Italy is the home of two important experiments. One is political: three years ago this month it became the first of the major protagonists from the 20^th century’s European wars to elect as its leader someone who identifies their political roots as coming from fascism. The other is economic: as the largest recipient of the first big transfers of European Union funds derived from collective borrowing, known as the Recovery and Resilience Facility, Italy has in effect become a test of whether such transfers can be handled safely and well in a country viewed with suspicion by northern Europeans as inherently corrupt and riven with organised crime.

It will surprise some to learn that Italy is faring quite well on both experiments. Three years into the political test and four into the economic one, we can say that Italy’s post-fascist leader, Giorgia Meloni, looks a lot less deserving of that label than does the man whose inauguration she attended in Washington in January, Donald Trump; and that the real issue with fiscal transfers to Italy is not whether they will be stolen but rather how productive a use they can be put to. That, rather than concerns about organised crime in southern Europe, should be the main criterion for whether collective European borrowing deserves to be repeated and expanded.

Italians seem to quite like being seen as something of a test-bed, especially in politics. This may reflect nostalgia for the pioneering role that city-states such as Venice, Florence and Genoa played in Medieval Europe, in politics and finance as well as in culture. In the case of fascism, invented by Benito Mussolini as a resurrection of imperial Roman glory, it may reflect some feelings of regret, but also perhaps an instinct for deflection of blame for the way those ideas were later implemented by their German emulators.

In modern times, the most notable example of a pioneering Italian political experiment began in 1994 when the businessman Silvio Berlusconi was briefly elected prime minister, but really came into force seven years later when this advertising and media mogul successfully used populist techniques to form one of postwar Italy’s most long-lasting governments, from 2001-2006, and then again from 2008-2011. Berlusconi was Trump before Trump, a man skilled at salesmanship, who used his command (and ownership) of television to dominate politics, a shameless liar and narcissist who used patronage, which others would call cronyism, to build a coalition of support inside and outside parliament.

This familiarity with experimentation may explain why the victory of Giorgia Meloni in general elections in September 2022 was received far more calmly inside Italy than in the rest of Europe. Meloni’s victory broke two political moulds: she became Italy’s first female prime minister but also, just as important, the first to come from a political party that openly and proudly traces its roots back to Mussolini’s National Fascist Party that ruled Italy from 1922 until 1943.

Since her electoral triumph came almost on the centenary of the March on Rome that launched Il Duce’s dictatorship, the arrival in government of someone labelable as a ‘neo-fascist’ was bound to cause concern, especially in the rest of Europe. It caused special concern among headline-writers in the international media about how best to describe her. Given the use by her party, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), in its logo of a burning flame that is reminiscent of fascist iconography, it was natural to describe her as ‘extreme right’, ‘far-right’ or ‘neo-fascist’, even though Meloni herself has claimed many times that fascism has been ‘consigned to history’.

Now, as the third anniversary of that triumph approaches, Meloni is showing herself to be no passing phase: far from it, she is busy breaking another even more significant mould, one that might indicate that she could be leading Italy well into the next decade.

Despite all the doubts about having both a relative political neophyte (just 45 years old in 2022, having previously served merely as a junior minister in Berlusconi’s final government) and an apparent neo-fascist leading one of the founding member states of the European Union, Meloni is defying political gravity. For a leader who is now three-fifths of the way through the parliamentary term, her party’s poll ratings seem almost eerily stable at just below 30 per cent, which is even an improvement on the 26 per cent that, at the 2022 elections, made Fratelli d’Italia the largest party. Moreover, for a government led by a party that harks back to Mussolini, she has been surprisingly uncontroversial. That may, indeed, be a main reason for her continued popularity.

The normal experience of Italian coalition governments is that they eventually fall apart less by being undermined by opposition parties than through rivalry within their own ranks. This is natural, especially in modern times when party loyalties have become much weaker than they were in the early postwar (and post-fascist) decades. The three parties in Meloni’s coalition – the others are the Lega (League), a quasi separatist party led by a populist firebrand, Matteo Salvini, and Forza Italia (Go, Italy), founded by Berlusconi, who died in 2023 – are largely competing for the same voters. In fact, a big part of the rise in Fratelli d’Italia’s poll numbers ahead of the 2022 election came through defections from Lega. Meloni’s greatest political success has been to keep Lega and Forza Italia both at around 9-10 per cent in the polls, firmly as junior partners.

She has done so not by outflanking her partners on the right, as was the fear, but rather by keeping Italy firmly in the European mainstream, which is where her technocratic, non-party predecessor as prime minister, Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank, had placed it. Certainly, it helps that her strong opposition to illegal immigration and hostile approach to asylum-seekers has now itself become mainstream in Europe. But also, thanks to the flow into Italy of EU funds since 2021 under the Recovery and Resilience facility equivalent to 1-2 per cent of GDP each year, with a total of €194 billion due in the five years 2021-2026, playing the Eurosceptic card has not been an option either for her or for her chief rival, Salvini of the Lega.

Indeed, the most revealing aspect of Meloni’s three years in Palazzo Chigi, the prime minister’s splendid offices in Rome, may be that having positioned herself and Fratelli d’Italia as the chief external opposition to Draghi’s national unity government of 2021-2022 by being the only large parliamentary party to withhold its support, in government she has stayed close to Draghi’s policies and is even reported to be on good personal terms with her predecessor.

In a speech she made on August 27^th to the prestigious annual meeting in Rimini of a conservative Catholic movement, Comunione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation), she even referred jokingly to her relationship with Draghi, saying that in the media she was always amused to see which box she was being placed in at different times, the anti-Draghi one or the pro-Draghi one. The right answer, based on the policies her government has followed, might be termed the prudently pragmatic but unambitious one.

One notable indicator in the financial markets has been that borrowing costs for the French government have just moved above those for Italy, despite Italy carrying a burden of public debt that, at 138 per cent of GDP, remains considerably higher than France’s at 113 per cent. This may mainly be the result of France’s political instability, with it now cycling through prime ministers at a rate much faster than Italy has ever done, notwithstanding the notoriously revolving doors of Italian politics. But it also reflects a deliberate caution, now proved over three years, by Meloni and her Lega finance minister, Giancarlo Giorgetti.

In 1994, 2001 and again in 2008, the populist Silvio Berlusconi pioneered not just by being Trump before Trump but also by forming the first coalitions in postwar Italy to include a party with Mussolinian roots. His coalitions, like Meloni’s, brought together what was then the Lega Nord (Northern League), a party infused by suspicion of supposed thieving southerners, the Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance), which had previously been the postwar neo-fascist MSI (Italian Social Movement), and his own party-cum-fan club, Forza Italia. To keep together this band of apparent incompatibles Berlusconi spread public money around, as far as the financial markets would allow him. This is why, in 2011, his final demise as prime minister came as a result of a bond-market crisis.

Meloni has not so far done this. It helps that unlike Berlusconi she has a squeaky clean reputation as far as personal conduct and corruption is concerned, one that she seems determined to maintain. For someone who proudly identifies herself as a Catholic conservative and promoter of family values, she starts from an unusual place as an unmarried mother of a now-nine-year-old daughter. But she lifted her popularity and reputation, especially among women, in 2023 by abruptly dumping her partner (who is the daughter’s father), Andrea Giambruno, when the TV journalist was caught on video propositioning his female co-host.

If Fratelli d’Italia were to slide in the polls during the next two years, especially at the expense of Lega or to the left-wing opposition parties, the temptation to open up the purse strings would undoubtedly grow. For the time being, however, riding high in the polls, she is positioning her key achievements as having given Italy a new reputation internationally for ‘stability and seriousness’, and as having chosen to govern on ‘il campo del reale‘ (the field of reality) rather than one of ideology or utopianism.

In foreign policy, the Meloni government has played an especially cautious and pragmatic role. She has been a strong supporter of NATO and of Ukraine, while being careful not to commit Italy to providing Ukraine with substantial financial or military support. She has pledged to raise Italy’s currently low level of spending on defence of just over 1.5 per cent of GDP to the NATO target of 2 per cent and eventually to 3.5 per cent, but so far is doing so chiefly by relabelling existing spending as defence (e.g. that on coastguards or military pensions) rather than spending more. And while she has played up her contacts with conservative Republicans in the United States, including Trump himself and his former ‘best buddy’ Elon Musk, she has conspicuously avoided the sort of flattery and sycophancy towards Trump that has been used by some other European leaders.

It is all quite a far cry from what most people would think of as neo-fascism. There is no doubt that Meloni and several of her ministerial colleagues do have an authoritarian streak. She has been quick, arguably too quick, to use Italy’s rather draconian law of criminal defamation to intimidate critical journalists. Her government has sought to interfere in banking takeovers, such as the giant Unicredit’s attempt to acquire a smaller rival, BPM, in July, or the troubled Monte dei Paschi di Siena’s bid to buy its larger Milan-based rival, Mediobanca. It has made full use of its powers to place loyalists at the head of state-owned or state-influenced companies and institutions, including the public broadcasting network, RAI. And she has railed against judges on numerous occasions, especially when they ruled against her flagship plan to send asylum-seekers to custom-built processing centres in Albania.

She and her government have also been hostile to social rights. Her main target has been surrogate motherhood, which is thereby also an attack on gay couples of all kinds since they are common users of surrogacy. Yet while using surrogacy has certainly become more uncomfortable, especially for the future rights of the children involved, the effort to criminalise the practice has been largely performative rather than substantive, since an Italian government cannot criminalise surrogate births that occur in other countries. Most Italian surrogacy candidates are using mothers abroad. The real question, then, for any parent, gay or straight, using surrogacy, is less what Italian law is now than what the legal position might be by the time their children grow up.

As of 2025, based on the actions of her government during its three years in office, the correct label for Giorgia Meloni can only be conservative, not extreme-right, far-right or neo-fascist. The 2022 elections anyway did not indicate that Italian voters were renewing their interest in either fascism or extremism, but rather that between a quarter and a third of them had decided to try the one party that had not recently been in government, and that was being led by a rather charismatic but seemingly unthreatening female, Meloni.

Italian commentators debate over whether Meloni in office can be said to have shown herself to be in the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrat) mainstream that dominated government for nearly four decades, or whether she is different. Part of the answer, at least for non political-scientists like me, is that during those postwar decades there were a number of occasions when fascist tendencies reared their heads, especially in the form of state involvement in terrorist violence in the 1970s and 1980s, and in the continuation until the 1980s of the corporatist relationship between the state and heavy industry that Mussolini had established in the 1920s and 1930s.

Giulio Andreotti, the seven-times Democrazia Cristiana prime minister who was portrayed in Paolo Sorrentino’s great 2009 film Il Divo as a conspiratorial kingpin both of the ‘strategy of tension’ used in that terrorist violence and of close relationships with Mafia groups, was certainly no liberal and not a centrist either. Berlusconi, in effect Andreotti’s successor in the 1990s and 2000s as the dominant figure in Italian politics, was closely collaborative with the Catholic Church, and was a member of the notorious secret freemasonry group, Propaganda Due (P2), which had been shown in the early 1980s to have included leading figures plotting a coup d’état.

The key point is that the instincts and ideas of fascism had never disappeared in postwar Italy: they may no longer have been talked about publicly or in polite company, but they were there. So, while Meloni and her party have brought new resonances of pre-war iconography and even of ‘nostalgia’ for Mussolini (though Meloni herself criticises such nostalgia), their arrival in government either as a junior partner in 1994 or now as the leading party has not brought in anything truly new. None of the tendencies seen in the Meloni government have been new, nor extreme by the standards of many previous governments in postwar Italy. In some ways, circumstances have so far allowed her to be more moderate than either Berlusconi or Andreotti.

The real question surrounding Meloni and her government concerns whether she can succeed in winning the elections due in 2027 at the latest, enabling her to occupy Palazzo Chigi for a long time to come. The left-wing opposition is deeply split between the populist, anti-establishment Muovimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement) and the more conventional centre-left Partito Democratico (Democratic Party). So, if Meloni can keep control of her own coalition she must stand a chance of beating the record of Italy’s longest-serving prime minister, Alcide de Gasperi, who held power for more than seven years from 1945 to 1953.

This is where the economic experiment could come into play. The gush of European recovery funds, known in Italy as the Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR, National Recovery and Resilience Plan) and first managed by the Draghi government before Meloni took over and amended the plan modestly in 2022-2023, has by and large been handled successfully. It has mainly been spent on railways, schools, other infrastructure and on the green transition. While projects of this magnitude are bound to bring some mistakes, cost overruns, delays and even corruption, the record has mostly been good.

What the PNRR does not seem to have done, however, is to make any substantial measurable impact on productivity, innovation or entrepreneurship. The infrastructure will bring some efficiency benefits and will add in many ways to the quality of life. But the trend rate of economic growth, estimated by the OECD to be around 0.5-0.7 per cent per annum, has shown no sign of rising. The weight on the economy of public debt and of Italy’s ageing population is heavy. This means that structural, which means deregulatory and liberalising, reforms would be the only real way to overcome those burdens and make a long-term difference. The Draghi government lasted too briefly to achieve such reforms, and Meloni has not attempted them in any major way.

The result is that when the infusion of EU cash comes to an end in 2026 or 2027, if the PNRR is extended to accommodate delayed projects, this European fiscal support for economic demand in Italy will fall away. The Italian economy has certainly not been performing strongly under her government, and household incomes have been noticeably weak, but with employment high and PNRR projects under way, it has been doing well enough to assuage critics and maintain support.

For the 2027 elections, which she could seek to bring forward into 2026, much will depend on how the economy fares as PNRR funds diminish. The elections may happen in time for Meloni to avoid trouble. If she does succeed in winning, the big ambitions she said in her Rimini speech that she has for the government are threefold: to reform the constitution so as to introduce direct elections for the prime ministership; to devolve more power to regional governments in what is known as ‘differentiated autonomy’; and to reform the justice system, so as to separate the careers of judges and prosecutors.

The justice reform is already under way, and is a long obsession of the right, especially under Berlusconi, because of a belief that prosecutors are biased towards the left and so shouldn’t be allowed to become judges. The differentiated autonomy is largely an effort to keep Lega on board in the coalition and to suppress rivalry from Salvini. But the notion of direct elections for the prime minister is a particular Meloni obsession.

If it were to be achieved, it would represent a considerable centralisation of power. It would, in a very real way, represent a kind of rebuttal of a postwar constitution that was deliberately designed to prevent any future Mussolini from achieving or holding on to power. This, rather than anything else in her government’s agenda, is the one genuine reason to worry about Meloni’s neo-fascist roots.

The barriers in the constitution against such a change are considerable, notably the need for a national referendum to approve the change. One of her more populist predecessors on the centre-left, Matteo Renzi, became a political Lazarus during his two years as prime minister in 2014-2016, flying high before then crashing to earth when a referendum rejected his own attempt to reform the constitution. It is a reassuring precedent for everyone except Giorgia Meloni herself.