Standing on a Slackline: Giorgia Meloni, Ursula von der Leyen, and the EU

By Mario Bragadin

A Note to the Reader:

The political matter I’m most interested in right now is the question of why nothing ever seems to happen. For decades, whether we elected leaders from the left or the right, nothing structural seemed ever to change, particularly on existential matters like mass immigration.

The people noticed, and they clearly no longer want the body politic to simply sway back and forth, gently shifting its weight from the left foot to the right and back. It’s time to walk away from our broken consensus, and everyone knows it.  Now, we are starting to see politicians like Georgia Meloni come to power, a woman who promised a new beginning for Italy.

And, well, so far, still nothing. The institutions are still addicted to debt. Nothing works. The administrative class still believes in nothing but sleepy, managed decline. And Italy, by the way, is taking in roughly as many “refugees” and migrants as it was before her tenure.

Is Meloni a charlatan? Is she a secret leftist? Is she incompetent? Or is something blocking her from making the changes she wants? I turned to an Italian friend for answers. Mario’s response is extremely long and detailed, and I encourage my fellow politics junkies to sit down with a hot coffee and enjoy his masterful tour of the art of Italian politics. It’s always a pleasure when a real maestro lets you look inside their head. But if you don’t have time, I think I speak fairly when I say that the key takeaway is that Meloni really is trying to clean up the mess left by the centrist consensus. Moreover, he argues she isn’t incompetent. This article explains the incredibly difficult balancing act she is attempting with the EU, one of the many gigantic, corrupt institutions dragging Italy below the water.

I’m not an expert on Italy, but if Mario is right, we owe Georgia Meloni our goodwill. She is doing the best she can with a very complicated situation.

Enjoy Mario’s article, and look out for a broader piece I’m writing on why nothing ever seems to change.

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On Wednesday, 10^th July, the Estonian athlete Jaan Roose tried to cross the Strait of Messina on a slackline. The three-hour, 15,000-step feat would have broken a world record, as we have no evidence of anybody ever attempting to walk the 2.4 miles between mainland Italy and Sicily before. Roose almost managed it, but fell off the rope a mere 262 feet from the far end of the slackline, placed in Torre Faro, Sicily.

Jaan Roose slackening in Rotterdam. Credit: ANP/Alamy

The incident’s interest doesn’t just lie in the drama a near-miss tends to involve, or in any Homeric reminiscence of Ulysses and his much more perilous passage between Scylla and Charybdis. Roose’s almost successful enterprise also offers us a timely and fitting metaphor for a major political turning point which the Italian Prime Minister has been facing. Giorgia Meloni is, in fact, treading on a metaphorical tightrope comparably thin and exhausting. Between today and tomorrow she will have to decide whether to endorse Ursula von der Leyen’s bid to be confirmed as the President of the European Commission (the EU’s executive body), thus giving full legitimacy to the EU’s top leader.

The European Parliament at a Crossroads

Let’s recap the surrounding circumstances of Meloni’s dilemma. The elections held across the European Union in early June returned a strange picture. While the European Parliament is just as hung as it had been in the previous five years, the ratio of forces within it shifted rather significantly. On the one hand, Ursula von der Leyen’s former majority was eroded. Von der Leyen’s own European Popular Party (EPP), a center-of-the-right force with a loosely moderate, Christian-democratic outlook, held its ground reasonably well, even increasing its seats from 182 (out of pre-Brexit 751) to 188 (out of a post-Brexit 720). The Italian movement Forza Italia, founded and led for twenty-eight years by the recently departed Silvio Berlusconi, elected 8 MEPs within the EPP group. Their traditional allies of EPP, however, didn’t fare as smoothly: the European coalition of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) lost 12 seats, going down to 136, whereas the centrist liberal democrats of Renew Europe (RE) lost 20, returning only 77 MEPs.

This change, while reflecting a general right-wing trend across Europe, shouldn’t pose a problem to von der Leyen’s chances of a second five-year term as President of the European Commission. While the parliamentary groups willing to support her in 2019 did decrease their overall number of seats from 444 to 401, in theory she still enjoys a rather comfortable 40-seat majority compared to the 361 votes needed to be confirmed in office during tomorrow’s plenary session.

This is only true in theory, though. These figures don’t convey the level of cross-party and cross-nation infighting characterizing the European Parliament. Suffice it to say that, back in 2019, Ursula von der Leyen won a confidence vote with a 9-seat majority of only 383 votes, rather than the 444 available to her in principle.  Even that narrow majority would have escaped her, hadn’t the Italian Five Star Movement and the Polish PiS come to her rescue from outside the perimeters of her supposed majority, supplying 40 crucial votes

A Visibly Relieved von der Leyen. Credit: Pietro Naj-Oleari via Filer

Von der Leyen faces the same dangers, bolstered by the confidence vote’s secrecy and by a web of reciprocal vetoes, later this week. This time, though, she does with a significantly reduced consensus basis. In other words, she can’t afford squandering about a hundred votes like she did last time; her margin of error to hold on to her top office is much more reduced than it was five years ago. That’s exactly where Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni becomes relevant.

Meloni’s Dilemma

A lot of ink has been spilled on the kind of political beast Meloni is, and I can’t do it justice here. For sure, her political journey has been like a slackline for several years. It has been marked by winds and challenges of no small magnitude as well as by her singular dexterity in surviving them. Threading her way carefully through danger, Meloni has turned her Fratelli d’Italia, originally just a marginal splinter from Berlusconi’s coalition, into the leading party in the Italian political landscape – all in the space of 12 years. She pulled this off despite a still problematic relationship with her party’s post-Fascist background and despite being constantly portrayed as a too radical, uncompromising, and even dangerous politician. The European election has given her a major chance to dispel even more doubts about herself and her leadership skills. Since June 9^th, in fact, Fratelli d’Italia has composed the largest delegation (24 MEPs) within the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, a coalition of nationalists and more thorough conservatives than the EPP. ECR elected a total of 78 MEPs at the last election. It has been led by Meloni since 2020. Fratelli d’Italia’s leading role within ECR was made possible by a clear success in the Italian leg of the European elections, where the party achieved 28.8%.

That was when Meloni’s slacklining enterprise became most stiff, as her party’s positive performance came with a momentous set of questions: will the Fratelli d’Italia delegation lend von der Leyen some “buffer votes” on Thursday, thus making her plight to remain the EU’s top officer easier? Will they, concurrently, embrace the prospect of joining the other mainstream forces within the European Parliament?

Will von der Leyen Take a Deal?

For a while, Ursula von der Leyen acted as though she might welcome such a scenario. Not only did she in 2019 accept the support of the Poles of PiS (Right and Justice) – a party that was then as influential as Fratelli d’Italia is today. Formal support to von der Leyen from MEPs faithful to Meloni would also complete a converging trajectory which the two female leaders seemed to have engaged in. Finding common ground in their joint support to Ukraine, commitment to the rule of law, and outright (if recent, in Meloni’s case) Atlanticism, in the last few months Meloni and von der Leyen appeared to be working on a reciprocally beneficial alliance. For von der Leyen, this would consist in a cautious, acceptable expansion of her majority’s perimeter to the right – after all, she is the highest-ranking member of a force, EPP, that portrays itself as center-of-the-right. Meloni, on the other hand, could accept an alliance with von der Leyen as a final, rewarding sanction to her reliable approach to international politics as well as to her stature as a global leader – the final step on the tightrope she’s been walking on for so long.

And yet, it looks less and less likely that this scenario will materialize; rather, it looks like Meloni might fall off the slackline only a handful feet away from her goal. At least two crucial factors suggest this; interestingly, both lie beyond Meloni’s reach.

One factor is the lethal combination of vetoes and political calculations within the European Parliament. The idea of receiving support from Fratelli d’Italia (the ECR as a whole has allowed its MEPs freedom of conscience) might not be a cheap bargain for von der Leyen. Despite her best attempts at “normalizing” Fratelli d’Italia and its conservative posture, Meloni is still portrayed and treated as the leader of a far right, cryptofascist force by some in the European institutions. A recent report by the Italian news site Fanpage.it cast some extra doubt on whether Meloni has done enough to address the presence of Fascist nostalgia and offensive attitudes within her ranks.

Crucially for von der Leyen, the scores of Meloni-sceptics are very vocal, and include the leadership of S&D and RE, her social-democratic and liberal allies, who have firmly and repeatedly ruled out any kind of cooperation with political groups sitting right of the EPP. Pressing to include Fratelli d’Italia into the parliamentary majority supporting the Commission might therefore alienate von der Leyen from the votes of many leftist MEPs, where her majority is already slim(mer). Meloni can only bring 24 votes to the table, and that isn’t enough to offset losses on von der Leyen’s left flank.

A Divided Right

The other core factor hindering Meloni’s entrance into Ursula von der Leyen’s majority is fierce political competition on the right. Having increased their overall parliamentary presence by about 190 seats, right-wing parties within and beyond ECR are still seeking a formula that might maximize their influence. Many feel Meloni’s ECR may no longer be up to the task. Among these is Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, who in the past two weeks spearheaded the formation of a new parliamentary group, named Patriots for Europe (PfE). The rationale behind this skillful operation was twofold: a)forming a parliamentary group that might adequately reflect the nationalist right’s electoral performance, and b) providing a visible, unified right-wing bloc that might tempt the EPP into abandoning its structural, decades-long alliance with socialists liberals. The first, more tactical objective was quickly achieved, as Orbán gathered 84 MEPs from twelve different countries, thus making PfE the third largest group within the European Parliament – even larger than Meloni’s ECR. The second, on the contrary, looks well beyond the realm of current possibilities and more like a long-term ambition. In fact, Ursula von der Leyen herself has ruled out any forms of cooperation with PfE and even refused holding talks with them before the confidence vote on Thursday – a move which the recent French election made even easier to justify.  

Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban Credit: Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Viktor_Orbán_%2813581867193%29.jpg

Both sides of the coin bring bad tidings for Meloni. On the one hand, the formation of PfE has eroded her own ECR ranks, and made her looked weaker. 6 MEPs from the Spanish movement Vox abandoned ECR to join Orbán, thus leaving Meloni’s group smaller in image and less relevant in influence. Furthermore, Meloni’s domestic ally Matteo Salvini was ready to seize another opportunity to portray himself as the authentic nationalist in Italian politics. The current Minister of State infrastructure and transport as well as leader of regionalist-turned-nationalist party Lega (the League, formerly known as Northern League) joined the ranks of PfE along with France’s Rassemblent National, Austrian Party of Freedom, Portuguese Chega, and a few others. On the other hand, the long-term strategy of attracting EPP (Orbán’s political family of old) away from an alliance with socialists and liberals makes Meloni look somewhat hypocritical: it does exactly what she said she wanted while campaigning, and the opposite of what she seems to be pursuing – i.e. a solution by means of compromise. This impression is fueled from within PfE, and not just by Salvini. If socialists, liberals, and Greens are eager to lump Meloni together with these supporters of immigration bans and national sovereignty, to make her look fully unacceptable, members of PfE argue, on the contrary, that Meloni’s way of doing “right-wing” politics is only nominal and radically different to theirs.

This kind of criticism, incidentally, hits Meloni where it hurts. She is aware that many, in and beyond Italy, are upset by her failure to deliver on some policy pledges, such as immigration. In this respect, she is paying the cost of having chosen a long-term approach. She has made vigorous and ostensible efforts to reach international agreements with Tunisia and Albania on jointly handling the movement and re-distribution of asylum-seekers. She has also set out an articulate plan (the so-called Piano Mattei) to develop partnerships and bring Italian investment and skills into Africa, in the hopes of improving the continent’s economic conditions and reducing the rush of people to Europe. Sadly, this hasn’t cut migration figures just yet. So Meloni may well have entered intense negotiations with von der Leyen with a tactical, highly pragmatic attitude. Knowing that Italy has relinquished much of its financial and geopolitical sovereignty to the European Union and isn’t getting it back anytime soon, she is after influence, support, and resources that may help her mitigate migration faster and more effectively - well before more structural change kicks in. So her response to her right-wing critics is an attempt at pragmatism – a new if not unfitting paradigm for her. Whether she follows through with this tactical move remains to be seen.

For sure, migration gives an example of the overall awkwardness Meloni must feel in the face of her current dilemma. Her uneasiness was reflected quite neatly during the last meeting of the European Council – a directorial body that is made by national leaders (PMs or Presidents), and contributes to the Union’s executive functions by setting out the EU’s political agenda. As leaders of all member States gathered on 27^th June to nominate the top EU officers, Meloni voted against nominating Portuguese PM Antonio Costa (a socialist) as Chairman of the European Council and Estonian liberal PM Kaja Kallas as the new High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs (the EU’s Foreign Secretary). At the same time, she abstained on the nomination of von der Leyen for a second term as Chief Commissioner – the nomination which the European Parliament is called to ratify tomorrow. That seemed to leave some (little) room for compromise further down that line, i.e. in the next couple days.

What Happens Tomorrow?

Observers in the press and even better-informed, strictly anonymous MEPs from within Fratelli d’Italia share my impression that Meloni won’t make it to the end of the tightrope – not alongside Ursula, at least. Don’t be mistaken, though: Meloni does not fear giving off an image of isolation or short-term failure. Back in early 2021, when the Italian Parliament had Mario Draghi appointed as Prime Minister, Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia were the only ones saying no to the umptieth technocratic experiment in Italian politics. That allowed Meloni and her party to carve themselves out a solo role as loyal opposition to a government all parties cheered – and then mercilessly destroyed seventeen months later. This choice, furthering the fame of reckless politician she’d earned when she abandoned Berlusconi in 2012, won Meloni both Draghi’s respect and the general election the following year. So Meloni definitely knows how to navigate strong turbulence while threading on dangerous ground, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she managed a brusque rupture of relationships better than Ursula von der Leyen.

This scenario, however unexpected, might in fact play to Meloni’s strengths. While she would definitely suffer some kind of blow to her status as the right-wing leader in Europe and she’d have to face Orbán’s organized competition, Meloni could soon start rebuilding an even wider right-wing platform with their allies of old, including Orbán and Salvini, after having given the prospect of a responsible alliance the best shot she could. After all, the memory span of politics is short. She could do so from a more moderate position, which is in short supply on the right these days; she would also avoid the cordon sanitaire strangling Patriots for Europe. Concurrently, Meloni could switch back to her “the Right or nothing” stance, and depict her lack of support to von der Leyen as replicating a strategy of loyal opposition and delayed political satisfaction. This choice would also give her the additional advantage of defying, both domestically and internationally, the tendency to compromise and concertation which has been the hallmark and malaise of Italian politics since after World War Two.

And yet, I don’t think this is the outcome she wants deep down. The pros of forming an alliance with Ursula von der Leyen, in fact, far exceed its cons for her. Not only would an agreement between the two leaders defy the narrative of all of Meloni’s adversaries, who picture her as either too moderate or too radical, and prevent a shift to the left in the European Parliament’s balance of forces. What’s more, supporting von der Leyen’s attempt at a second term as Chief Commissioner would provide Meloni with vast bargaining powers: through her, the Italian government could get a high-ranking commissioner, perhaps even a Vice-Presidency to the Commission, in the same way as it did in 2019, when PM Conte’s Five Stars Movement supported Ursula and got former PM Paolo Gentiloni appointed as European Commissioner for the Economy. That would likely be accompanied by more concrete institutional support on migration – an issue on which Meloni is desperate to deliver – as well as some leniency on the Italian financial deficit. The issues surrounding the Italian debt, especially after Giuseppe Conte’s catastrophic policies on public expenditure during 2019-2021, are still watched with some angst in German circles such as Handelsblatt (Policy Sonar has an insightful piece on this). Italy’s fiscal woes are also quite likely to have featured in the informal agenda of the Economic and Financial Affairs Council’s last meeting, held earlier this week.

Yes, in exchange for all that Meloni would have to vote with the socialists of S&D and the liberals of RE, which host Italian MEPs who vigorously oppose her domestically – but she’d have to do that once, and with potentially great reward.

Prime Minister Meloni. Credit: Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giorgia_Meloni_Official_2023.jpg

Meloni the Happy Warrior

Accusations of hypocrisy, from left and right, won’t bother her. Internationally, they are already happening and have paradoxically put her in a position of relative centrality between the moderate and the far right. Furthermore, Meloni might feel that her credentials as a conservative are still reasonably healthy, as she virtue-signaled voting against non-right-wing candidates within the Council of Europe. On the domestic front she might even gain popularity, as Italians are accustomed to loose political boundaries and sudden coups de theatre, and she wouldn’t struggle reframing her fresh compromise with an opponent as an instance of occasional pragmatism, stemming from sharp focus on the sizeable benefits Italy would get. Besides, Italians are much less concerned with international politics as they are with domestic issues, so they’ll be more willing to forgive their PM switching sides, if that implies no tightening of fiscal demands on them, or lighter migration-related burdens.

So I bet supporting Ursula von der Leyen for a second term is what Giorgia Meloni wants and will keep aiming for in the next two days, no matter the prospects of failure. If, after all, an easily understandable choice of compromise can be met by greater efficiency on the domestic political market, it’s hard to believe she’d renounce that, and choose another display of strength instead – which she may not even need, as she’s repeatedly proven herself on that front.

For sure, should things end poorly for Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday, Giorgia Meloni will back on her feet, heading straight towards the goal of success on the international scene. The drama of a near-miss could even turn things in her favor. We’ll know only on Thursday evening if she is more fortunate than Roose on the Strait of Messina. What we already know is that, just like his, her feat will have been extraordinary regardless of its outcome, as no conservative European leader had ever made it so far as a potential kingmaker. We can also expect that heavy winds from left and right will keep trying to have her sink into the waters of a political defeat. Ursula von der Leyen better blow hard – and blow right.