When Giorgia Meloni entered Palazzo Chigi in 2022, much of Europe looked at her with suspicion. She was presented as the latest sign of the continent’s rightward drift, an Italian anomaly with radical roots and uncertain intentions. Four years later, the anomaly looks rather more integrated into the system than many expected.
In its recent reporting, Le Monde revisits Meloni’s trajectory and frames it as a political repositioning of unusual significance. The argument is not simply that Meloni has survived. It is that she has moved from the fringes of Italian and European politics into a place of recognised influence. That, in itself, is already an important shift. Italy is not new to instability, rhetorical excess or governments treated abroad as provisional episodes. Meloni, by contrast, has forced European capitals to treat her as a durable interlocutor.
Part of this is the result of adaptation. Once in office, she behaved less like a disruptor than many feared. She maintained Italy’s Atlantic posture, supported Ukraine, stayed within the broad perimeter of European fiscal discipline and avoided spectacular institutional clashes with Brussels. For foreign observers, this looked like a familiar story: ideology in opposition, pragmatism in government.
But that is only part of the picture. The more interesting suggestion in the French reading is that the transformation did not happen only on the Italian side. Europe itself has changed. Positions on migration, sovereignty and borders that once marked the nationalist right have become more normal inside the European conversation. In that sense, Meloni did not simply enter the European mainstream; the mainstream moved in directions that made her easier to absorb.
This helps explain why her legitimacy abroad now appears stronger than many initially imagined. She is no longer interpreted merely as a domestic political curiosity. She has become, for some, a symptom of a broader European adjustment: a Union that still speaks the language of liberal norms but increasingly negotiates with a harder political grammar.
That does not mean the Italian prime minister has solved the deeper contradictions of the country she governs. Italy remains burdened by weak productivity, stagnant wages, demographic decline and structural fragilities that no diplomatic rehabilitation can erase. A government may become more acceptable internationally without fundamentally altering the national condition.
That is where the international fascination with Meloni sometimes becomes too flattering. It risks measuring success through external respectability rather than internal results. To move from the margins to the centre is politically meaningful. But it is not the same as transforming Italy. It may prove to be a historical passage, or simply a successful repositioning within a Europe that has itself become more tolerant of certain ideas than it once was.
THE ITALIC View
Europe did not exactly domesticate Meloni; it discovered that she was more usable than alarming. The real question is not whether she has become acceptable in Brussels, but whether that acceptance tells us more about her moderation or about Europe’s own shift. From an Italian perspective, international legitimacy is welcome, but it is also the easiest part of the job. The harder one is still domestic: productivity, wages, social mobility and a country that remains far more fragile than its new image of stability suggests.