The far right is on the march. And in Europe, the birthplace of fascism, that has sparked big questions about what it means — for democracy, for the European Union — when far-right leaders actually govern.

Far-right parties are leading the polls in Germany and France. Would they moderate once in power? Not necessarily. In Poland and Hungary, hard-right populist governments meaningfully chipped away at the rule of law.

But one intriguing counterexample is Giorgia Meloni. Italy’s prime minister was the first far-right leader to take power in a founding member state of the E.U. She hasn’t rigged any courts or deployed the Italian navy to block immigrant boats. And rather than working to extract Italy from the E.U., she says she wants to change it from within. Today my colleague Roger Cohen, who recently sat down for a rare interview with Meloni, writes about what that might look like.

Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, has a vision.

Once, it was extracting Italy from the euro and the grip of the “usurers” of the European Central Bank in order to steer her country toward a far-right nationalist future. But that was before power tempered her. Now rather than turning her back on Europe, she wants Italy to lead it.

When I spoke to Meloni recently, she talked little of a sluggish economy, but a lot about an Italy that “does not run after others.” “I don’t like the idea of a submissive Italy,” she told me. She wants her country, the world’s eighth-largest economy, pivotally placed in the Mediterranean as the importance of Africa grows, to be “a protagonist — and one that can benefit all of Europe.”

(Read Roger’s interview with Meloni and takeaways.)

Italy has found a long-elusive stability under her leadership. With President Emmanuel Macron of France departing next year, Meloni, who this week becomes the longest continually serving postwar prime minister of Italy, could emerge as the doyenne of European politics, a role once played by former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Of course, Merkel welcomed refugees; Meloni does not.

As she has journeyed from post-Fascist roots to a pivotal place in European politics, Meloni has remained something of an enigma. In our interview, she described Mussolini’s rule, which she considered an inspiration in her youth, as a “particularly complex” time, even if the catastrophe of Il Duce’s dictatorship and his alliance with Hitler was clear enough by 1945.

Her ambivalence over horrific history does not appear to affect her approach to the present, which is pragmatic.

Meloni could offer an indication of where Europe is heading. Marine Le Pen, of the once-outcast French far right, is the front-runner in next year’s presidential election; the hard-right AfD is leading polls in Germany. The countries at the very core of postwar European integration would then be tested in their fundamental orientation.

Such a scenario once promised the end of the E.U. But Meloni’s time in office suggests that, once in power, priorities can shift as ideology is cast aside.

Immigration and Donald Trump

Like all of Europe’s far-right leaders, Meloni’s appeal has been based in part on her stance on immigration. During her election campaign, she warned of “ethnic replacement,” and relentlessly associated migrants with violence. In office, however, her approach shifted.

When she came to power in 2022, the E.U’s immigration policy centered on finding means to “spread the burden” — essentially distributing migrants across member states rather than reducing their flow. That has changed, due in part to Meloni, who led the E.U. in a hard line against asylum seekers and illegal migrants, attempting to offshore their processing, a procedure that now has European support.

She has also, however, pushed the continent to see Africa as a land of potential rather than problems. Under a plan adopted in 2024, Italy has invested heavily in 18 African countries, from Tunisia to Mozambique, in fields including energy, water, health and agriculture. In Algeria alone, close to 90,000 acres of desert were planted with corn.

The idea has been not only to encourage would-be migrants to stay home by increasing economic opportunity but also to build a strategic bridge with Africa. Her top diplomatic adviser, Fabrizio Saggio, pointed out that Italy secures the bulk of its critical minerals from China, which in turn has imported much of them from Africa — “and Sicily is 190 miles from Tunisia, so does that make any sense?”

Meloni’s impact on E.U. policy in this area has been significant, an example of Italy having “force, weight and capacity,” as she put it.

That does not stop her using immigration as a means to provide red meat for her base, as in a recent outburst addressing the flow of migrants into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast.

Nor does it stop her from quietly authorizing more than 450,000 visas for migrants to work in Italy’s fields and factories and to look after Europe’s oldest population. For Meloni, ideology is malleable, often ceding to realism.

With President Trump, an ideological ally, she thought this flexibility would pay dividends. She aimed to build on their shared nationalism and hostility to immigration, and also to ensure that the Western alliance remained functional.

But in the face of provocations from the White House — an attack on Pope Leo; a Trump story that Meloni “begged” him for a photograph together — Meloni snapped: “Italy and I never beg.”

She’d thought the relationship with Trump would be “easier,” she told me. But their shared values were eclipsed by Meloni’s single biggest foreign-policy objective: to overcome Italy’s longtime status as the least of the major powers.

She hasn’t spoken to Trump in several weeks and was unsure when they would.

The future of Europe

Overall, her four years (and counting) in power suggest that, rather than the undoing of the E.U., as far-right parties like Meloni’s once threatened, something else may emerge: a Europe of nationalist rhetoric, ever harsher anti-immigrant measures, and a looser rather than more federal structure, but also one guided by realism.

The E.U. has been perhaps the greatest peacemaking creation of the second half of the 20th century. That is too easily and too often forgotten. But the far right’s hostility to “ever closer union” does not in itself mean the end of union. As Meloni has learned, to govern is to adjust.

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