Giorgia Meloni has lasted where her predecessors fell. Italy’s test is whether stability in Rome can survive debt, demography, and a changing Europe.
Published 14 October 2026 · 06:00 GMT
Italy used to change prime ministers the way other countries change seasons. Since the Second World War, Rome has burned through dozens of governments, coalitions collapsing over budgets, scandals, or sheer exhaustion. The joke in Brussels was that you could not learn an Italian prime minister name before it changed. Giorgia Meloni ended that joke. In office since October 2022, she has given Italy something it has rarely had: a government that lasts.
Her staying power is the first thing to understand about modern Italy. Meloni leads the Brothers of Italy, a party with roots in the country post-fascist right, and governs in coalition with Matteo Salvini League and Silvio Berlusconi old Forza Italia party, now led by Antonio Tajani. The coalition has quarrelled, as Italian coalitions always do, but it has held. That alone marks a break with the past.
Part of the secret is that Meloni governed more cautiously than her critics feared and her supporters hoped. On Europe, she did not pick the fight many expected. On Ukraine, she kept Italy firmly in the Western camp, supplying aid and backing sanctions. On fiscal policy, she talked tough about discipline while protecting the spending her voters care about. The result is a paradox: a prime minister from the hard right who has become, in Brussels, a reliable interlocutor.
The other part is the weakness of the alternative. Italy centre-left opposition has struggled to unite around a single leader or programme, and the populist Five Star Movement has faded from its peak. Meloni’s dominance owes as much to the fragmentation of her opponents as to her own skill. In Italian politics, the side that stays together usually wins, because the other side rarely does.
Behind the politics sits the number that has haunted Italy for a generation: the public debt. Italy owes, relative to the size of its economy, among the highest debt burdens in the eurozone, a legacy of decades in which governments borrowed to fund spending, pensions, and a state that does much and does it slowly. Every Italian prime minister inherits this number. None has tamed it.
The debt matters because it sets the price of everything else. When European Central Bank interest rates rise, Italy borrowing costs rise faster than Germany, and the spread between the two, the famous spread, becomes the daily thermometer of market confidence. A government that loses market confidence loses room to govern. Meloni has governed with one eye on that spread, and it shows in her caution.
The European Union recovery fund was supposed to change the equation. Italy, as the largest beneficiary, received a plan worth around 194 billion euros in grants and loans, tied to reforms of the courts, the bureaucracy, and public administration. The money is real and the reforms are real, but spending it on time has been a slog. Italy’s administration is famously slow, and every missed milestone becomes a headline about waste.
Demography makes the arithmetic worse. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe and one of the oldest populations. Fewer workers must support more pensioners, and the pension bill is already one of the largest in the rich world. Meloni has promoted pro-family policies and cash incentives, but no Italian government has yet reversed the birth rate. A country that shrinks cannot easily outgrow its debts, and Italy is shrinking.
The market discipline behind the debt has a history. In 2011, Silvio Berlusconi resigned as prime minister in the middle of a debt crisis that pushed Italy’s borrowing costs to dangerous levels, and a technocratic government under Mario Monti took over to restore confidence. In 2018, a populist coalition clashed with the European Commission over its budget, and the spread widened until Rome backed down. Meloni learned from both episodes. She has governed with the memory of what happens when markets lose faith in Italy, and that memory explains her caution better than any ideology. The debt is not just a number. It is a leash, and every Italian prime minister knows who holds the other end.
Italy is not a peripheral European country that happens to be large. It is a founding member of the European project, a signatory of the Treaty of Rome, and the eurozone third-largest economy. When Italy sneezes, the euro catches a cold. That is why Brussels watches Rome the way it watches no other capital except Berlin and Paris.
Migration is where the relationship strains hardest. Italy is the first European landfall for many crossing the Mediterranean from Libya and Tunisia, and arrivals concentrate on the small island of Lampedusa and on Sicily. Rome has long argued that the burden is European, not Italian, and has pushed for deals with North African states and for EU burden-sharing. Brussels has offered money and operations, but never enough to satisfy Rome. Every surge in arrivals reopens the argument.
On foreign policy, Meloni’s Italy has been Atlanticist in a way that surprised some observers. Rome backed Ukraine, hosted international summits, and cultivated Washington across administrations. At the same time, Italy has kept its Mediterranean vocation, courting North Africa and the Gulf, and competing quietly with France for influence in the region. The old Franco-Italian rivalry never dies; it changes costumes.
The question for Europe is whether Italian stability lasts beyond Meloni. The debt, the demography, and the migration pressure are structural, and they will outlive any one government. Meloni has shown that Italy can be governed steadily. She has not yet shown that Italy’s problems can be solved. The difference between those two achievements is the story of the next decade.
The Western lens reads Meloni as a case of populism tamed by office. The markets wanted discipline, Brussels wanted a reliable partner, Washington wanted an ally on Ukraine, and Meloni delivered all three. In this telling, Italy is proof that institutions civilise outsiders, and the debt is a manageable constraint rather than a crisis.
From the East, Italy looks like Europe soft underbelly: a large economy with a fragile fiscal position, a shrinking population, and a coastline that cannot be sealed. Russian and Chinese influence operations have long treated Italy as the most permeable of the big European states. In this telling, Meloni Atlanticism is the surprise that matters, and the question is whether it survives her.
From the Global South, Italy is the gatekeeper. The deals Rome signs with North African states decide who crosses the Mediterranean and who drowns trying. In this telling, migration policy is not a European internal matter but a question of life and death for Africans, and Italy choices are judged by their human cost, not their fiscal arithmetic.
