Giorgia Meloni was nearly an hour late for Monday’s European crisis summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris. According to the French press, Italy’s prime minister made her appearance ‘in the middle of the meeting, 50 minutes later than the agreed time’. Perhaps her Maserati got caught in the Paris traffic, or perhaps Meloni made her late entrance intentionally; a way of underlining to her host, Emmanuel Macron, and the other European leaders present, that she alone has a warm relationship with Donald Trump.
Meloni visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club for what both parties called an ‘informal meeting’ at the start of the year. The then President-elect described the Italian as a ‘fantastic woman’ and told reporters that ‘she’s really taken Europe by storm’. A fortnight later Meloni was one of the handful of world leaders invited by Trump to his inauguration in Washington.
It is Meloni who is most in touch with her people among Europe’s traditional powerhouses
To no one’s great surprise, Monday’s summit achieved little other than revealing the divisions that exist between European nations. Apart from Meloni, the leaders of Britain, Spain, Denmark, Germany and Poland were greeted by Macron, along with Mark Rutte, secretary general of Nato, and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.
There were plenty of air kisses and manly embraces on the steps of the Elysee but once inside, Europe’s political elite differed on how best to respond to being sidelined by the US in their peace talks with Russia over Ukraine. As the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, put it ‘the only certain success of the day is that the eleven Europeans managed to meet within a few hours’.
Quelle surprise. For years, Europe has been unable to agree on anything, whether it’s how to tackle the migrant crisis, tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, trade agreements with South America and particularly the war in Ukraine.
This was true even before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The previous month, the Washington Post ran an article headlined ‘A divided Europe confronts Russia with conflicting goals on Ukraine’. The newspaper added that ‘competing European agendas risk undermining US-led diplomacy to deter a Russian incursion’.
Much has changed in Europe’s power dynamic in the three years since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Britain is on its fourth prime minister, one whose poll ratings are in freefall with voters describing his government as ‘incompetent’ and ‘dishonest’. France has gone through four premiers in the last 13 months and Macron’s approval ratings are at an all-time low with 79 per cent of the people dissatisfied.
Germany’s coalition government collapsed last November and this weekend’s elections will almost certainly be the end of Olaf Scholz’s chancellorship. Spain’s Socialists, meanwhile, lost the 2023 general election but Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez clung onto power by granting Catalan separatists an amnesty in exchange for their support. Poland’s prime minister, the centrist Donald Tusk, has seen his popularity fall since his victory in the general election of December 2023. Tusk came to power with a boast to implement 100 reforms in his first 100 days in office, but he manged only fifteen changes.
Ursula von der Leyen was re-elected president of the European Commission although with no great enthusiasm. Even some of her own centre-right European People’s party were opposed to another five years of her leadership, notably the French Republican party. ‘We will not be supporting her in the forthcoming election…because we believe that her record does not live up to what Europe expects today’, said François-Xavier Bellamy, the European leader of the Republicans.
Bellamy added that his party had been opposed to von der Leyen’s nomination in 2019 because ‘she was Emmanuel Macron’s candidate’. The French would also have been aware of von der Leyen’s disastrous six years as Germany’s defence minister between 2013 and 2019.
The one European leader whose popularity has gone in a positive direction in the last couple of years is Meloni. When she was elected PM in September 2022, a chill wind blew through Europe’s Progressive elite. Von der Leyen and the then French PM, Elisabeth Borne, warned Meloni to stay on the right track or face the consequences. Macron has barely uttered a civil word to Meloni and she in return makes no secret of her disdain for the French president.
But it is Meloni who is most in touch with her people among Europe’s traditional powerhouses. How the Progressive elite wails at her success. ‘Meloni consolidates popularity by disrupting Italian democracy,’ was the headline in a hatchet piece on her in Le Monde last week.
‘Nationalist’, ‘reactionary’ and ‘fascist’ all reared their heads in an article that tried to make sense of her popularity in Italy. A few years ago, lamented the paper, Meloni ‘could have been described as a populist, someone “against the system”…Today, she is the system. And Italy’s old republican institutions are presented as cumbersome obstacles by her people’.
Meloni is neither a ‘fascist’ or a ‘reactionary’; she is a democrat. Like Trump, she made promises to her voters and she is striving to make good on those promises. In contrast, the leaders of Britain, France and Germany ignore their electorates, the majority of whom want order restored to their borders and to their streets.
That is why Macron, Starmer and Scholz are so unpopular. It is also why the Trump administration has little respect for them. ‘We must do more than talk about democratic values,’ said J.D. Vance in his address to the Munich Security Conference last Friday. ‘We must live them’.
Meloni is on message, but the rest of Western Europe is still living in the Progressive past.
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