ANALYSIS | How caution became a keyword to the record staying power of Italy's Giorgia Meloni | CBC News

Giorgia Meloni is Italy's longest-serving postwar leader. Will that stability last?

Marking 1,413 days in office, caution — not confrontation — has defined far-right leader's governing style

On Friday, on a quay in the southern Italy port city of Bari, more than 10,000 supporters will have room to celebrate a number that once seemed about as likely as an Italian putting ketchup on spaghetti: 1,413.

That is how many consecutive days Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government will have survived on Sept. 4, overtaking the record set by Silvio Berlusconi's second administration to become the longest-lasting government in the postwar history of the Italian Republic.

The milestone is being marked with a rally organized by Meloni's Brothers of Italy party at Bari's port, where the prime minister will be joined by ministers, lawmakers and other supporters for what's being billed as a celebration of the government’s record longevity.

For a country that has cycled through 68 governments in the 80 years since the end of the Second World War, the record may say more about Meloni than Italy.

Italy's first female leader rose to power with a public persona constructed around combat and defiance.

Raised largely by her mother in Rome's working-class Garbatella neighbourhood after her father left, Meloni, 49, entered politics in the 1990s through the youth movement of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement.

A self-described "underdog," she describes resistance as a main source of her motivation, recently telling the New York Times, "a 'No' is one of the things that most mobilizes me."

Her political communication is similarly personal. The rally cry that helped make her famous — "I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian" — was catchy enough to be turned into a dance remix.

But for someone who built her image on fighting, it is caution, not confrontation, that has most marked her governing style.

While Italian politics is littered with the wreckage of male leaders undone by overreach, Meloni has built her staying power on knowing when not to push her luck.

It's patience she displayed even before reaching office. When almost every major party entered Mario Draghi's broad coalition government in 2021, Meloni kept her small, outlier Brothers of Italy party alone in opposition.

After the 2022 collapse of Draghi's government, Meloni claimed power, heading a three-party, right-wing coalition that gave her a clear parliamentary majority. The politician who had railed against Brussels now largely toed the European Union's fiscal rules, remained steadfastly pro-Ukraine and fell silent on earlier talk of challenging the euro.

She's also managed to keep together that sometimes-fractious alliance with Matteo Salvini's anti-immigration, pro-Russia League and Antonio Tajani's centre-right Forza Italia.

That combination — fiery political identity, pragmatic governing — has helped her beat the odds.

Lorenzo Pregliasco, a head pollster with YouTrend, calls Meloni's durability "highly unusual." Brothers of Italy is polling slightly above its 2022 election result right now, in a country where governing parties typically start losing support within months.

But Pregliasco said that shouldn't be mistaken for an overwhelming love of the party's leader.

"Meloni's strength in the polls doesn't reflect a genuine, overwhelming support for a government," he said. "The key issue here is how much Meloni is seen as credible, as opposed to the alternative."

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That alternative — an opposition led by the Democratic Party and populist Five Star Movement that has shifted left — remains divided. Meloni, meanwhile, remains politically dominant within her own coalition, with Brothers of Italy polling well ahead of both the League and Forza Italia.

Her governing style also involves knowing when rhetoric and policy can quietly clash.

Migration is a case in point. Meloni campaigned vociferously on stopping migrant arrivals by sea to Italy — numbers that have sharply fallen from their 2023 peak — and built controversial offshore migrant processing centres in Albania.

Yet at the same time, her government has authorized almost half a million legal entries for non-EU workers between 2026 and 2028 to fill severe labour shortages driven by Italy's aging population.

The same pragmatic compromise has marked her foreign policy.

The only EU leader to attend Donald Trump's inauguration, Meloni was widely cast as Europe's natural bridge to the U.S. president. But building that bridge to Trump proved akin to engineering one across an Italian fault line: the relationship buckled over the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and Trump's attacks on Pope Leo.

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That ability to adapt without appearing to abandon her political identity helps explain the credibility voters still give her, Pregliasco said.

She still talks about nation, family, motherhood and traditional values. She has tightened the rules around same-sex parenthood, and criticized feminists for focusing on gender quotas and symbolic battles over language, saying real equality meant a woman being free to become prime minister in the first place.

It's language that speaks squarely to a conservative electorate in one of the world's oldest countries.

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But economist Veronica De Romanis, with Rome's Luiss University, says the same caution that has shielded Meloni politically has also held back deeper structural change in a country whose debt-to-GDP ratio is second only to Greece in the EU.

"Stability is an instrument," she said. "The goal is growth, economic growth, and we haven't seen that."

De Romanis credits the Meloni government with fiscal discipline, but adds its leader has failed to exploit four remarkably stable years to tackle weak productivity, low education spending or the precarious foothold women and young people have in Italy's labour market.

Higher female employment rates and higher fertility are positively correlated across Europe, she said, pushing back against the idea that getting more women into the workforce worsens Italy’s demographic problem.

"We cannot afford having one out of two women at home," she said.

As elections approach next year, a stagnant status quo is not Meloni's greatest threat. The outsider who built her career attacking the political establishment is now experiencing what it means to become the target.

Former general Roberto Vannacci, positioning himself to Meloni's right after breaking off from Salvini's League, is now trying to outflank her on immigration, security and social issues, including his opposition to 2SLGBTQ+ and abortion rights.

Vannacci gives Meloni something she has long avoided, Pregliasco said: "An opposition from the right which can basically speak the language of her electorate."

After a record 1,413 days in power, Meloni has demonstrated a rare instinct in modern Italian politics: knowing when to fight, when to back down and when to wait it out.

But whether Italians believe Meloni can transform political stability into lasting change may be a question they decide at the polls next year.

Megan Williams has been covering all things Italian, from politics and the Vatican, to food and culture, to the plight of migrants in the Mediterranean, for more than two decades. Based in Rome, Megan has also told stories from other parts of Europe and the world and won many international prizes for her reporting, including a James Beard Award. Her radio documentaries can be heard on Ideas and The Current. Megan is also a regular guest host on CBC national radio shows.