Georgia Meloni is making things difficult for her ideological opponents on the left. They portray Italy’s head of government as a right-wing bogeyman, as a neo-fascist, EU opponent, anti-immigrant – as before in the election campaign.
After a hundred days in office, it seems difficult. Meloni has done some to refute the warnings. Manfred Weber, head of the bourgeois party family EVP in the European Parliament (EP), makes advances to Meloni. She should switch with her party Fratelli d’Italia from the EKR, the association of EU skeptics, to the EPP.
However, there is a high hurdle, more on that later. It is significant that Meloni’s course as prime minister is not one of them. She is committed to the EU and NATO. She has increased Italy’s arms aid to Ukraine.
Meloni defuses conflicts with Brussels
She has not yielded to her right-wing coalition partners on central conflict issues with EU partners such as national debt, migration and the independence of the judiciary. But Silvio Berlusconi and the agitators from the Northern League, Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini and Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, sidelined.
She has clearly distanced herself from her party’s neo-fascist roots. She keeps her distance from the AfD, from Marine Le Pen in France and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán when he is in Rome.
She is conspicuously looking for the proximity of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (CDU) and the conversation with Manfred Weber (CSU). Sure, that helps her be seen as a moderate. Conversely, it would be risky for von der Leyen and Weber to show themselves with her if they thought Meloni was a neo-fascist who was only charmingly covering it up to the outside world.
She pushes to the center, not to the right edge. Seen in this way, Weber’s efforts to guide Meloni into the EPP are understandable. Italy is a founding member and the third largest economy in the EU, Meloni is the new dominant right of center. In no major EU country are Christian Democrats involved in the government.
But: Meloni heads the right-wing EKR in the European Parliament. Does she want to give up the influence?
In general, breaking up today’s party families would have risky consequences. Looking at Italy, it is easy to replace the lost Christian Democracy with Melonis Fratelli. In Poland, on the other hand, the liberal-conservative Civic Platform would rather leave the EPP than join the EPP in rapprochement with right-wing governing parties such as the PiS.
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Source: Tagesspiegel
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