Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni meets US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House last April. Photo / Demetrius Freeman, The Washington Post
It was a spotlight moment for Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to defend her warm ties to United States President Donald Trump.
On the floor of the Italian Senate, she listened to an opposition lawmaker challenge her links to an American leader who, in his words, had brought “destruction” to the Middle East, aligned with the Russians, and sought the unravelling of Europe and Nato.
Meloni’s answer surprised even the questioner, Senator Carlo Calenda.
“Senator Calenda, frankly, I don’t consider your assessments of President Trump far-fetched,” she said.
Following Trump’s initiation of an unpopular war in the Middle East, leaders in Europe who had staked out closer ties to the US President are watching those links transform from asset to liability.
Perhaps nowhere is that truer than in Italy, where Meloni - known as Europe’s Trump whisperer - is doing political contortions, condemning what she describes as a dangerous Iranian regime while raising questions about the legality of the war.
Meloni last Thursday condemned the strike on an Iranian school that killed at least 175 people, mostly children, demanding swift “responsibility” for what she called a “massacre” at a time when Italian outlets have widely reported suspicion of US culpability.
In the same appearance, Meloni, who belongs to the populist, right-wing Brothers of Italy party, warned of “unilateral interventions carried out outside the perimeter of international law”.
In echoes of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a target of Trump who has spoken about a “rupture” in the world order under the current US Administration, she declared “the collapse of a shared world order”.
“This is a process that has been underway for some time but which has, in my opinion, reached a very specific turning point,” Meloni said.
Her framing, unlike Carney’s, did not pass judgment and was presented instead as an objective assessment of modern times.
She pinned the erosion of international law to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. She also seemed to back American goals, saying “we cannot afford an Ayatollah regime in possession of nuclear weapons”.
But the senator who challenged her - a former government minister with whom Meloni maintains a working relationship - saw her comments on the war against Iran as the Prime Minister’s own turning point on Trump.
“She was really defending not just Trump, but the MAGA movement values,” Calenda said in an interview with the Washington Post.
“And then I think what changed everything was this war. Because also in her own electoral base, they are very upset about what is happening.
“The fact is, Trump is becoming very, very unpopular in Italy,” the senator added. “This war is very unpopular.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, a centre-left socialist, has made headlines by standing up to the Trump Administration on the war in Iran.
Yet a more worrying sign for the White House might be the reaction of its closest European allies, a constellation of right-wing and populist leaders for whom the Administration has voiced support but who are now on the defensive.
Inside Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which the Trump Administration has defended and allied with in the past, the US attack on Iran has triggered a war of words.
Tino Chrupalla, an AfD co-leader, criticised Trump in a radio interview, saying he would go from being remembered as a president of peace to one of “war”.
That sparked pushback from Trump supporters within AfD ranks, particularly as Chrupalla sounded more critical of Trump than Germany’s centre-right Chancellor, Friedrich Merz.
Last month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio went out of his way to pay respects to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who has called Trump a “very pragmatic and rational leader”.
Yet Fico blasted the assault on Iran in harsher terms than Sanchez did, saying in a video address to his nation that “we are witnessing further proof of the total collapse of the international order and the complete disregard for international law. The big and powerful do as they please.
“We can condemn these actions, but it will change absolutely nothing against a military attack in Iran.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who maintains close ties to the White House and Trump’s MAGA movement, has been banking on the US leader’s support to aid him in what is shaping up to be the toughest election of his tenure this April.
He has sought nuance in his response to the outbreak of war, backing Trump while also suggesting in a TV interview that he had “advised” the US leader against it. Orban has also starkly outlined the downsides.
“War in the Middle East brings rising risks,” he said in a social media post. “A prolonged conflict may trigger new waves of mass migration, flowing from Iran to Turkey, through the Balkans, to our border. At the same time, LNG deliveries from Qatar are halted and energy prices are rising. These are testing times. Hungary must prepare and make sure the dam holds.”
Orban has tried to distance himself from the war “without alienating Trump”, said Zsuzsanna Vegh, a political analyst at the German Marshall Fund, even as he tries to leverage the rise in oil prices for an election campaign focused on criticising Ukraine and clashing with the European Union.
“Orban cannot say much else because he has been positioning himself as a force for peace. But from the Hungarian Government perspective, this war is bad, it can increase energy prices, it can restart migration flows,” Vegh said.
Meloni’s alliance with Trump is weighing on her at precisely the wrong time - as she is expending enormous political capital on a high-stakes referendum for judicial reform this month that some also see as a test of confidence in her government.
Pressed on her ties to Trump after the intervention in Venezuela in January, Meloni said: “I agreed with Trump on Venezuela, and I didn’t agree on Greenland … It’s called defending one’s national interest, because the interests of nations don’t always perfectly overlap.”
Meloni’s “balancing act” with Trump “finally broke down with the war in Iran”, said Ferruccio De Bortoli, a former editor in chief of Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper.
“Her great concern today is of course losing support because of a war that isn’t her own.”
Nicola Procaccini, a close Meloni ally who is a member of the European Parliament, pushed back at any suggestion that the Prime Minister is distancing herself from Trump.
“Nothing has changed in the relationship between Italy and the US, Meloni and Trump,” Procaccini said. “We hope that the Iranian threat is cancelled.”
He warned against a rush to judgment on US intervention, saying, “we should wait for the end” of the war in Iran. “Look at Venezuela,the operation was perfect.”
The American leader was never truly popular in Italy. But polls routinely showed Italians somewhat less sour on Trump than the British, Germans or Spanish.
He felt less alien to a country familiar with Silvio Berlusconi, the late playboy billionaire who became the most influential modern Italian statesman.
The optics of a Meloni-Trump friendship played mostly well here - an example of how Italy’s first female prime minister, and its most stable since Berlusconi, was elevating Italy’s stature and importance.
The two saw eye to eye on migrant crackdowns and the “anti-woke” agenda. They both took aim at judges who didn’t rule in their favour. Meloni was one of the few European leaders to defend US Vice-President JD Vance after his controversial speech in Munich in which he chided Europe for isolating far-right parties.
Their friendship became a running story. During an encounter in October in Egypt, Trump called her a “beautiful young woman”. As recently as this week, he made a point of telling Corriere della Sera that Meloni “always tries to help, she’s an excellent leader, and she’s a friend of mine … I love Italy, I think she’s a great leader.”
But amid his threats of seizing Greenland, his foreign interventions and his Administration’s verbal attacks on the EU, Trump’s popularity in Italy has fallen in recent months, with a YouGov poll in January showing that 77% of Italians held an unfavourable view of him.
Now fuel prices at Italian pumps are jumping during a war that many here see as having no clear objective or cause, putting Meloni’s friendship with Trump on trial.
The Italian press is drawing attention to the religious overtones and war-bro style of US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, dubbing him “the ex-soldier who wants to kill everyone” and “Ayatollah Hegseth”.
Meloni’s hobnobbing at Mar-a-Lago and the White House, her opponents pointed out, also didn’t help when American bombs fell and triggered a regional war.
The Italians received no advance notice from the Americans - leaving Meloni’s own defence minister caught off-guard, stranded with his family in Dubai as airspace closed.
Verbal blows to Meloni by Elly Schlein, the head of the opposition Democratic Party, have tended not to land very hard in the past. Suddenly, they have begun to sting.
“The Italian Government cannot remain subservient to the US Administration, or it will irreparably harm the diplomatic role that Italy has always played … in the region,” Schlein declared shortly after the US assault.
“The friendship [Meloni] claims with Trump didn’t prevent him from failing to warn her of the attack, so much so that our defence minister was stuck in Dubai.”
- Ellen Francis contributed to this report.
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