Victorious Meloni Faces Early Test of Italy’s Resolve on Russia
The hard-right leader Giorgia Meloni has been a full-throated supporter of Ukraine, but her coalition partners have sounded like apologists for Vladimir V. Putin.
Giorgia Meloni on Monday after early projections had her coalition winning a majority in Italy’s Parliament. She has unambiguously criticized Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
Jason Horowitz
By Jason Horowitz
Sept. 26, 2022
ROME — Throughout her time in the opposition to Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s national unity government, Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who is poised to become the next Italian prime minister after a strong showing in Sunday’s elections, railed against everything from vaccine requirements to undemocratic power grabs.
But on the issue of Ukraine, perhaps the most consequential for the government, she unambiguously criticized Russia’s unwarranted aggression, gave full-throated support for Ukraine’s right to defend itself and, in a recent interview, said she would “totally” continue to provide Italian arms to Kyiv.
The same cannot be said for Ms. Meloni’s coalition partners, who have deeply admired Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and have often sounded like his apologists. Just days before the vote, the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, once Mr. Putin’s best friend among leaders in Western Europe, claimed “Putin was pushed by the Russian population, by his party and by his ministers to invent this special operation,” and that a flood of arms from the West had thwarted Russian soldiers in their mission to reach “Kyiv within a week, replace Zelensky’s government with decent people and then leave.”
The other coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League party, used to wear T-shirts with Mr. Putin’s face on them and has for years been so fawning toward Russia that he has frequently had to reject accusations that he has taken money from Moscow.
Recently, with Ms. Meloni apparently uncomfortable as she sat beside him, Mr. Salvini doubted the wisdom of sanctions on Russia, which he said hurt Italy more than Mr. Putin’s government.
How Ms. Meloni navigates those tensions in her coalition will now be a key factor in the European Union’s struggle to keep an unbroken front against Russia as the cost of sanctions begins to bite in winter.
Image
Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy, second from right, visited Ukraine in June with leaders from France, Germany and Romania. Under Mr. Draghi, Italy became a key player in Europe’s hard line against Russia.Credit...Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Reuters
If she wavers, especially on sanctions, European leaders who have stood up to Mr. Putin all these months fear it could begin a major unraveling of resolve, widening divisions in the European Union and between the United States and Europe.
“We are ready to welcome any political force that can show itself to be more constructive in its relations with Russia,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said after the Italian election results, according to the Russian news service Tass.
But analysts said Russia should not expect a change from Ms. Meloni anytime soon, believing that her position on Ukraine is credible and that the weak showing of her partners in the election will allow her to keep them in their place without blowing up their alliance.
“I put my hand today on fire that she is not going to bend,” said Nathalie Tocci, the director of the Institute for International Affairs in Rome. “She’s very gung-ho about Russia.”
Despite a widespread suspicion that political calculation lay behind Ms. Meloni’s pivot during the campaign to less hostile positions on the European Union and away from leaders such as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, analysts judged that on the issue of Ukraine, Ms. Meloni was not likely to budge.
In the past, Ms. Meloni has admired Mr. Putin’s defense of Christian values, which is consistent with her own traditionalist rhetoric. But unlike other hard-right politicians and newbie nationalists, like Mr. Salvini, Ms. Meloni was raised in a post-Fascist universe in Italy where Russia — and especially Communist internationalists — represented an Eastern force that threatened the sanctity and peculiarities of Western European identities.
For Ms. Meloni it was less difficult to step away from the Putin adoration that swept the populist-nationalist right over the last decade. During the campaign, she was happy to point out this difference with her coalition partners, as she was competing with them and it helped differentiate her and reassure the West of her credibility.
Pummeling the competition in Sunday’s election will have made it easier to withstand any attempted pressure from Mr. Salvini or Mr. Berlusconi, who both failed to break into double digits in the polls and were thus left with little leverage.
In any case, Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Salvini had already supported the sanctions as part of Mr. Draghi’s national unity government and didn’t bolt over the issue then. Mr. Salvini, who has sought to distance himself from Mr. Putin, was so hobbled by his disastrous performance in the elections that Rome was rife with speculation that he could be replaced as his party’s leader by a more moderate and less ideological governor from the country’s north, where the League has its electoral base.
Image
Ms. Meloni meeting with her coalition partners, Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi, in October 2021. The two men admire Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and have often sounded like his apologists.Credit...Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
That is not to say Ms. Meloni faces no pressure at home for a more forgiving stance. Italy, a country with deep and long ties to Russia, has long had reservations about sanctions against Moscow and getting involved in foreign wars.
“I think we should put the question up to the Italians in a referendum,” Stefano Ferretti, 48, a supporter of Ms. Meloni, said on Election Day. “Let’s see if they really want it.”
And Italy is not alone in Europe when it comes to doubts about a continued hard line against Russia, and turning away from its cheap energy, ahead of a cold and economically painful winter.
In Prague this month, a day after the Czech government survived a no-confidence vote over accusations that it had failed to act on soaring energy prices, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to voice outrage on the issue while far-right and fringe groups led many demonstrators in calling for withdrawal from NATO and the European Union. In Sweden, a hard-right party more sympathetic to Mr. Putin was on the winning side in elections this month.
Mr. Orban has created complications for the European Union in its efforts to present a united force against Mr. Putin by demanding, and receiving, carve-outs for oil imports in exchange for agreeing to an embargo on Russian crude oil imports, a sanctions measure that required unanimity among member countries.
On Monday, Mr. Orban applauded Ms. Meloni’s victory, writing on Facebook: “Bravo Giorgia, A more than deserved victory. Congratulations!”
But analysts did not foresee Italy, under Ms. Meloni, playing the same games Hungary has done with sanctions. In her acceptance speech, she emphasized “responsibility” and experts said she was a savvy politician who clearly understood that Italy’s leaving the fold would break the bloc’s Russia strategy.
As a reminder, though, only days before the vote, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, responded to a question about “figures close to Putin” poised to win elections in Italy by saying, “We’ll see.”
“If things go in a difficult direction — and I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland — we have the tools,” she said.
Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League party, used to wear T-shirts with Mr. Putin’s face on them.
Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League party, used to wear T-shirts with Mr. Putin’s face on them.Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
The tools included the cutting of funds for member states that Brussels considers in violation of the rule of law. Last week, the commission — which is the European Union’s executive arm — proposed to cut €7.5 billion of funds allocated to Hungary.
But Italy is a central pillar not only of the European Union, but of its united front against Russia. Aldo Ferrari, head of the Russia, Caucasus and Central Asia Program at the Institute for International Political Studies in Milan, said Ms. Meloni had made her position “amply clear” throughout the election campaign, and that it was through Ukraine that she “sought legitimacy” among international leaders, especially members of the European Union and NATO.
And as Russia is an ever less attractive ally, its pull on the West diminishes. The decision by countries of the European Union to endure economic pain together made it less likely that Italy, which is so woven into the fabric of the union, would break.
“Our inclusion in the European Union and NATO,” Mr. Ferrari said, overcame the will “of individual politicians and individual countries.”
Under Mr. Draghi, Italy became a key player in Europe’s hard line against Russia, which he has framed as an existential issue that will define the contours and values of the continent for decades to come.
While some liberals had hoped he would rally to their side during the election campaign, or at least nod that he preferred them, Mr. Draghi stayed out of it completely. Analysts say he saw the polls, and the writing on the wall, and decided the most prudent course of action for his platform, legacy and, some critics say, future ambitions, was a smooth transition of power to Ms. Meloni.
“I have a good relationship with Draghi,” Ms. Meloni said in an interview earlier this month. She said that more than once, “He could trust in us much more than the parties he had in his majority.”
“Look on Ukraine,” she said. “On Ukraine, we made the foreign policy.”
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.
Italy’s Hard Right
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Giorgia Meloni May Lead Italy, and Europe Is Worried
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Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader
Sept. 21, 2022
Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief, covering Italy, the Vatican, Greece and other parts of Southern Europe. He previously covered the 2016 presidential campaign, the Obama administration and Congress, with an emphasis on political profiles and features. @jasondhorowitz
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Ukraine and the Shifting Geopolitics of the Heartland
BACKGROUNDERS - September 21, 2022
By Alexander Brotman
Simbirsk zasechnaya cherta (Simbirskaya, Saranskaya, Karsunskaya, Penzenskaya defense lines). Fragment from: First official geographic atlas of the Russian Empire (1745). Map of Kazan governorate, nearest provinces and part of Volga river. Hand-coloured copper engraving. / https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&ns0=1&ns6=1&ns14=1&search=old+map+russia#/media/File:Russian_Empire_1745_(Map_IX_HQ).Simbirskaja_cherta.jpg
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As the Ukraine conflict has now passed the six-month mark, fears of a brutal war of attrition along an immovable front have now evolved into a series of successful counteroffensives by Ukrainian forces of towns held by Russia since the beginning of the war. It is now possible to imagine a Ukrainian victory sooner than many in the West had expected, and with immense geopolitical consequences for Europe and the wider world. As a frontier state, Ukraine may be guided by the hands of neighbouring powers, but its destiny is increasingly being shaped by those within its own borders. The possibility of a fully liberated Ukraine in charge of its strategic destiny calls for an assessment of Ukraine’s place in the history of geopolitical theory. Russia’s ability to manage relationships and project power across its sphere of influence in the heartland of Eurasia is waning. As such, over thirty years since its independence from the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s fight marks a dividing line of the post-Soviet era in one of the most geopolitically significant regions of the globe.
Ukraine’s History in Geopolitical Perspective
The geographer and founder of modern geopolitics Halford Mackinder famously posited in his Heartland Theory that whoever ‘rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.’ Since Mackinder’s article was published in 1904, Eastern Europe has largely fallen under a Western orientation, with the notable exception of Belarus as a Eurasian-leaning Russian appendage, and Ukraine and Moldova progressing towards the West but still existing in a state of geopolitical limbo. Ukraine’s security guarantees are more iron-clad than Moldova’s, which remains at risk of Russian provocations in Transnistria, combined with steady support for the pro-Kremlin aligned Socialist Party of former President Igor Dodon.
In addition, over a hundred years after the publication of Mackinder’s book Democratic Ideals and Reality, the conflict between Germany and Russia, and thus Central Europe and Russia, has become more managed to the benefit of both nations, but arguably to the hindrance of heartland nations like Ukraine. Germany still faces a ‘Russia problem’ in the words of John Lough, which favours continental security over antagonism with Moscow, and places significant emphasis on the role Russia has played in defining Germany’s role within Europe. Six months on, the real ‘Zeitenwende’, or turning point as announced by Chancellor Scholz, is occurring in the heartland much closer to the recently recaptured city of Izium than it is in the corridors of power in Berlin. Germany still has major targets to meet as it engages in a dramatic overhaul of its security and defence policy, and successes by Ukraine in its counteroffensive may finally force Berlin to act.
The conflict in Ukraine has also revealed the perennial significance of Eurasia to the ambitions of rival powers. Jeffrey Mankoff in his book Empires of Eurasia argues that Post-Cold War Eurasia is a continent ‘less of states than of regions,’ where ‘large, powerful polities’ and outside powers like the EU and US battle for influence over the smaller states that rest between them. This heartland is a renewed great game of conquest, with the sovereignty of states existing on a ‘limited and conditional’ level according to Mankoff, as witnessed in Putin’s conception of Ukraine. Well over a century ago, the historian Henry Adams’ assessment that the core problem of Europe was Russia still rings true, and efforts to firmly shape Russia’s strategic destiny as either Euro-Atlantic or Eurasian have failed to materialise. Putin has shown a much greater interest in reintegrating the imperial borderlands of Europe from the old Kyivan Rus that have long formed the heart of Russian culture and identity rather than merging the Central Asian states to counterbalance the EU.
The Eurasian Economic Union, often seen as Putin’s response to the EU, is more of a practical economic arrangement amongst long-allied states rather than an ideological mainstay or legacy-shaping project for the Kremlin. The most critical change from Mackinder’s day is the role of China in Eurasia, with Russia playing the role of junior partner on almost all matters of importance, led from Beijing despite being engaged in a relationship with ‘no limits.’ Similarly, Russia’s role as a security guarantor in the Caucasus, a pivotal region at the crossroads of many former empires, is also being tested because of its actions in Ukraine. The ability of Russia to use its leading role in collective security organisations across its sphere of influence like the CSTO is waning, causing other powers from China to Turkey and the US to make inroads.
In Eastern Europe, Russia’s influence remains strong from a cultural and identity-driven perspective, but weak in terms of prospects for alliance building and economic development when compared with the EU. This is the case in Serbia, a longstanding ally of Russia with Slavic roots that is pursuing a multi-vector foreign policy as it seeks investment from China and also membership in the EU. In Ukraine, despite having many ethnic Russians with longstanding connections to Moscow, broad popular support exists across regions from the Polish border to the Donbas for a European integration and strategic outlook. As such, Ukraine may exist physically in the contested space of the heartland, but it is now ever-closer ideologically, militarily, and strategically with its neighbours in the West. Putin’s war in Ukraine has only accelerated this trend, causing the very threats he imagined over NATO expansion to come to fruition as Sweden and Finland are now set to join the alliance. Thus, the heartland is likely to become not just uncontested but treaty-bound to Western-led institutions that are perceived by Putin to be existential threats to the survival of Russia.
For Poland and the Baltic states, Ukraine remains the heartland of Europe as a contested space between two competing blocs, the EU and Russia, that is crucial to each opposing sides’ strength and to the expression of its values. In contrast, France, Germany, and other Western European states still regard Ukraine as a peripheral state existing in the next wave of enlargement to Europe, one whose integration is not critical to their own success and prosperity, but rather solely to Ukraine as the state seeking membership. Ukraine remains an expendable security issue for states like France which possess ambitions to redefine the European core and engage in power projection in other areas like Africa and the Indo-Pacific. For France and Germany, Ukraine is not yet a ‘new Berlin’ standing on the frontlines of freedom, but a prospective member of an integrated European core that still is open to including Russia as a major economic partner. The Baltic states and Poland view Ukraine differently as the last bastion of liberty by nature of its geography and heartland position, something also echoed by Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin in a recent address to the European Parliament. Ukraine’s Western-allied neighbours in the heartland rightly see Kyiv not as a pawn on the geopolitical chessboard devoid of agency but rather as a principal player, deserving of its leading role.
Ukraine’s Future Orientation
In the over 100 years since Mackinder first posited his theory, Ukraine has gone from heartland to imperial periphery and borderland to frontline state. Unlike prior wars, the conquest of Ukrainian territory for material political gain is less important than the defence of that territory and the stakes involved for the projection of power and values in the 21st century. Ukraine is a gatekeeper to Europe, a key indicator of where the continent is going and how the established powers in Europe, as well as those with imperial legacies, will respond. Since Russia’s invasion on 24 February, Ukraine has proved itself to be a decisively European state fighting for European values and an orientation that is markedly different from that of Moscow. However, by nature of its geography, it will take time for Ukraine to be fully accepted as a modern European state that belongs firmly in the European family of nations.
Ukraine is not a scapegoat for the EU’s ills but a provider of moral clarity for the bloc, and a reminder of the importance of enlargement for revitalising its core mission. Few nations have been as pivotal as Ukraine to the strength of competing, neighbouring powers in both the 20th and 21st centuries. As the conflict continues, it is also imperative for Ukraine’s development and future orientation that its territory no longer be framed as a borderland existing in the post-Soviet space. While that framework can be important in placing historical context for the present conflict, it continues to subject Ukraine to the post-imperial periphery that according to Putin is not fully sovereign but conditionally so as a member of a nebulous near abroad. Furthermore, the notion of being post-Soviet has many different interpretations and outlooks and is often defined by those in Moscow or the West to serve their own strategic calculations and national interests in a contested space. Ukraine is now able to reclaim and redefine what it means to be post-Soviet, and to export its modernised conception of its heartland region to the other side of Europe as it engages with Brussels over EU membership.
As leading geopolitical thinkers have long recognised, Ukraine is too important and too great a member of the heartland to fail politically or strategically. As the past months have revealed, Ukraine shows no signs of failing, and it is time for the West to consider the ramifications of a Ukrainian victory for the existing security order in Europe. Given the intractable strength of the Ukrainian project and its people, it is not unprecedented to think that Ukraine will at some point be driving debates over the future of Europe. Over a hundred years ago, what Mackinder did not factor in his original analysis was a Ukraine existing as a heartland state to a weakened and isolated Russia, with Ukrainian identity and will to fight being much stronger than that of its larger neighbour. This is the greatest geopolitical development in Ukraine’s favour, making Ukraine the heartland not just geographically but spiritually as the leader of a moral cause capable of redefining the core of Europe and reimagining relations in Eurasia.
The views expressed in this article belong to the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com
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Victorious Meloni Faces Early Test of Italy’s Resolve on Russia
The hard-right leader Giorgia Meloni has been a full-throated supporter of Ukraine, but her coalition partners have sounded like apologists for Vladimir V. Putin.
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Giorgia Meloni on Monday after early projections had her coalition winning a majority in Italy’s Parliament. She has unambiguously criticized Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.
Giorgia Meloni on Monday after early projections had her coalition winning a majority in Italy’s Parliament. She has unambiguously criticized Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
Jason Horowitz
By Jason Horowitz
Sept. 26, 2022
ROME — Throughout her time in the opposition to Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s national unity government, Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who is poised to become the next Italian prime minister after a strong showing in Sunday’s elections, railed against everything from vaccine requirements to undemocratic power grabs.
But on the issue of Ukraine, perhaps the most consequential for the government, she unambiguously criticized Russia’s unwarranted aggression, gave full-throated support for Ukraine’s right to defend itself and, in a recent interview, said she would “totally” continue to provide Italian arms to Kyiv.
The same cannot be said for Ms. Meloni’s coalition partners, who have deeply admired Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and have often sounded like his apologists. Just days before the vote, the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, once Mr. Putin’s best friend among leaders in Western Europe, claimed “Putin was pushed by the Russian population, by his party and by his ministers to invent this special operation,” and that a flood of arms from the West had thwarted Russian soldiers in their mission to reach “Kyiv within a week, replace Zelensky’s government with decent people and then leave.”
The other coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League party, used to wear T-shirts with Mr. Putin’s face on them and has for years been so fawning toward Russia that he has frequently had to reject accusations that he has taken money from Moscow.
Recently, with Ms. Meloni apparently uncomfortable as she sat beside him, Mr. Salvini doubted the wisdom of sanctions on Russia, which he said hurt Italy more than Mr. Putin’s government.
How Ms. Meloni navigates those tensions in her coalition will now be a key factor in the European Union’s struggle to keep an unbroken front against Russia as the cost of sanctions begins to bite in winter.
Image
Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy, second from right, visited Ukraine in June with leaders from France, Germany and Romania. Under Mr. Draghi, Italy became a key player in Europe’s hard line against Russia.Credit...Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Reuters
If she wavers, especially on sanctions, European leaders who have stood up to Mr. Putin all these months fear it could begin a major unraveling of resolve, widening divisions in the European Union and between the United States and Europe.
“We are ready to welcome any political force that can show itself to be more constructive in its relations with Russia,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said after the Italian election results, according to the Russian news service Tass.
But analysts said Russia should not expect a change from Ms. Meloni anytime soon, believing that her position on Ukraine is credible and that the weak showing of her partners in the election will allow her to keep them in their place without blowing up their alliance.
“I put my hand today on fire that she is not going to bend,” said Nathalie Tocci, the director of the Institute for International Affairs in Rome. “She’s very gung-ho about Russia.”
Despite a widespread suspicion that political calculation lay behind Ms. Meloni’s pivot during the campaign to less hostile positions on the European Union and away from leaders such as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, analysts judged that on the issue of Ukraine, Ms. Meloni was not likely to budge.
In the past, Ms. Meloni has admired Mr. Putin’s defense of Christian values, which is consistent with her own traditionalist rhetoric. But unlike other hard-right politicians and newbie nationalists, like Mr. Salvini, Ms. Meloni was raised in a post-Fascist universe in Italy where Russia — and especially Communist internationalists — represented an Eastern force that threatened the sanctity and peculiarities of Western European identities.
For Ms. Meloni it was less difficult to step away from the Putin adoration that swept the populist-nationalist right over the last decade. During the campaign, she was happy to point out this difference with her coalition partners, as she was competing with them and it helped differentiate her and reassure the West of her credibility.
Pummeling the competition in Sunday’s election will have made it easier to withstand any attempted pressure from Mr. Salvini or Mr. Berlusconi, who both failed to break into double digits in the polls and were thus left with little leverage.
In any case, Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Salvini had already supported the sanctions as part of Mr. Draghi’s national unity government and didn’t bolt over the issue then. Mr. Salvini, who has sought to distance himself from Mr. Putin, was so hobbled by his disastrous performance in the elections that Rome was rife with speculation that he could be replaced as his party’s leader by a more moderate and less ideological governor from the country’s north, where the League has its electoral base.
Image
Ms. Meloni meeting with her coalition partners, Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi, in October 2021. The two men admire Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and have often sounded like his apologists.Credit...Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
That is not to say Ms. Meloni faces no pressure at home for a more forgiving stance. Italy, a country with deep and long ties to Russia, has long had reservations about sanctions against Moscow and getting involved in foreign wars.
“I think we should put the question up to the Italians in a referendum,” Stefano Ferretti, 48, a supporter of Ms. Meloni, said on Election Day. “Let’s see if they really want it.”
And Italy is not alone in Europe when it comes to doubts about a continued hard line against Russia, and turning away from its cheap energy, ahead of a cold and economically painful winter.
In Prague this month, a day after the Czech government survived a no-confidence vote over accusations that it had failed to act on soaring energy prices, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to voice outrage on the issue while far-right and fringe groups led many demonstrators in calling for withdrawal from NATO and the European Union. In Sweden, a hard-right party more sympathetic to Mr. Putin was on the winning side in elections this month.
Mr. Orban has created complications for the European Union in its efforts to present a united force against Mr. Putin by demanding, and receiving, carve-outs for oil imports in exchange for agreeing to an embargo on Russian crude oil imports, a sanctions measure that required unanimity among member countries.
On Monday, Mr. Orban applauded Ms. Meloni’s victory, writing on Facebook: “Bravo Giorgia, A more than deserved victory. Congratulations!”
But analysts did not foresee Italy, under Ms. Meloni, playing the same games Hungary has done with sanctions. In her acceptance speech, she emphasized “responsibility” and experts said she was a savvy politician who clearly understood that Italy’s leaving the fold would break the bloc’s Russia strategy.
As a reminder, though, only days before the vote, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, responded to a question about “figures close to Putin” poised to win elections in Italy by saying, “We’ll see.”
“If things go in a difficult direction — and I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland — we have the tools,” she said.
Image
Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League party, used to wear T-shirts with Mr. Putin’s face on them.Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
The tools included the cutting of funds for member states that Brussels considers in violation of the rule of law. Last week, the commission — which is the European Union’s executive arm — proposed to cut €7.5 billion of funds allocated to Hungary.
But Italy is a central pillar not only of the European Union, but of its united front against Russia. Aldo Ferrari, head of the Russia, Caucasus and Central Asia Program at the Institute for International Political Studies in Milan, said Ms. Meloni had made her position “amply clear” throughout the election campaign, and that it was through Ukraine that she “sought legitimacy” among international leaders, especially members of the European Union and NATO.
And as Russia is an ever less attractive ally, its pull on the West diminishes. The decision by countries of the European Union to endure economic pain together made it less likely that Italy, which is so woven into the fabric of the union, would break.
“Our inclusion in the European Union and NATO,” Mr. Ferrari said, overcame the will “of individual politicians and individual countries.”
Under Mr. Draghi, Italy became a key player in Europe’s hard line against Russia, which he has framed as an existential issue that will define the contours and values of the continent for decades to come.
While some liberals had hoped he would rally to their side during the election campaign, or at least nod that he preferred them, Mr. Draghi stayed out of it completely. Analysts say he saw the polls, and the writing on the wall, and decided the most prudent course of action for his platform, legacy and, some critics say, future ambitions, was a smooth transition of power to Ms. Meloni.
“I have a good relationship with Draghi,” Ms. Meloni said in an interview earlier this month. She said that more than once, “He could trust in us much more than the parties he had in his majority.”
“Look on Ukraine,” she said. “On Ukraine, we made the foreign policy.”
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.
Italy’s Hard Right
Giorgia Meloni Wins Voting in Italy, in Breakthrough for Europe’s Hard Right
Sept. 25, 2022
Giorgia Meloni May Lead Italy, and Europe Is Worried
Sept. 15, 2022
Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader
Sept. 21, 2022
Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief, covering Italy, the Vatican, Greece and other parts of Southern Europe. He previously covered the 2016 presidential campaign, the Obama administration and Congress, with an emphasis on political profiles and features. @jasondhorowitz
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