We are about to see how significant a politician Giorgia Meloni really is after she arrived in Washington yesterday evening for bilateral talks today with Donald Trump. Tariffs will be top of the agenda but they are also expected to talk about Ukraine. She then flies immediately back to Rome to meet Vice President J.D. Vance – a Catholic – on Friday, who is in Rome for Easter hoping to meet the Pope as well.
Certainly, Meloni is the one leader of a major EU country Trump enjoys seeing
Italy’s first female prime minister travels to Washington bearing the cross of the EU on her small but sturdy shoulders. For she is going not on behalf of Italy but on behalf, albeit unofficially, of the EU. This is ironic considering her past record as a Eurosceptic in common with so many on the so-called ‘far right’. But she is Trump’s favourite EU leader. She has a great sense of humour and is full of charm. She speaks good English. And above all, she is a pragmatist.
A passionate reader of Tolkien, her hero is Sam Gamgee because, as she told me, ‘Without Sam, Frodo is nothing.’ Her trip to Washington, she may be feeling, is not unlike that of the Fellowship of the Ring to Mordor. Many in the Italian media are calling it ‘Mission Impossible’.
Trump has repeatedly made plain his contempt for the European Union. This week he rejected the EU Commission’s offer of a zero-for-zero tariff deal. So hostile is he to the EU that it is doubtful whether he would even agree to meet EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Earlier this week, talks between the EU negotiator, Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic, and Howard Lutnik, US Commerce Secretary, are said to have run into the sand. But von der Leyen has given Meloni her support as an unofficial mediator between Europe and America and they have had several preparatory telephone conversations.
How times change. When Meloni became prime minister two and a half years ago, and the world was still calling her the heir to Mussolini, von der Leyen said that the EU had the tools to stop her if need be. But the two have since become allies, in particular over the Mediterranean migrant crisis. EU Commission press spokeswoman, Arianna Podestà, said that ‘naturally’ only the Commission could negotiate, but the Meloni-Trump meeting is ‘much appreciated and strictly coordinated’.
The task confronting Meloni, however, is daunting. As the US President told a White House press conference earlier this month:
For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike (…)You know, you think of the European Union, very friendly. They rip us off. It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.
This week, as he rejected the EU’s zero tariff offer, he told a White House press conference:
The European Union has been very, very bad to us, they don’t take our cars … they don’t take our agricultural product. They don’t take anything practically.
Elsewhere, he has called Europeans ‘parasites’.
Meloni is often talked about as the most important leader in the European Union, given the weakness and deep unpopularity of Emmanuel Macron in France and (until recently when he lost the election) Olaf Scholz in Germany. Meanwhile, she goes from strength to strength. Popular support for her Brothers of Italy party has increased significantly since she came to power in October 2022 at the head of a right-wing coalition. For a party in power to increase support is almost unheard of in a European democracy.
Certainly, she is the one leader of a major EU country Trump enjoys seeing. She was the only EU leader he invited to his inauguration on 20 January. Earlier that month, she was his guest at Mar-a-Lago when he called her a ‘fantastic woman’. In addition, she is a friend of Elon Musk, who last September presented her in New York with a Global Citizen Award from the influential Atlantic Council think tank. ‘She is even more beautiful on the inside than the outside,’ he said. She and Trump are both right-wing national conservatives but are able to appeal to what in Britain is called the Red Wall working class. Both are very seductive public speakers.
What Trump wants even more is for the EU to turn its back on China in favour of America
We shall soon find out how much all this counts when it comes to the nitty-gritty. Before setting off for Washington, Meloni conceded: ‘We are in a difficult moment (…) We will do our best as always.’ She also joked: ‘I don’t feel any pressure at all, as you can imagine, regarding the next two days.’
The Italian left has been taunting her relentlessly about this trip to the White House by asking rhetorically, ‘Why is she going?’ and ‘Is she the EU’s ambassador to Trump, or Trump’s ambassador to the EU?’
She has said Trump’s tariffs are ‘mistaken’ and that it would be counter-productive for the EU to react with equally huge tariffs on American imports. She has declined to say what she will be offering Trump when she meets him today.
But it is thought that in an attempt to get him to think again and do an acceptable tariff deal with the EU, she will offer a number of things. Firstly, an increase in defence expenditure across the EU to 2 per cent of GDP immediately with the possibility of increasing to 3.5 per cent in the longer term (Italy spends 1.6 per cent of GDP on defence). Secondly, that EU countries buy arms from America to achieve this. Thirdly, that the EU waters down its ‘Green Deal’ which aims to cut by 2030 greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent and by 2050 by 100 per cent. And lastly, that the EU buys significantly more natural gas from America.
All this will please Trump, but what he wants even more is for the EU to turn its back on China in favour of America. Indeed, it emerged this week that in return for lower tariffs he now plans to force the EU to block Chinese imports, stop Chinese firms setting up shop in Europe, and stop them shipping goods through the bloc.
Ukraine, too, is an issue that potentially puts Trump and Meloni, despite their shared political beliefs, in serious conflict. Meloni was one of the most devout supporters in Europe of Joe Biden’s programme of military support for Ukraine. In March 2024, he invited her to the White House, where he kissed her on the head and called her ‘a close friend’.
Since Trump’s election victory, however, she has been conspicuously quiet about Ukraine. But I think she now genuinely believes that President Volodymyr Zelensky cannot regain the parts of Ukraine captured by Vladimir Putin, especially as Trump has suspended military aid, and that it is pointless shedding any more blood.
Giorgia Meloni, as I said, is above all a pragmatist.
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