Italians will soon discover who the real Giorgia Meloni is

WHO, EXACTLY, is Giorgia Meloni? In 2023 Italians will find out. The first and biggest question is: what does the new prime minister, who triumphed in the general election in September, truly believe?

She heads a party, the Brothers of Italy, whose origins date back to post-war neo-fascism. It dominates a right-wing alliance infused with populism. Will she turn out to be the Trumpian firebrand who has set out an unequivocally alt-right agenda in some of her past speeches, especially while abroad? Or will she be the sensible, if unabashedly conservative, leader who has fallen in line with Italy’s NATO partners over Ukraine, sought advice from her respected predecessor, Mario Draghi, and has argued for prudent management of the public finances?

A further question is whether it even matters what Ms Meloni thinks. The constraints on her new government are so great, some argue, that it can only go in one, conventional, direction. It is reliant on the goodwill of Brussels for the disbursement of the bulk of Italy’s vast, €200bn ($201bn) share of the eu’s post-pandemic recovery fund. And it needs the approval of the markets to avoid the kind of storm that ravaged Britain’s finances in the autumn. With so much else on her plate—inflation, a cost-of-living crisis and a war at the eu’s frontier—Ms Meloni, the argument runs, would be crazy to start a culture war, let alone impose the kinds of restrictions on civil liberties seen in Poland and Hungary.

Whether that view proves correct may depend on the answer to another question that could be answered in 2023: how long will her government last? In the past 30 years, the average duration of an Italian administration has been less than 20 months. However mad, bad or indifferent the people at the top, there is a limit to what can be achieved in that time.

At first glance, Italy’s new government has all the requirements for a short life: the Brothers, the Northern League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party openly disagree on a range of issues, from Russia to budgetary policy. But their coalition’s outright majority is the first since Mr Berlusconi’s landslide victory in 2001, and that allowed him to remain in power for five years. If Ms Meloni can emulate him, then sooner or later she may feel sufficiently free of constraints to ditch her pragmatism—and experiment with the kinds of policies foreshadowed in those fiery speeches.■