ROME — One date has always loomed large in Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s political calendar: Friday, Sept. 4. As she gathers with her allies for a jamboree in the southern port city of Bari, Meloni will overtake Silvio Berlusconi’s record for the longest unbroken stretch running a government in the history of the Italian Republic: 1,412 days. The big question — with a general election due next year — is how far Meloni’s right-wing dominance of Italy’s politics will endure.
She still has a long way to go to rival Berlusconi’s total of 3,340 days in charge across all his mandates. Berlusconi’s extraordinary endurance rested on his ability to survive electoral defeats, collapsed governments, criminal trials and repeated predictions of his political death. His wealth, television empire and a party constructed around himself gave him resources independent of his popularity at any particular moment.
Meloni lacks those tycoon-style advantages, but she is still only 49 years old, tops the polls and is planning an electoral reform that could make it easier for her to keep her grip on power. Nearly four years after taking office, she towers over her coalition partners without an obvious challenger on the right. Italo Bocchino, a former conservative parliamentarian and prominent Meloni supporter, predicted her era “will last 30 years” — even if some of those years are in opposition.
Her appeal, he argued, lies in her unfiltered authenticity: She complains in dialect about high heels and needing the toilet at international summits and press conferences, embraces her “fishwife” nickname and is notorious for eye-rolls that betray what she is thinking. Her image as a petite blonde woman, Bocchino argued, also made a leader from Italy’s post-fascist right appear less threatening to wary voters. On the other side of the political spectrum, Laura Boldrini, a center-left Democratic Party MP and former speaker of the lower house, insisted Meloni had not yet earned the comparison with Berlusconi.
Critics say she focused her efforts on measures intended to cement her power, such as electoral reform and a failed shakeup of the judiciary, while failing to tackle a cost of living crisis. Boldrini argued that the rise of former General Roberto Vannacci as a force on the far right also showed that disillusioned right-wing voters were already looking elsewhere. They say they won’t run together but I think they will or they won’t win,” she said.
On the international stage, Meloni has established far more credibility than her predecessor Berlusconi. While Berlusconi cultivated allies across the political spectrum, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Britain’s Tony Blair, his gaffes, Bunga Bunga parties and sex scandals frequently made him an object of ridicule abroad. Meloni is regarded as a pragmatist at European summits and has built strong relationships with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
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