The political winner of the Italian elections and the likely future president of the right-wing coalition government, Giorgia Meloni, is clearly not Benito Mussolini in a skirt, as mainstream European and Croatian media often implied during the election campaign. On the contrary, after her electoral victory, she sent very ‘correct’ (geo)political messages: loyal to transatlantic cooperation, committed to supporting Ukraine, interested in the EU… However, the future ideologically conservative Italian government with a very comfortable parliamentary majority and under the apparent leadership of Giorgia Meloni is an important piece in the mosaic of creating a new European order, supported by the Russo-Ukrainian war and the energy-economic crisis.
Precondition for a Constructive Compromise
It is no coincidence that one of the first messages from the future prime minister was of a purely geopolitical nature: firm transatlantic cooperation. In today’s Europe, where defense and security are very important factors, two states gain geopolitical importance: Poland as a newer NATO (or, if you will, American) military base in Eastern Europe and Italy as a traditional base of NATO’s southern flank in the Mediterranean. In the northeast, the main challenge is, of course, Russia, and in the Mediterranean, destabilized North Africa, including mass illegal migrations.
It is not surprising that Meloni explicitly distanced herself geopolitically from pro-Russian Orbán’s conservative Hungary and emphasized the similarity with conservative Poland, which is geopolitically firmly aligned with the USA, alongside Ukraine and firmly against the expansion of the ‘Russian world’. It is true that her coalition partner Matteo Salvini until recently saw an ally and support in Vladimir Putin, that her other coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi openly admired him, and even Meloni herself. However, a new era brings new partnerships, and Meloni has once again shown how Italy easily changes wartime and political friends and partners – to welcome the end of the war on the winning side. With a stable, ideologically close conservative government, for which she has all the electoral prerequisites (a sufficient number of mandates), Meloni is in a position to represent a conservative counterbalance to the dominant neoliberal German-French axis together with Poland in the European Union.
This counterbalance is a prerequisite for a constructive compromise on the future of the Union. Namely, a stable and well-integrated Union cannot be built by having German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as he did a few days ago, impose his vision of an ‘integrated Europe from Dublin to Tbilisi’ as a counterbalance to Russia from the position of a current geopolitical loser. Nor can it be built by Ursula von der Leyen threatening European ‘instruments’ to countries whose electoral results she does not like, as she did before the Italian elections. Or by Emmanuel Macron presenting to Sorbonne students the dream of a European superstate in which only he is missing as the predestined president, as he did five years ago… A constructive compromise cannot, of course, be built on sovereignisms according to 19th-century molds, which see everything European as hostile, except for European funds, nor on being entrenched in one’s ideological trenches.
