Italy has cycled through more than 60 governments since 1946 – a merry-go-round so reliable that political scientists have built entire careers cataloguing its instability. So, when Giorgia Meloni’s coalition ticked past Silvio Berlusconi’s old record this month to become the longest continuous government since the second world war, the temptation was to declare something profound: proof, at last, that the hard right can govern. But not quite. What Meloni has pulled off says less about her genius than about everyone else’s habit of throwing away a good hand.
Start with what she was dealt. The 2018 electoral law rewarded her coalition’s arithmetic before she’d done anything with it. Brothers of Italy emerged from 2022 so far ahead of Salvini’s Lega and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia parties that the question of who was actually in charge never had to be fought over. Disarray in the opposition is a Democratic Party and Five Star problem, not her achievement. A benign economic backdrop and a steady drip of EU recovery funds gave the coalition something to distribute rather than fight over. None of that was architecture. It was inheritance.
What is an achievement is how effectively Meloni has managed this inheritance. Italian politicians have an almost unbroken record of squandering exactly this kind of opportunity. Berlusconi had comparable dominance twice and burned through both times on scandal and coalition brinkmanship. The Five Star-Lega experiment had a working majority in 2018 and was dead within fourteen months because neither party would defer to the other. Liz Truss, the British Prime Minister, had a mandate and blew it in seven weeks testing markets that had already been tested too far. Meloni took a winning hand and played it correctly. She compromised on campaign promises rather than chasing them; stayed Atlanticist, until the Trump administration and Vatican got into a dispute; and backed Ukraine and avoided significant disagreements with Brussels. That is not conviction politics. It is restraint, a rare trait among politicians holding a strong hand.
Given how routinely politicians of every stripe blow it once the arithmetic finally breaks their way, simply not squandering the opportunity turns out to be most of the job.
None of which makes this a governing triumph. Growth is barely above zero, debt sits atop the EU table and the reforms Meloni actually promised, namely judicial overhaul and regional autonomy have not been delivered. Yet, longevity and pragmatism provide a certain level of stability. itself an achievement for a European country. Coalition governments in the Netherlands often collapse without finishing their term: Belgium went for well over a year without a government; Macron struggles to pass a budget; Merz’s coalition looks precarious and Britian has churned through seven prime ministers in a decade. The benchmark is low but Meloni is getting something right.
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