FOR years, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni enjoyed leverage as the right-wing leader who could connect Washington and Brussels.
Recently, though, she seems to have decided that Trump is a bridge too far.
After suffering major political setbacks because of her association with Trump, who is deeply unpopular in Italy and seen as the cause of rising gas prices, Meloni seized on an opportunity to extricate herself from a relationship that had grown poisonous.
After Trump launched a broadside against Pope Leo XIV, Meloni rallied to the Holy Father’s defence, declaring his remarks “unacceptable”.
The rebuke served as the breaking point for a relationship that had already been fraying under the weight of divergent geopolitical interests.
A jilted Trump quickly retaliated, telling an Italian newspaper that he was “shocked”, adding, “I thought she was brave, but I was wrong.”
The spat seemed to be the end of, or at least a low point for, perhaps Trump’s most special relationship in Europe.
It is also another remarkable moment in the career of Meloni, who has shifted from teenage neofascist activist to hard-right party leader – before finally emerging as a pragmatic conservative and the first female prime minister of Italy.
When Trump returned to power last year, many in the European establishment feared that he would pull her to the far-right extremes.
Instead, analysts suggest, Trump may have actually pushed her deeper into the Europe mainstream.
“In the relationship with Trump, she originally thought he could be an asset, and maybe he was, because she could appear as the person that could mediate between the rest of Europe and Trump,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Florence.
“But gradually, it has become a liability. I think she took advantage of what he said about the pope to make a firm statement and take distance. She couldn’t do otherwise.”
In 2018, when she was still a marginal figure in Italy’s crowded populist space, Meloni invited Trump’s former top adviser, Steve Bannon, to be the guest of honour at her political conference.
A year later, she was the only Italian invited to speak at Washington’s Conservative Political Action Conference, where she mirrored Trump’s rhetoric.
Years later, when they were both at the height of their power, they seemed to be hitting it off.
“You don’t mind being called beautiful, right?” Trump said to Meloni at a summit in Egypt last October. “You are.”
Despite the public displays of affection, throughout his second term, Trump has increasingly put pressure on Meloni, along with other European allies, to increase Italy’s military spending and to accept unfavourable trade terms.
She showed signs of resistance.
Last April, as Trump threatened to raise tariffs, she said, “I think the choice of the United States is a wrong choice,” even as she cautioned against retaliatory tariffs from Europe.
In January, as Trump increasingly began to float the idea of taking Greenland, she said, “I don’t believe in the idea of the US launching military action on Greenland, which I would not agree with.”
When Trump decided to attack Iran, he did not give Meloni a heads-up. To her humiliation, her defence minister was vacationing in Dubai at the time and had to be evacuated via military jet.
The war also led to a spike in gas and electricity prices in Italy.
Meloni, a populist with a sharp sense of pocketbook issues, understood the political danger, especially as Italians prepared to vote in a referendum on a crucial judicial change that she supported.
As poll after poll showed that Italy did not support the war and did not like Trump, Meloni started speaking out.
“I am concerned, obviously, because it would be stupid to believe that what happens even far from our borders does not involve us,” she said on March 2, adding, “The United States and Israel decided to attack without the involvement of their European partners.”
Days later, she made it clear that “we are not at war and we do not want to go to war”.
She then added in a speech to parliament that because the United States had problems communicating, she couldn’t necessarily endorse the US assessment that Iranian intransigence had thwarted negotiations over a deal.
For all her effort to distance herself from Trump’s war, she badly lost the referendum on the judiciary anyway, after the vote became perceived as a plebiscite on her own popularity.
Now, experts say, Meloni will have to decide if she wants to do it alone or seek closer alliances in the European establishment that she rose to power bashing. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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