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Who do you call if you want to speak to Europe?
If you’re Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and a key adviser to United States President-elect Donald Trump — the number you dial belongs to Giorgia Meloni.
In less than a decade, the leader of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party has gone from being dismissed as an ultranationalist kook to being elected prime minister of Italy and establishing herself as a figure with whom Brussels, and now Washington, can do business.
Even as she has tacked to the center, Meloni — who began her political career as an activist in the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement and praised dictator Benito Mussolini as “a good politician who did everything he did for the good of Italy” — has been on the forefront of a wave that is dragging European politics toward the far right.
Indeed, since her election in 2022, the Italian prime minister has introduced policies on issues like migration and LGBTQ+ rights that would once have drawn condemnation from Brussels. Instead, the reaction from European Union leaders has ranged from indifference to approval, with many accepting Meloni as the palatable representative of the ever-more-radical zeitgeist blossoming on both sides of the Atlantic.
Conventional politicians’ inability to counter an increasingly popular ultranationalist narrative, and their willingness to collaborate with Meloni on the European stage, enable Italy’s 47-year-old prime minister — who insists on using the masculine form of her formal title, Il Presidente del Consiglio — to be a strongman capable of exerting tremendous power at a moment when the continent lacks powerful centrists capable of taking her on.
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