Power doesn’t always knock at the front door. Sometimes it slips in quietly, wearing a business suit, speaking of reform while rearranging the architecture of the state. Italy has seen this before. A century ago, Benito Mussolini didn’t seize power by force, he was appointed and welcomed by a political class seeking order.
Today, the stakes may be different, but the method feels eerily familiar: slow, legalistic, cloaked in responsibility. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has mastered this subtle choreography and, although her rise is often portrayed as a nationalist surge or a post-liberal tremor, beneath the speeches and slogans lies the quieter, slow, procedural transformation of the Italian state.
In office since 2022, the first Italian female prime minister presents two faces. To Brussels, she is a model of fiscal discipline. Her government meets European Union deficit targets, keeps the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio hovering near 137% and avoids the chaos that defined past populist regimes. European elites and markets see composure, responsibility and continuity.
At home, she is something else entirely.
Democracy is being hollowed out
On 27 May 2025, the government won a confidence vote in the Chamber of Deputies in the latest chapter in this quiet reengineering – the ‘decreto legge sicurezza’ – with the final vote expected by 29 May. Touted as a necessary tool against public disorder, it expands police powers, criminalises non-violent protest and limits demonstrations in public spaces. Climate activists, trade unions and student groups, previously protected by liberal norms, now face the threat of fines and prison under vague definitions of ‘disruption’.
And it follows a broader trend. The right-wing government has pushed through reforms that weaken judicial independence and stack state institutions with loyalists. Oversight agencies, public broadcasters and state-owned companies have seen a wave of appointments based on political proximity rather than competence, corroding a once-robust bureaucracy.
This institutional reshaping extends to the cultural and civic sphere. A further sign that Meloni is not breaking with liberal democracy but hollowing it out from within is that municipalities governed by her coalition have banned protests in central squares. Educational curricula are being revised to favour national identity over climate science and digital literacy.
Her most audacious effort to date is undoubtedly constitutional reform: the so-called ‘premierato’ proposes direct election of the prime minister and guarantees a five-year majority to the winning coalition. Framed as a remedy to Italy’s chronic political instability, it risks undermining a delicate post-war system designed to prevent the concentration of authority.
Holding up a mirror to Trump
This remaking of the republic is not confined to domestic soil. Meloni’s foreign policy serves as an extension of her ideological project at home, like a mirror reflecting, and reinforcing, the same post-liberal values.
Her proximity to Donald Trump is not mere symbolism. With the ‘Make America Great Again’ president back in the White House, the Meloni government has tightened ideological ties with the US Republican Right, not because of traditional Atlanticism rooted in multilateralism and diplomacy, but for culture war affinities: opposition to migration, hostility to international institutions, disdain for climate commitments and a suspicion of pluralism.
Italian foreign policy under Meloni has increasingly echoed Trump’s playbook: from blocking EU-wide migration quotas to promoting bilateral over supranational agreements, reorientating diplomatic language around sovereignty and civilisation rather than co-operation and law. This ideological synchrony gives her domestic agenda external cover. In treating the transatlantic relationship as a partnership of like-minded illiberal democracies, she reframes Italy not as Europe’s southern flank but as the western frontier of a new right-wing internationalism.
Rome is no longer just looking to Brussels, but to Mar-a-Lago. And in doing so, it draws legitimacy from a global narrative that pits ‘the real people’ against the ‘liberal elite’, abroad as at home.
Look beneath the surface on the economy
A more careful look at the numbers reveals how the macroeconomic story is only superficially sound. Youth unemployment in Italy increased to 19% in March 2025, up from 17.3% in February. Labour productivity has stagnated, with just 0.3% annual growth since 2010. At the beginning of 2024 real wages were still 6.9% below pre-pandemic levels. Over 1,000 workplace deaths were recorded in 2024, mostly in logistics and construction.
Two deeper fractures stand out. First, Italy’s female labour force participation remains among the lowest in the EU – just 41.3% of women aged 15-64 were employed in 2024. Second, only 45.8% of people in Italy have at least basic digital skills, with the south disproportionately affected. These aren’t peripheral statistics. They are structural handicaps to growth, inclusion and democratic resilience.
Italy’s post-war system was built to stop power concentrating behind a single figure, wrapped in the language of stability. The safeguards today are being weaponised, not broken: the premierato, the security decrees and the institutional reshuffling are legal, incremental and strategic steps. Democracy isn’t being overthrown, it’s being refitted.
Nadia Urbinati, a political theorist, warned that democracy dies not in a moment of rupture, but when people stop noticing its erosion. Her theory of the ‘permanent majority’ captures what’s happening now: electoral wins converted into structural dominance, dissent sidelined, pluralism recast as dysfunction.
Europe, meanwhile, mistakes discipline for health. It sees a leader who ticks the right boxes and avoids chaos. But what it’s endorsing is something far more corrosive: a regime that governs by subtraction with fewer checks, fewer rights, fewer spaces to push back. And that’s just one Italy, the other is sliding backwards, not in chaos, but in silence; not in anger, but in indifference. And as Meloni finds ideological kinship with Trump’s America, she also finds cover.
The performance is convincing, the choreography careful. Behind it, a different kind of politics is taking hold: illiberal, enduring and dangerously easy to miss.
Sofia Melis is Chief Revenue Officer at OMFIF.
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Image source: White House
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