“The politics of smiles and good manners on the international stage are successful propaganda that wins over even experts.” For Nadia Urbinati, an Italian political scientist at Columbia University, it’s hard to get international audiences to understand the true face of her country’s prime minister. There’s even something of a historical parallel: “In the 1930s, the antifascist intellectual and politician Gaetano Salvemini struggled to convince British and American professors and journalists that there was a dictatorship in Italy. Today a similar fate befalls us: there is a risk of an authoritarian turn. We struggle to make that clear to foreign observers who think and write that Giorgia Meloni has moderated the far right.”

Since taking power in Italy in October 2022, Prime Minister Meloni’s first move in Brussels was to send a message: “We are not aliens.” Her cooperation with the mainstream Christian-democratic European People’s Party (EPP), the biggest single force in the continent’s politics, has paid off: Meloni plays as the far right’s Trojan horse as it moves toward the heart of power in the European Union. The fact that in these EU elections the far right dealt such a heavy blow to the leaderships of both France and Germany shows that Italy’s far-right government was only the trigger for a Europe-wide assault.

Meloni portrays herself as “a pragmatic leader who is able to talk to anyone.” The way that mainstream media and politics portray her tends to follow the same line. During the debate between the lead candidates to be next president of the European Commission, the incumbent Ursula von der Leyen legitimized Meloni and her camouflage tactics. She insisted that Italy’s prime minister is “clearly pro-European, pro-Ukraine,” and pro-rule of law.