Giorgia Meloni

• 1. Introduction

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  Giorgia Meloni ended a speech at a rally in Rome on the 19th of October 2019 with four short declarations. "I am Giorgia. I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm Italian, I'm Christian." She was attacking a proposal to replace the words father and mother on the identity cards of minors with parent 1 and parent 2.

  Two Milanese DJs remixed the line into a dance track, meant as satire at her expense. It gathered millions of views, a flood of imitations and memes, and even a gold disc. In her autobiography, Meloni says the joke changed her image. In her words, it turned her "from a boring politician into a curious pop phenomenon".

  By October 2022 the woman behind the slogan was Prime Minister of Italy, the first woman ever to hold the post. In 2024 Forbes ranked her the third most powerful woman in the world. In 2025 Politico named her the most powerful person in Europe. She leads Brothers of Italy, a party she co-founded, and she presided over the European Conservatives and Reformists Party from 2020 to 2025.

  How did a child left behind by her father in a working-class corner of Rome end up running the Italian government? Why do journalists, historians and rivals still argue over which label fits her? And what has she done with power at home, at Italy's borders and abroad?

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• 2. Garbatella Roots

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  Giorgia Meloni was born in Rome on the 15th of January 1977, and her father left the family in 1978, when she was one year old. Francesco Meloni was a tax advisor who moved to the Canary Islands and remarried. He was the son of Nino Meloni, a radio director from Sardinia, and the actress Zoe Incrocci from Lombardy. According to some political profiles, he had communist sympathies and voted for the Italian Communist Party. Her mother, Anna Paratore, comes from Sicily and later became a novelist.

  In 1995 her father was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to nine years in a Spanish prison. He last contacted his daughter in 2006, the year she entered parliament. She has four half-siblings from his second marriage.

  Garbatella, a working-class district of Rome, became her home after a fire destroyed the more comfortable house where she lived as an infant. Her family has described those years as impoverished. In her autobiography, Meloni writes that her childhood and the breakdown of her family shaped her politics. Her sister Arianna, born in 1975, was appointed head of the party's political secretariat in 2023. Arianna was partnered with Francesco Lollobrigida, who became Minister of Agriculture on the 22nd of October 2022.

  In 1992, at the age of 15, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement. Followers of Italian fascism had founded that party in 1946, and it dissolved in 1995. In the Youth Front she founded a student group called Gli Antenati, meaning The Ancestors. The group joined protests against a public education reform promoted by the minister Rosa Russo Iervolino.

  In 1996 she became national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the National Alliance. That post-fascist party was the legal successor of the Italian Social Movement. It sent her to the Student Associations Forum, created by the Ministry of Education. Two years later she won a primary and became a councillor of the province of Rome, serving until 2002. She was elected national director in 2000. In 2004 she became the first woman to preside over Youth Action, the National Alliance youth wing. All the while she earned money as a nanny, a waitress and a bartender at the Piper Club, one of the most famous nightclubs in Rome.

  The 1993 revival of the Camp Hobbit festival, nicknamed "Hobbit 93", drew a young activist who sang along with the folk band Compagnia dell'Anello. The band took its name from The Fellowship of the Ring, published in 1954. Meloni is a fan of fantasy, especially J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Years later she named her political conference Atreyu, after the hero of the 1979 novel The Neverending Story. She also speaks English, Spanish and French.

  Meloni graduated from the Istituto tecnico professionale di Stato Amerigo Vespucci in 1996. After her election to parliament in 2006, her curriculum vitae claimed a high school diploma in languages with a final mark of 60/60. That caused controversy, because the Vespucci school was a hospitality institute, not a language school. It issued professional diplomas for jobs such as chef, waiter, entertainer, tour guide and hostess. Which course she took is unknown. Meloni says the institute later became the Centro di Formazione Professionale Ernesto Nathan, which gives language diplomas. Training centres cannot issue diplomas, and that centre in fact issues qualifications for beauticians and hairdressers.

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• 3. Ministry and Opposition

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  Meloni won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in the 2006 general election, running for the National Alliance, and became its youngest ever vice-president. That year she also began working as a journalist. She defended laws passed by the third Berlusconi government that benefited the companies of the prime minister and delayed trials involving him. Her verdict was blunt: "it is necessary to contextualise them. Those are laws that Silvio Berlusconi made for himself. But they are perfectly fair laws."

  After the April 2008 general election, Meloni, then 31, became Minister for Youth Policies in the fourth Berlusconi government. She held the post until the 16th of November 2011, when Berlusconi resigned amid a financial crisis and public protests. Only one minister in Italy's history since 1861 had been younger than she was.

  In August 2008 she urged Italian athletes to boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, objecting to Chinese policy on Tibet. Berlusconi and the foreign minister Franco Frattini both criticised her. In 2009 her party merged with Forza Italia into The People of Freedom, and she took over its youth section, called Young Italy. In November 2010 she presented a package worth €300 million named "Right to the Future". It had five initiatives, including incentives for new entrepreneurs, bonuses for temporary workers and loans for deserving students.

  In November 2012 she announced a bid for the leadership of The People of Freedom against Angelino Alfano, objecting to the party's support for the Monti government. The primaries were cancelled. She then teamed up with Ignazio La Russa and Guido Crosetto on an anti-Monti line, calling for renewal and criticising Berlusconi's leadership. In December 2012 the three founded Brothers of Italy, a name taken from the words of the Italian national anthem.

  The 2013 general election gave the new party 2.0% of the vote and 9 seats, as part of Berlusconi's centre-right coalition. Meloni led the party's group in the Chamber until 2014, then resigned to dedicate herself to the party. Fabio Rampelli succeeded her. In March 2014 she became party president. The European election that spring went worse. The party took 3.7%, just under the 4% threshold, so she missed a seat despite winning 348,700 votes.

  On the 4th of November 2015 she founded Our Land, a conservative committee that ran alongside the party to widen its popular base. On the 30th of January 2016 she took part in the Family Day demonstration, declared herself against LGBT adoption, and announced that she was pregnant. Her daughter Ginevra was born on the 16th of September.

  In June 2016 she ran for mayor of Rome with the backing of Matteo Salvini's Us with Salvini. Berlusconi's Forza Italia supported a rival, Alfio Marchini. In May she promised to name a street after Giorgio Almirante if elected, which angered the local Jewish community and the anti-fascist association ANPI. She won 20.6%, almost twice Marchini's share, but missed the run-off. Her party took 12.3%.

  The constitutional referendum of the 4th of December 2016 gave her a bigger stage. She founded the "No, Thanks" committee and debated the prime minister Matteo Renzi on television. The "No" side won with almost 60% of the votes. She called for snap elections, and when Renzi resigned the next day, she withheld confidence from the government of Paolo Gentiloni on the 12th of December.

  The party congress in Trieste on the 2nd and the 3rd of December 2017 re-elected her and renewed the logo. The long-time right-wing politician Daniela Santanchè joined. Meloni allied with Salvini's League, pushing the party towards Eurosceptic and right-wing populist positions. In the 2018 general election the party won 4.4%, more than three times the seats of 2013. She herself won the single-member constituency of Latina with 41%. The vote produced a hung parliament.

  For the whole 18th legislature Meloni led her party in opposition. Its poll numbers rose during the pandemic, when it was the only opposition party to the national unity government of Mario Draghi. In February 2021 she joined the Aspen Institute, the Washington think tank. In October 2021 she signed the Madrid Charter, drafted by Spain's far-right party Vox, which describes left-wing groups as enemies of Ibero-America engaged in a "criminal project".

  At the Vox congress she declared: "Yes to the natural family. No to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity. No to gender ideology. No to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders. No to mass migration, no to big international finance, no to the bureaucrats of Brussels." In February 2022 she addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, telling American activists they must defend their views against progressives.

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• 4. The Fascist Question

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  At 19, in an interview with the French newscast Soir 3, Meloni called Benito Mussolini "a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy". She also named him the best politician of the last 50 years. That remark has followed her through nearly every later controversy.

  In January 2020 Meloni and the municipality of Verona backed naming a street after Giorgio Almirante, while also supporting honorary citizenship for Liliana Segre, a Holocaust survivor and senator for life. Segre said that she and Almirante were incompatible and that the municipality had to choose. In May 2020 Meloni praised Almirante as a "great politician" and "a patriot".

  Almirante co-founded the Italian Social Movement and kept a postwar political career until he retired in 1987. During the Second World War he served as a civil minister in the Italian Social Republic, a Nazi puppet state. He was also editor-in-chief of the antisemitic and racist magazine La Difesa della Razza, which published the "Manifesto of Race" in 1938.

  Meloni's defenders point to other moments. In 2009, as a minister, she visited Yad Vashem in Israel. As party leader she has said that her party "handed fascism over to history for decades now". In November 2018, though, she argued that Liberation Day on the 25th of April and the Festa della Repubblica on the 2nd of June should be replaced. Her proposed substitute was National Unity and Armed Forces Day on the 4th of November, which marks Italy's victory in the First World War. She called the two existing holidays "two controversial celebrations".

  After founding Brothers of Italy in 2012, she added the tricolour flame to the party flag. It is a neo-fascist symbol associated with the Italian Social Movement. The flame is said to represent the one that always burns on Mussolini's tomb in Predappio. Before the 2022 election, Segre told the magazine Pagine Ebraiche that Meloni should remove it from the logo. The party's co-founder Ignazio La Russa rejected the idea, and Meloni ignored the request.

  A 2021 report by Fanpage.it put the party under fresh scrutiny. Meloni minimised the investigation and refused to expel openly neo-fascist members. In December 2021 two party figures, Alfredo Catapano and Luigi Rispoli, joined former Italian Social Movement members in a Roman salute, which ANPI condemned. Rispoli told Fanpage.it: "I believe in the New Right and in the efforts Giorgia Meloni is making in Brothers of Italy. It makes me wonder, frankly, this clamour."

  Shortly before the 2022 election she sacked a member who openly praised Adolf Hitler. The party also distanced itself from its Ascoli Piceno section, which had celebrated the anniversary of the March on Rome in 2019. She has tried to distance herself as well from Roberto Jonghi Lavarini, a Milanese politician known as the "Black Baron". The historians Ruth Ben-Ghiat, David Broder and Laurence Bertrand Dorléac argue that she and her party have stayed ambiguous about the fascist past, sometimes rejecting it and sometimes minimising it. In their view, that ambiguity has helped rebrand both.

  The 2022 campaign sharpened the argument. Some fretted, including inside the European Commission, that she might steer Italy towards the Hungary of Viktor Orbán. To calm those fears, she told the foreign press that Italian fascism is history. Gianfranco Fini, who had led both the Italian Social Movement and the National Alliance in her early years, said he voted for her. He called her an anti-fascist, though she rejects the label, which she considers political.

  In July 2022 she told Nicholas Farrell of The Spectator that calling her far right was a smear campaign by her opponents. She named the British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton as an influence. Many commentators described her government as Italy's first far-right-led one since the Second World War. Sky News disagreed, writing: "Giorgia Meloni is not a fascist." Steve Sedwick of CNBC summed up the confusion: "Have we got a centre-right coalition, have we got a right coalition, have we got a far-right coalition, or have we got a fascist coalition? I have seen all four printed, depending on who you read."

  A July 2024 court case showed how personal the dispute can get. Meloni was awarded damages against the journalist Giulia Cortese, who in October 2021 had posted a photo of her altered to show Mussolini in the background. Cortese was not charged for the photo itself, but she was fined for later comments about Meloni's height, which the court deemed body shaming. Cortese answered on X that Italy's government "has a serious problem with freedom of expression and journalistic dissent".

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• 5. Taking Power

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  A record-low turnout marked the 2022 general election, a snap vote called after the 2022 Italian government crisis. The centre-right coalition had agreed beforehand that the leader of its biggest party would be its candidate for prime minister. Exit polls showed Brothers of Italy with the most seats, and the centre-left Democratic Party conceded defeat soon afterwards. Congratulations came from Hungary's Orbán, Poland's Mateusz Morawiecki, Britain's Liz Truss and France's Marine Le Pen. Alternative for Germany and Vox also celebrated.

  Tensions inside the winning coalition surfaced almost immediately. On the 13th of October Berlusconi refused to support La Russa's candidacy for president of the Senate. La Russa was elected in the first round with 116 votes out of 206, helped by opposition parties. Berlusconi wrote notes in the Senate describing Meloni as "patronising, overbearing, arrogant... and offensive".

  The coalition still reached a deal quickly. On the 20th of October consultations began between President Sergio Mattarella and the parties. The next day delegates from Brothers of Italy, the League, Forza Italia and Civics of Italy-Us Moderates-MAIE told him they had agreed on a government with Meloni as Prime Minister. Mattarella summoned her to the Quirinal Palace that afternoon. She accepted, announced her cabinet the same day, and was sworn in on the 22nd of October.

  Seven Italian women had their names read into the record on the 25th of October 2022, when she addressed the Chamber of Deputies before the confidence vote. They were Tina Anselmi, Samantha Cristoforetti, Grazia Deledda, Oriana Fallaci, Nilde Iotti, Rita Levi-Montalcini and Maria Montessori. Meloni said that with the boards of their own examples they had built the ladder that let her climb and break the heavy glass ceiling above women's heads. The government won the vote comfortably in both houses.

  The first decision of the new government was to scrap the COVID-19 vaccination certificate, known in Italy as the Green Pass, and to bring unvaccinated doctors back into service. The workforce vaccination mandate had already run for over a year, so the change was largely symbolic. Meloni herself had not vaccinated her daughter, saying "it's not a religion". She had also said that someone aged 0-19 was as likely to die of COVID-19 as to be struck by lightning, which drew criticism.

  On the 31st of October the government approved a decree setting a penalty of up to six years in prison for illegal parties and rallies. It was presented as a measure against illegal raves, but it could apply to any illegal gathering that authorities judged dangerous. Jurist Vitalba Azzolini and civil rights groups objected, and Forza Italia contested it too. Amnesty International said it "risked undermining the right to peaceful protest". The government answered that it would accept minor changes in parliament.

  On the economy, the government continued the energy policy of Draghi, lowering prices, subsidising families and businesses, and authorising new drilling in Italian seas to raise gas output. It also raised the cash ceiling from €2,000 to €5,000. In March 2023 it approved a draft bill banning cultured meat, saying it wanted to protect food heritage. In November 2023 Italy became the first country to ban it.

  On the 26th of February 2023 a boat carrying between 143 and 200 migrants sank in harsh weather off Steccato di Cutro, near Crotone in Calabria. At least 86 people died, including 12 children. Meloni spoke of her "deep sorrow" and blamed human traffickers. The opposition leader Elly Schlein, with More Europe and the Greens and Left Alliance, demanded the resignation of interior minister Matteo Piantedosi.

  In May 2023 severe floods struck Emilia-Romagna, killing 17 people and displacing 50,000. The provisional damage bill passed €10 billion. On the 23rd of May the Council of Ministers approved a first emergency decree, with a recovery package estimated at €2 billion. Meloni toured the flooded areas on the 25th of May with Ursula von der Leyen. She said she found people "shoveling mud with pride in their eyes, saying: all right, we have a problem, but we will solve it, we will rebuild." On the 27th of June 2023 the cabinet named army corps general Francesco Paolo Figliuolo Extraordinary Commissioner for the Reconstruction, after weeks of tension.

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• 6. Law and the Constitution

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  On the 15th of June 2023 the Council of Ministers approved a justice bill proposed by Carlo Nordio. It abolished the crime of abuse of office, redesigned how prosecutors can appeal acquittals, and tightened rules on wiretapping. The Senate passed it on the 13th of February 2024, and the Chamber of Deputies followed on the 10th of July.

  The "Safety Bill" cleared the Chamber on the 18th of September 2024. It was a modified version of a security package that the Council of Ministers had approved on the 16th of November 2023. The bill covered terrorism, scams and protection of law enforcement. It also banned cannabis in any form, including hemp products. It set prison terms of 2-7 years for illegally occupying a property. Immigrants from outside the EU would need a residence permit to buy a SIM card. Road or railway blockades could bring one month in prison for a lone protester, or 6 months to 2 years for groups.

  The opposition called the bill "liberticidal". Critics nicknamed one provision the "anti-Salis rule", after Ilaria Salis, a member of the European Parliament accused of illegal occupation in 2008. They called another the "anti-Gandhi rule", warning that it could stop peaceful protests like those Gandhi once led. The government also proposed wider powers for the secret services and a duty for universities and public research bodies to cooperate with them. Critics recalled that these services were involved in illicit activities during the Years of Lead, between the 1960s and 1980s. They also feared for the privacy of students and researchers.

  On the 4th of April 2025 the government approved a decree-law that largely followed the earlier bill. That bill had been sent back to the Chamber over missing financial cover and doubts raised by President Mattarella. The decree was meant to speed up approval.

  A second fight concerned the regions. On the 23rd of January 2024 the Senate approved a bill on "differentiated autonomy", which could give regions much more power over up to 23 specific subjects. The Chamber approved it on the 19th of June. Southern leaders objected from both sides of politics, among them Roberto Occhiuto of Forza Italia, president of Calabria, and Vincenzo De Luca of the Democratic Party, president of Campania. They accused the government of abandoning the south in favour of the north. On the 20th of July signatures began to be collected for a repealing referendum. A month later, on the 12th of August 2024, Meloni called "surrealist" a European Commission court case over a government social policy favouring Italians over recent non-citizen immigrants.

  In late December 2022 Meloni announced that Elisabetta Casellati, the minister for constitutional reforms, would meet opposition parties to start a path towards strengthening the prime minister's powers. The coalition's electoral programme had mentioned only the direct election of the president. On the 3rd of November 2023 Meloni presented the reform itself. It provided for the direct popular election of the prime minister, known as the premierato, and a new electoral law giving 55% of seats in both houses to the winning coalition.

  In March 2026 voters decided a constitutional referendum on the "Nordio Reform", named for the justice minister. It proposed separating the career paths of judges and public prosecutors. It would split the High Council of the Judiciary into two bodies, choose members by sortition rather than election, and create a High Disciplinary Court. The Senate had approved the bill on the 30th of October 2025. Because it missed the two-thirds majority required in each chamber, signatures were collected to force a confirmatory referendum, which needs no quorum. Meloni's government campaigned for a yes. The "No" side won, widely seen as a blow to the government and a boost to opposition parties before the 2027 general election.

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• 7. Family and Faith

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  In March 2018 Meloni wrote on Facebook, after Disney showed a gay couple in the film Frozen II: "Enough! We are sick of it! Take your hands off the children." The post captures a worldview she calls pro-family. She opposes abortion, euthanasia and laws recognising same-sex marriage.

  Her practice is more cautious than her rhetoric. On abortion, she says she would not change the Italian law but wants to apply fully its part about prevention, including the right of doctors to refuse to carry out abortions. On same-sex unions, she says the current recognition in Italy is good enough and that she would not change it. In 2016, however, she had backed a referendum to repeal the civil union law, and in a February 2016 interview with the television show Le Iene she said she would "rather not have a gay child". In 2009 she voted for a decree law against euthanasia.

  She has opposed the 1993 Mancino law, a hate speech statute. She also opposed the DDL Zan, a bill that would have extended the Mancino law to cover LGBT discrimination, declaring in 2020 that "there is no homophobia" in Italy. She wants to make surrogacy, derided in Italian as utero in affitto, or "uterus renting", a "universal crime". The Catholic Church and Pope Francis himself endorsed that effort. On the 16th of October 2024 the Senate voted 84-58 to extend the surrogacy ban to couples who go abroad for the procedure. Under new legislation from her government, only a child's biological parent can be named on a birth certificate.

  Meloni is sceptical of what she calls "gender ideology", which she says is taught in schools and attacks female identity and motherhood. She is also sympathetic to the anti-gender movement, which grew out of Catholic theology in the 1990s and condemns gender studies. She supports changing the Constitution to make adoption by same-sex couples illegal.

  Her book We Believe, published in 2011, includes the line: "I am a right-wing woman, and I proudly support women's issues." She also wrote that feminists had subjected women like her to contempt and racism. She opposes pink quotas and denies being anti-women, as some critics have claimed. Hillary Clinton said before the 2022 vote that electing a first woman prime minister "always represents a break with the past". The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat replied that Meloni "would also represent continuity with Italy's darkest episode". Some women did not see her win as a victory, and a few called her a feminist despite her rejection of the label. In August 2025 Mihail Neamțu wrote that her conservatism rests on duty, not on rights and recognition. In November 2025 she backed the passing of a law against femicide.

  In 2015 Meloni began a relationship with Andrea Giambruno, a journalist for the Mediaset TV channels. On the 20th of October 2023 she announced their split after the television programme Striscia la notizia aired his off-air remarks, which were described as sexist and chauvinist. She said: "all those who hoped to weaken her by attacking her personal life should know that however much the drop of water tries to dig out the stone, the stone remains stone and the drop is only water". She has defended herself against criticism for not being married to her daughter's father.

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• 8. Borders and the World

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  In September 2023, more than 120 boats carrying around 7,000 migrants from Africa reached the island of Lampedusa within 24 hours. The local reception centre handled 15 times its usual volume, and the arrivals outnumbered the island's own population. Meloni said she had written to Ursula von der Leyen, asking her to come to Lampedusa to see the gravity of the situation.

  On the 16th of July 2023 Meloni, von der Leyen and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte travelled to Tunis to sign an agreement with President Kais Saied. It covered economic partnership, European support for an IMF loan and, above all, the fight against irregular migration. On the 6th of November 2023 she signed another deal, with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. For at least five years, Italy could run two migrant facilities in Albania, funded by Italy and under Italian jurisdiction.

  Building began in March 2024. An arrival facility sits in the port of Shëngjin, and an asylum complex operates on a military base near the village of Gjadër. Politicians and human rights observers have criticised the detention centre in Gjadër for its lack of transparency, prison-like conditions, and risks to detainees' mental health. The centre has room for 36,000 migrants, but by October 2025 only 256 had been detained there. In most cases, judicial decisions sent them back to Italy.

  Her words have shifted over time. In January 2017 she called immigration to Italy "ethnic substitution", and critics have described her as xenophobic and Islamophobic. In August 2022 she reposted a pixelated video of a woman being raped by an asylum seeker. The victim said she was recognisable in it and condemned the post. In 2022 she said refugee status should go to women and children fleeing war, but not to other asylum seekers. By 2023 she was asserting that Europe and Italy need immigration and that only illegal immigration should be fought. Her government issued over 450,000 permits to migrants between 2023 and 2025. In July 2025 it was reported that it would issue nearly 500,000 work visas for non-EU nationals from 2026 to 2028.

  Before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Meloni favoured better relations with Moscow. She supported lifting sanctions in 2014, congratulated Vladimir Putin on his re-election in 2018, and wrote in 2021 that Putin's Russia defends European values and Christian identity. After the invasion she pledged arms for Ukraine and moved towards Atlanticism. In September 2022 she said Russia's annexation of four partially occupied provinces had "no legal and political value". On the 22nd of February 2023 she visited Kyiv, met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and went to Bucha, where Russian forces killed more than 400 Ukrainians in March 2022. There she said: "we have been with Ukraine from the beginning and will be until the end."

  Her travel schedule filled quickly. In January 2023 she visited Algeria, where President Abdelmadjid Tebboune signed a gas supply deal. On the 2nd of March 2023 she met Narendra Modi in India and called him the "most loved leader in the world". In April 2023, in Addis Ababa, she announced the "Mattei Plan" for investment in Africa, becoming the first Western leader to visit Ethiopia since the end of the Tigray War. On the 27th of July 2023 she met congressional leaders at the Capitol and then President Joe Biden at the White House. The two discussed Ukraine, China and Africa.

  From the 13th to the 15th of June 2024 she hosted the 50th G7 summit in Borgo Egnazia, in Apulia. Pope Francis became the first pope to address a G7 summit. That month's European Parliament election made her the most voted candidate, as her party took 28.8% of the votes in Italy.

  On the 19th of December 2024 the journalist Cecilia Sala was arrested in Tehran and held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison. The arrest became known only on the 27th of December. Three days before it, Italy had arrested the Iranian engineer Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi at Milan Malpensa Airport, at the request of the United States. On the 8th of January 2025 Meloni announced that Sala had been released, and she welcomed the journalist herself at Rome Ciampino Airport. On the 12th of January Abedini was released back to Iran.

  On the 19th of January 2025 the Libyan general Osama Elmasry Njeem, known as Almasri, was arrested in Turin. The International Criminal Court wanted him for war crimes. Two days later, the court of appeal of Rome ordered his release because the arrest lacked approval from the Ministry of Justice, and he was flown home on an Italian intelligence aircraft. A report by the lawyer Luigi Li Gotti led the Tribunal of Ministers to examine whether Meloni and three colleagues should be investigated. In a video, she said the court had acted "curiously" just as the man was about to enter Italy, after twelve days in three other European states.

  With the Gaza war, Meloni first backed Israel's "full right to defend itself in accordance with international law". On the 27th of August 2025 she called an airstrike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which killed five journalists, "unjustifiable". She said the military reaction had "gone beyond the principle of proportionality". In September 2025 large general strikes hit Italy over her Gaza policy and Israeli attacks on the Global Sumud Flotilla. She called the protesters "hooligans" and ruled out recognising the State of Palestine while Hamas remains in power in Gaza.

  Relations with Donald Trump have swung both ways. On the 17th of April 2025 she visited Washington and received a warm welcome, a first step towards trade talks between the EU and the US. She was the only European leader at his second inauguration in January 2025. She is credited with brokering a rapprochement between Trump and Zelensky at the 2025 funeral of Pope Francis. In April 2026 the friendship broke down over Trump's criticism of Pope Leo XIV and his handling of the 2026 Iran War. Trump lashed out, calling her "much different than I thought."

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