ROME: Having fostered pragmatic relations with Brussels, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is for many the “moderate” face of Europe’s radical right — and is leading the charge for June elections.
The ascent to power of Meloni’s post-fascist, euroskeptic Brothers of Italy in 2022 sent shockwaves through the European Union, sparking fears of a lurch to the right within a founding member of both the bloc and NATO.
But her strong support for Ukraine has won Meloni friends in Washington and Brussels, particularly after she helped persuade Hungary’s Viktor Orban — a long-time ally sympathetic to Moscow — to drop his veto of EU aid to Kyiv.
Meloni has also worked closely with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, particularly on migration, a priority for the far-right premier.
“At a European level, she’s trying to present herself as a sort of moderate conservative and mediator” with the rest of the radical right, noted Lorenzo Castellani, a political analyst at Rome’s LUISS University.
At home, Meloni has pursued a nationalist populist agenda focused on traditional family values, law and order, and migration, including a clampdown on rescue ships operating in the central Mediterranean.
It has raised hackles among the Italian left — particularly moves to exert influence over the RAI public state broadcaster — but nothing yet to spark alarm in Brussels, as with judicial reforms in Hungary and Poland.
Fiscal policy meanwhile has been relatively prudent, reflecting the constraints of being part of the EU’s single currency.
“She wants to be in many aspects the acceptable extreme for the rest of the European political establishment,” Castellani told AFP.
“She’s like the last island before the border.”

“More credible”

Meloni heads the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament, which includes Spain’s Vox, Poland’s populist Law and Justice (PiS), and France’s Reconquete!.
Marked by a pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO stance, it is viewed as more credible by the Brussels establishment than the other far-right grouping, the euroskeptic Identity and Democracy group (ID).
ID includes Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in France, Germany’s anti-immigrant AfD and Meloni’s own coalition ally, Matteo Salvini’s far-right League.
Rosa Balfour, director of the Carnegie Europe think tank, says both Rome and Brussels have benefited from a pragmatic working relationship.
“What the Commission has been doing is embrace Meloni and isolate Orban,” who is not part of either grouping, she told AFP.
“And that’s worked very well for Italy because Meloni has managed to extract concessions.”
This has mainly entailed EU support for the premier’s efforts to stop the tens of thousands of migrants who land on Italy’s shores each year on boats from North Africa.
Von der Leyen joined Meloni on the island of Lampedusa last year after a surge in arrivals, and the two women joined EU delegations to Egypt and Tunisia in recent months to agree new deals on energy and migration.

Building bridges

Analysts say the shift to a tougher EU approach on migration was well underway before Meloni arrived — but that has not stopped her claiming credit.
“We want Italy to be central to changing what doesn’t work in Europe,” she said during her election campaign launch last month.
She is standing in the vote — despite an EU rule barring government ministers from taking up their seats — and urged the European right to follow her example.
“We want to do in Europe exactly what we did in Italy on September 25, 2022,” she said.
But Castellani calls this a “bluff.”

“The real game she’s playing is trying to enter within the European game of alliances,” he said, notably building bridges between the ECR and Von der Leyen’s conservative European People’s Party (EPP).
The divisions in the European right are echoed within Meloni’s coalition, notably between her and Salvini — they share similar domestic priorities but differ on foreign affairs.
Salvini’s League has a history of warm ties with Moscow, while he never misses an opportunity to criticize Brussels.
But he has been eclipsed. The League came top in 2019 European elections in Italy with 34 percent, but is now polling closer to eight percent, compared to more than 27 percent for Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.

Fresh face, skilled communicator
Surveys show voters are supportive of Meloni’s foreign policy — and less so of her migration efforts — but Lorenzo Pregliasco, founder of polling company YouTrend, says personality plays a big role.
Meloni is also seen as “more credible” than other Italian leaders, a skilled communicator and a “genuine figure, someone who says what she thinks,” he told AFP.
He notes her 2022 victory was driven by her image as a fresh face, the only party leader who did not join Mario Draghi’s technocratic government.
With the opposition still divided, as they were back then, he predicts she could stay in power for the full five-year term.
But by then the political landscape may be very different, not least if Donald Trump wins the November US presidential election.
Balfour suggests Meloni may have to reposition herself.
If Trump wins, “then you’ve got all the political leaders elbowing each other to lead the right. And Orban has already positioned himself there.”
 

WASHINGTON: Russian dissident historian Tamara Eidelman was on vacation in Greece when Moscow’s tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022 and she realized that she would not be going back to her home country.

With her single suitcase, Eidelman, 65, flew to Portugal, where her daughter had been living, and began a new life in exile.
“I am operating under the assumption that I will not return. I am building my life in Portugal,” Eidelman, who has over 1.6 million followers on her history channel on YouTube, told AFP. “I want to come back... but if I sit every day thinking ‘When will it finally happen?’ I will go mad.”
Eidelman, who was declared a “foreign agent” by the government in Moscow, is part of a group of exiled anti-war Russian public intellectuals and cultural figures who are rebuilding their careers abroad.
While they cater to a large diaspora — more than 800,000 Russians are estimated to have left the country in just the past two years — unlike the previous waves of emigration from Russia’s calamities, they are able to continue speaking to those who stayed via social media, despite growing government restrictions.
“I think it’s one of the advantages of today’s emigration, if there can be any advantages, that our ties with our homeland have not been ruptured so drastically,” Eidelman, who wore a pin in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on her black blouse, said before a lecture in a community center outside Washington.
“Today there is an opportunity to exchange ideas. And, despite all the bans, inside Russia you can still access what is being done by those who emigrated. It is extremely valuable, it must be used and cherished.”

While exiles are unlikely to have a significant impact on political life inside Russia, “they can be the keepers of ideas, the centers of expertise and civic education,” according to Alexander Morozov, a political analyst and lecturer at Charles University in Prague.
When political change occurs, “Those who have retained trust and their symbolic capital can play a role in Russia’s renewal,” he wrote in a recent paper.

During her first few months in Portugal, Eidelman, who worked as a history teacher at a prestigious Moscow school for more than 30 years before becoming an editor, blogger and public speaker, kept herself busy looking for a place to live, reassembling her YouTube team and signing up for Portuguese lessons.
But she would catch herself thinking she was there on a brief visit and that she needed to buy a bottle of Port wine to bring back to Moscow to her mother and friends. Then it hit her.
“I felt a tremendous weight pressing on me when things had settled down a little and I realized that I am going to be in this wonderful, beautiful country for a long time,” she said. “Of course, (President Vladimir Putin’s) regime will collapse, but I don’t know if I will be around to see it.”
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Eidelman’s YouTube channel has ballooned from some 500,000 followers to 1.63 million and a team of 30 people, with lectures on Russian, Ukrainian and world history — as well as a special presentation on Putin’s assault on democracy, which she delivered in a T-shirt that read “No Putin No War.”
“I want to express my unconditional support for Ukraine in this war and I believe that all its territories, including Crimea, must be returned to it,” Eidelman told AFP, referring to the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
During her lecture in an auditorium of several hundred Russian speakers titled “The Judgment of History,” Eidelman examined the painful questions of countries’ and societies’ culpability and responsibility for crimes from ancient Greece to Nazi Germany — with the clear undertone of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Prosecuting those who committed direct crimes against Ukraine will not be enough, Eidelman suggested in her interview with AFP.
“I believe that there cannot be collective responsibility, that a whole people cannot be guilty,” she told AFP. “But at the same time, there must be... moral responsibility, responsibility before one’s conscience.”
Alina, a 39-year-old Russia-born quality control manager drove more than eight hours to Washington from the southern US state of Tennessee with her husband and two children to hear Eidelman speak.
To Alina, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “a crime against a neighboring country, but it’s also a crime against my own country because crimes are being committed in the name of people like me, who don’t agree with it.”
In these tragic times, Eidelman’s talk was a breath of fresh air, Alina said.
“When I listen to her lectures, I believe that there is — if not hope, then at least some light ahead for you to follow,” she said. “You get the feeling that you are not alone in all of this, even though physically you live apart from everyone.”
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