Reform’s leader may hope to tread a similar path to Italy’s prime minister, but she is an experienced parliamentarian open to collaboration and compromise
O
ne of the more striking images from June’s G7 summit showed a small group of world leaders engaged in an impromptu and informal evening chat at the venue’s restaurant. In the foreground of that photo was a familiar blond head: Giorgia Meloni.
During her three years as the Italian prime minister, Meloni has moved beyond her hard-right populism, not to mention her fascism-adjacent origins, to earn at least the respect of other leaders – Keir Starmer among them – for her pragmatism and flexibility. Among those watching this transformation from the sidelines will be the man hoping to be Starmer’s replacement: Nigel Farage.
If campaigning is, as the political truism goes, conducted in poetry while government is prose, this is doubly so for insurgents and outsiders, whose careers are built on promising rapid and straightforward solutions to seemingly intractable national troubles.
