusselsm centred around the message of bringing home solid results that prioritise Italian interests over EU ones.  

During the recent negotiations of EU rules on supply-chain sustainability obligations for corporations, for example, Italy spearheaded a push to introduce hefty amendments at the late stages of the legislative process.

At the time, Adolfo Urso, Meloni’s minister for businesses, boasted Italy’s success in derailing the law by re-opening negotiations, and initiating trade-offs with other countries in parallel files that were also meant to be at the very last stage before the official EU rubberstamp – in that specific instance, the plastic waste legislation. 

That last-minute political reshuffling strategy – he told the press in Brussels in a message meant primarily for Italy’s domestic audiences – was helping Italy grab a primary political role at the EU table. 

What Meloni wants

For Meloni, bringing home results this time around means securing an “even better” representation for her country than in the outgoing legislature – where Paolo Gentiloni holds the economy portfolio in the Commission – she told the Italian Parliament. 

Government sources say she is eyeing a vice president’s role that would allow oversight “over two or three sectors” – attached to relevant portfolios such as “competition, trade, financial sector [or] industrial policy” – with Rome aiming to nominate Minister of European Affairs Raffaele Fitto for this role. 

In terms of the key subject matters, the country wants to influence EU policy, migration and green policies, judging by Meloni’s address to the Parliament. 

She maintained that Italy has set a precedent for Europe on migration, as she pointed to the fact that a majority of member states recently signed and sent a petition to the European Commission to follow the Italian model of the Albania agreement. 

According to her, the “memorandums with Egypt and Tunisia”, which the Commission recently signed, should be replicated and the focus shifted from “redistribution” to an externalisation approach “as highlighted by von der Leyen’s recent letter to EU leaders”. 

Another key battleground for Meloni is to bring “common sense and pragmatism” to the Green Deal, where she argues that sticking with the current path would ignore citizens’ will expressed in the 9 June vote. 

“No one has ever denied that electric vehicles can be part of the solution for decarbonising transport, but it makes no sense to impose a ban on producing diesel and petrol cars from 2035, thereby condemning ourselves to new strategic dependencies, like on Chinese electric vehicles.”

“Supporting the contrary was simply ideological folly, which we will work to correct,” she said. 

Overall, she said that many regulations need revision so that the EU is no longer a “bureaucratic giant” distant from its citizens, as shown by the voter abstention.  

To address this, Meloni proposed creating “a specific delegation for de-bureaucratisation” to remove the red tap currently penalising businesses in the EU.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic] 

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