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      Giorgia Meloni May Lead Italy, and Europe Is Worried

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      The hard-right leader has excoriated the European Union in the past, and she regularly blasts illegal immigrants and George Soros. But she is closer than ever to becoming prime minister.CAGLIARI, Sardinia — Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader of a party descended from post-Fascist roots and the favorite to become Italy’s next prime minister after elections this month, is known for her rhetorical crescendos, thundering timbre and ferocious speeches slamming gay-rights lobbies, European bureaucrats and illegal migrants.But she was suddenly soft-spoken when asked on a recent evening if she agreed, all caveats aside, with the historical consensus that the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini — whom she admired in her youth as a “good politician” — had been evil and bad for Italy.“Yeah,” she said, almost inaudibly, between sips of an Aperol Spritz and drags on a thin cigarette during an interview in Sardinia, where she had completed another high-decibel political rally.That simple syllable spoke volumes about Ms. Meloni’s campaign to reassure a global audience as she appears poised to become the first politician with a post-Fascist lineage to run Italy since the end of World War II.Such a feat seemed unimaginable not so long ago, and to pull it off, Ms. Meloni — who would also make history as the first woman to lead Italy — is balancing on a high-stakes wire, persuading her hard-right base of “patriots” that she hasn’t changed, while seeking to convince international skeptics that she’s no extremist, that the past is past, not prologue, and that Italy’s mostly moderate voters trust her, so they should, too.On Sept. 25, Italians will vote in national elections for the first time since 2018. In those years, three governments of wildly different political complexions came and went, the last a broad national unity government led by Mario Draghi, a technocrat who was the personification of pro-European stability.Ms. Meloni led the only major party, the Brothers of Italy, to stay outside that unity government, allowing her to vacuum up the opposition vote. Her support in polls steadily expanded from 4 percent in 2018 to 25 percent in a country where even moderate voters have grown numb to Fascist-Communist name calling, but remain enthusiastic about new, and potentially providential, leaders.As populism swept Italy in the last decade, Ms. Meloni adopted harsher tones and created the hard right’s latest iteration, the Brothers of Italy.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesMs. Meloni said her skyrocketing popularity did not mean the country had “moved to the extremes,” but that it had simply grown more comfortable with her and confident in her viability, even as she has tried to reposition herself closer to the European mainstream. Ms. Meloni, whose campaign slogan is “Ready,” has become a staunch supporter of NATO and Ukraine, and says she backs the European Union and the euro. The State of the WarDramatic Gains for Ukraine: After Ukraine’s offensive in its northeast drove Russian forces into a chaotic retreat, Ukrainian leaders face critical choices on how far to press the attack.How the Strategy Formed: The plan that allowed Ukraine’s recent gains began to take shape months ago during a series of intense conversations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials.Putin’s Struggles at Home: Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine have left President Vladimir V. Putin’s image weakened, his critics emboldened and his supporters looking for someone else to blame.Southern Counteroffensive: Military operations in the south have been a painstaking battle of river crossings, with pontoon bridges as prime targets for both sides. So far, it is Ukraine that has advanced.Global markets and the European establishment remain wary. “I fear the social and moral agenda of the right wing,” Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s vice president, said recently about the threat Ms. Meloni’s coalition posed to E.U. values. As recently as last month, she called for a naval blockade against migrants. She has depicted the European Union as an accomplice to “the project of ethnic replacement of Europe’s citizens desired by the great capitals and international speculators.”She has in the past characterized the euro as the “wrong currency” and gushed with support for Viktor Orban of Hungary, Marine Le Pen of France and the illiberal democracies in Eastern Europe. She excoriated “Brussels bureaucrats” and “emissaries” of George Soros, a favorite boogeyman of the nationalist right and conspiracy theorists depicting a world run by Jewish internationalist financiers.There remains concern that, once in power, Ms. Meloni would toss off her pro-European sheep’s wool and reveal her nationalist fangs — reverting to protectionism, caving in to her Putin-adoring coalition partners, rolling back gay rights and eroding liberal E.U. norms.Ms. Meloni called for a naval blockade against migrants as recently as last month.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesInternational investors and global leaders are wrong to be “afraid,” said Ms. Meloni, who is as affable and easygoing in private as she is vitriolic in public. Even in the midst of a heated campaign, she refused to take the bait from a desperate leader of the divided Italian left, who sounded “the alarm for Italian democracy.”“They’ll accuse me of being a Fascist my whole life,” Ms. Meloni said. “But I don’t care because in any case the Italians don’t believe anymore in this garbage.”She is delivering rations of red meat to her base (mass immigration is “an instrument in the hands of big great powers” to weaken workers, she growled in Cagliari) and is trying to mend fractures with the other right-wing leaders she is running with in a coalition.Her chief ally, Matteo Salvini, became the darling of the hard right in 2018 when he pivoted his once-secessionist northern-based League party into a nationalist force. But Ms. Meloni said those hard-right voters “came back home, because I am of that culture, so no one can do it better than I can.”Even so, Mr. Salvini is already creating problems for Ms. Meloni by urging a reconsideration of sanctions against Russia.Ms. Meloni acknowledged that her other coalition partner, Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister who famously named a bed after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, had put her “in difficulty as a woman” during his Bunga Bunga sex scandals with young women, when she was herself a young woman in his government. Neither of her partners, she suspects, wants a woman in charge.“I would like to say, ‘No, it’s not a problem that I’m a woman,’” Ms. Meloni said. “But I’m no more sure about that.”Ms. Meloni suspects that her coalition partners don’t want a woman in charge.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesBut when it comes to being a woman in politics, Ms. Meloni has leaned in. Her veneer of Roman-accented authenticity and her escalating and incensed style have become a part of the Italian political, and pop, landscape.In 2019, her hard-line defense of the traditional family, and against L.G.B.T.Q. marriage and adoption — while herself being an unwed mother — prompted D.J.s to mockingly put one of her furious refrains, “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian,” to a beat. It went viral. Ms. Meloni used it as a calling card. She titled her best-selling book “I am Giorgia.”Ms. Meloni grew up without her father, who when she was a toddler set sail for the Canary Islands, where she learned Spanish on summer visits. After a fire that she and her older sister accidentally started, her mother, who at one point wrote romance novels to make ends meet, moved the family into the working class and left-leaning Garbatella neighborhood of Rome.Ms. Meloni was overweight and introverted, but as a 15-year-old fan of fantasy books (and Michael Jackson, from whom she said she learned her good English) found what she has called a second family in the hard-right Youth Front of the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement.She considered herself a soldier in Rome’s perpetual, often violent and sometimes fatal ideological wars between Communist and post-Fascist extremists, where everything from soccer games to high schools was politicized. Her party leader went to Israel to renounce the crimes of Fascism at the same time as she was rising quickly, later becoming the republic’s youngest-ever minister.But as populism swept Italy in the last decade, Ms. Meloni adopted harsher tones and created the hard right’s latest iteration, the Brothers of Italy. She said she resented its members’ being depicted as “nostalgic imbeciles,” because she had worked hard to purge Fascists and build a new history.An activist was detained by law enforcement agents for interrupting Ms. Meloni’s rally in Cagliari.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesLike Mr. Salvini, she turned her social media accounts into populist pasta on the wall as she desperately sought traction. In the town of Vinci she accused the French of trying to claim Leonardo da Vinci as one of their own. She went to a grappa distillery to call the president then of the E.U., Jean-Claude Juncker, a drunk. She warned about an “empire” of “invaders” consisting of President Emmanuel Macron of France, Angela Merkel of Germany, Mr. Soros and Wall Street.At her annual political conference in 2018, she hosted Stephen K. Bannon and said that she supported his effort “to build a network that goes beyond the European borders,” and that “I look with interest at the phenomenon of Donald Trump” and at the “phenomenon of Putin in Russia.” She added, “And so the bigger the network gets, the happier I am.”But on the threshold of running Italy, Ms. Meloni has pivoted. After years of fawning over Ms. Le Pen, she is suddenly distancing herself. (“I haven’t got relations with her,” she said.) Same for Mr. Orban. (“I didn’t agree with some positions he had about Ukrainian war.”) She now calls Mr. Putin an anti-Western aggressor and said she would “totally” continue to send offensive arms to Ukraine.But critics say she revealed her true self during a recent speech at a conference supporting Spain’s hard-right Vox party. “There is no possible mediation. Yes to the natural family. No to the L.G.B.T. lobbies,” she bellowed in Spanish. “No to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people. No to major international finance.”A supporter of the Brothers of Italy in Cagliari.Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times“The tone, that was very wrong,” she said in the interview. “But it happens to me when I’m very tired,” she said, adding that her passionate delivery “becomes hysteric.”There are things she won’t give up on, including the tricolor flame she inherited as her party symbol. Many historians say it evokes the flickers over the tomb of Mussolini.The flame, she has said, has “nothing to do with fascism but is a recognition of the journey made by the democratic right in our Republican history.”“Don’t extinguish the flame, Giorgia,” a supporter shouted as Ms. Meloni commanded the stage in Cagliari, where she reserved her sharpest invective for leftist attacks that she said tried to depict her as “a monster.”“They don’t scare me,” she screamed above chants of “Giorgia, Giorgia, Giorgia.” “They don’t scare me.” More

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      Draghi’s Fall Reverberates Beyond Italy

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      The downfall of Italy’s prime minister has raised concerns across Europe about the power of populist movements and whether they will erode unity against Russian aggression.ROME — Just over a month ago, Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy boarded an overnight train with the leaders of France and Germany bound for Kyiv. During the 10-hour trip, they joked about how the French president had the nicest accommodations. But, more important, they asserted their resolute support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. The pictures of the men tucked in a cabin around a wooden conference table evoked a clubby style of crisis management reminiscent of World War II.The mere fact that Mr. Draghi had a seat at that table reflected how, by the force of his stature and credibility, he had made his country — one saddled by debt and persistent political instability — an equal partner with Europe’s most important powers. Critical to that success was not only his economic bona fides as the former president of the European Central Bank but also his unflinching recognition that Russia’s war presented as an existential challenge to Europe and its values.All of that has now been thrown into jeopardy since a multi-flanked populist rebellion, motivated by an opportunistic power grab, stunningly torpedoed Mr. Draghi’s government this week. Snap elections have been called for September, with polls showing that an alliance dominated by hard-right nationalists and populists is heavily favored to run Italy come the fall.Mr. Draghi’s downfall already amounts to the toppling of the establishment that populist forces across Europe dream of. It has now raised concerns, far transcending Italy, of just how much resilience the movements retain on the continent, and of what damage an Italian government more sympathetic to Russia and less committed to the European Union could do to the cohesion of the West as it faces perhaps its greatest combination of security and economic challenges since the Cold War.“Draghi’s departure is a real problem for Europe, a tough blow,” said Gianfranco Pasquino, professor emeritus of political science at Bologna University. “Draghi had a clear position against the Russian aggression in Ukraine. Europe will lose in compactness because the next prime minister will almost certainly be less convinced that the responsibility for the war lies with Russia.”If there was any question of where the sympathies of European leaders lie in Italy’s power struggle, before his downfall Mr. Draghi received offerings of support from the White House, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and others.Mario Draghi, left, and French President Emmanuel Macron examining debris as they visited Irpin, outside Kyiv, Ukraine, last month.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinPrime Minister Pedro Sanchez of Spain wrote “Europe needs leaders like Mario.” When Mr. Draghi made his last-ditch appeal to Italy’s fractious parties to stick with him on Wednesday, Prime Minister Antonio Costa of Portugal wrote him to thank him for reconsidering his resignation, according to a person close to Mr. Draghi.But now, with Mr. Macron lamenting the loss of a “Great Italian statesman,” anxiety has spread around the continent about what will come next.Mr. Draghi’s rebalancing of Italy’s position on Russia is all the more remarkable considering where it started. Italy has among Western Europe’s strongest bonds with Russia. During the Cold War, it was the home of the largest Communist Party in the West, and Italy depended on Russia for more than 40 percent of its gas.Mr. Draghi made it his mission to break that pattern. He leveraged his strong relationship with the U.S. treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, to spearhead the sanctions on the Russian Central Bank.By the example of his public speeches, he pressured his allies, including Mr. Macron, to agree that Ukraine should eventually be a member of the European Union.In the days before the fatal vote in the Senate that brought down his government, Mr. Draghi visited Algeria to announce a gas deal by which that country will supplant Russia as Italy’s biggest gas supplier.Those achievements are now at risk after what started last week as a rebellion within his coalition by the Five Star Movement, an ailing anti-establishment party, ended in a grab for power by conservatives, hard-right populists and nationalists who sensed a clear electoral opportunity, and went for the kill.They abandoned Mr. Draghi in a confidence vote. Now, if Italian voters do not punish them for ending a government that was broadly considered the country’s most capable and competent in years, they may come out on top in elections.Prime Minister Draghi speaking to ministers and Senators on Wednesday, the day his national unity coalition collapsed. Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesThe maneuvering by the alliance seemed far from spontaneous.Ahead of the vote, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the hard-right League party, huddled with former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi over a long sweaty lunch at the mogul’s villa on the Appian Way and discussed what to do.Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, a party with post-fascist roots who has incessantly called for elections from the opposition, said she spoke with Mr. Berlusconi a few days earlier and that he had invited her to the meeting as well, but that she demurred, saying it was better they meet after the vote. She said she spoke on the phone with Mr. Salvini only after Mr. Draghi’s speech in parliament.“I didn’t want them to be forced to do what they did,” she said, referring to Mr. Salvini and Mr. Berlusconi, who abandoned Mr. Draghi and collapsed the government. “I knew it would only work if they were sure about leaving that government.”Each has something to be gained in their alliance. Mr. Salvini, the hard right leader of the League party, not long ago the most popular politician in the country, had seen his standing eroded as part of Mr. Draghi’s government, while Ms. Meloni had gobbled up angry support from the opposition, supplanting him now as Italy’s rising political star. Mr. Berlusconi, nearly a political has-been at age 85, was useful and necessary to both, but also could use their coattails to ride back to power.Together, polls show, they have the support of more than 45 percent of voters. That is worrying to many critics of Russia. Mr. Salvini wore shirts with Mr. Putin’s face on them in Moscow’s Red Square and in the European Parliament, his party signed a cooperation deal with Mr. Putin’s Russia United party in 2017.Ms. Meloni, in what some analysts see as a cunning move to distinguish herself from Mr. Salvini and make herself a more acceptable candidate for prime minister, has emerged as a strong supporter of Ukraine.League leader Matteo Salvini and Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni meeting with with Silvio Berlusconi, right, in October 2021.Guglielmo Mangiapane/ReutersMr. Berlusconi used to host Mr. Putin’s daughters at his Sardinian villa and was long Mr. Putin’s closest ally in Western Europe. But now, some of Mr. Berlusconi’s longtime backers say, he has forgotten his European values and crossed the Rubicon to the nationalist and Putin-enabling side.Renato Brunetta, Italy’s Minister for Public Administration, and a long time member of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, quit the party after it joined with the populist League party in withdrawing support from Mr. Draghi and destroying the government.He said he left because Mr. Berlusconi’s decision to abandon the government was irresponsible and antithetical to the values of the party over the last 30 years. Asked whether he believed Mr. Berlusconi, sometimes shaky, was actually lucid enough to make the decision, he said “it would be even more grave” if he was.Italy, long a laboratory for European politics, has also been the incubator for the continent’s populism and transformation of hard-right movements into mainstream forces.When Mr. Berlusconi entered politics, largely to protect his business interests in the 1990s, he cast himself as a pro-business, and moderate, conservative. But in order to cobble together a winning coalition, he had brought in the League and a post-fascist party that would become Ms. Meloni’s.Now the situation has inverted. Ms. Meloni and Mr. Salvini need Mr. Berlusconi’s small electoral support in order to win elections and form a government. They are in charge.“It is a coalition of the right, because it is not center-right anymore,” said Mr. Brunetta. “It’s a right-right coalition with sovereigntist tendencies, extremist and Putin-phile.”Supporters of Mr. Draghi take some solace in the fact that he will stick around in a limited caretaker capacity until the next government is seated, with control over issues related to the pandemic, international affairs — including Ukraine policy — and the billions of euros in recovery funds from Europe. That money is delivered in tranches, and strict requirements need to be met before the funds are released.Supporters of Mr. Draghi acknowledged that major new overhauls on major problems such as pensions were now off the table, but they argued that the recovery funds were more or less safe because no government, not even a hard-right populist one, would walk away from all that money, and so would follow through on Mr. Draghi’s vision for modernization funded by those euros.But if the last week has shown anything, it is that political calculations sometimes outweigh the national interest.Supporters of Prime Minister Draghi demonstrating in Milan on Monday.Mourad Balti Touati/EPA, via ShutterstockThe government’s achievements are already “at risk” over the next months of Mr. Draghi’s limited powers, said Mr. Brunetta, but if the nationalist front won, he said, “obviously it will be even worse.”Mr. Brunetta said Mr. Draghi arrived on the political scene in the first place because there was a “crisis of the traditional parties” in Italy. He said that the 17 months in government, and the support it garnered in the public, showed that there was “a Draghian constituency,” which wanted moderate, pragmatic and value-based governance.The problem, he said, was there were “no political parties, or especially a coalition, to represent them” and he hoped one could be born before the election but “there was little time.”And in the meantime, he said, some things were for sure. Italy had lost influence in Europe and the continent would suffer, too, for the loss of Mr. Draghi.“Europe,” he said, “is weakened.”Gaia Pianigiani More

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      Draghi Says He’ll Stay as Italy’s Prime Minister, if Parties Unite

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      Days after he tendered his resignation, the Italian leader offered a way out of political crisis. Now it depends on the parties to accept or reject it.ROME — Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy, who offered to resign last week after a rebellion in his broad national unity government, challenged the country’s fractious parties on Wednesday to stick together for the good of the country as a condition of him staying on.“The only way forward, if we want to stay together, is to rebuild from the top this pact, with courage, altruism and credibility,” Mr. Draghi said in a speech to the Italian Senate, throwing down a gauntlet ahead of confidence votes in the upper and lower chambers of Parliament on Wednesday and Thursday that will determine the fate of his government, along with the stability of Italy and much of Europe at an especially tenuous time.Mr. Draghi, speaking to long applause but also to some heckling, said that the public outcries for the government to continue were “impossible to ignore.”“Italy is strong when it knows how to be united,” he said, calling the period a “miracle” for Italy, but adding that political motivations had “unfortunately” led parties to seek to distinguish themselves, weakening “the desire to move forward together.”That politicking has left Italy teetering on the brink of instability once again after a period of relative calm, progress and expanding influence under Mr. Draghi’s leadership, which has made Italy an essential part of Europe’s united front against Russia in response to its war in Ukraine and its efforts to rebuild its economies amid the pandemic.Now, much will depend on whether Italy’s political parties take up Mr. Draghi’s offer, especially the Five Star Movement, which set off the current crisis by withholding its support last week in a key vote on the government’s spending priorities.That rebellion prompted the offer to resign by Mr. Draghi. Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s president, rejected the resignation and asked Mr. Draghi to address Parliament, where confidence votes will force all of the parties to take responsibility for their decisions.Mr. Draghi told the Parliament on Wednesday that Five Star’s revolt signified “the end” of the pact of trust that had fueled his government, and that it was unacceptable. If one party could do it, anyone “could repeat it,” he warned, adding that ransom demands on the government to suit narrow political interests could become the norm.He said that because he was appointed as a caretaker prime minister and not directly elected, his legitimacy was contingent on “as ample support as possible.”Giuseppe Conte, the leader of the Five Star Movement, this month in Rome. Mr. Draghi told the Parliament on Wednesday that Five Star’s revolt signified “the end” of the pact of trust that had fueled his government, and that it was unacceptable.Massimo Percossi/EPA, via Shutterstock“Are you ready to rebuild this pact?” Mr. Draghi repeated several times, concluding that the answer to this question was owed not to him, but to the Italian people.If Mr. Draghi does not receive the support he asked for on Wednesday, he will resign for good, and many analysts believe that Mr. Mattarella will call for early elections, as soon as September.Mr. Draghi’s speech was an effort to avoid the chaos that such a crisis would most likely bring.On the one hand, he tried to remind Parliament, and the country, all that Italy had been able to achieve since he took power in February 2021 in a government crisis caused by the forced removal of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, now the leader of Five Star, which stirred the insurrection against Mr. Draghi. He repeated that the efficacy of the government, its ability to move fast and make quick decisions was rooted in a national unity that “was the best guarantee for a legitimate democracy.”Mr. Draghi said that unity had allowed Italy to get out of the worst phase of the pandemic, funnel financial assistance quickly to those who needed it, cut “useless bureaucracy” that slowed the country, and aided the growth of the economy in a deeply challenging time.He listed key overhauls in a variety of sectors, including increased energy independence from Russia, which he called “essential for the modernization of Italy,” and noted that Italy had already received 45.9 billion euros (about $47 billion) from the European Commission in recovery funds, with €21 billion more on the way. “If we can’t show that we can spend this money well,” he said, Italy would not receive more.Mr. Draghi also attributed Italy’s greater footprint in Europe, and its strong position backing Ukraine with arms and condemning Russian aggression, to the period of political unity.“The merit of these accomplishments was yours,” he told Parliament, adding to long applause, “I have never been as proud to be an Italian as I have been in these moments.”But many analysts believe that they are actually creditable to Mr. Draghi and his reputation as a senior European statesman who saved the euro as the president of the European Central Bank. Without him, they say, the period of stability, and potentially Italy’s support for Ukraine and relevance in Europe, would be imperiled.The Italian government held a confidence vote on Wednesday in the Senate. If Mr. Draghi does not receive the support he asked for, he will resign for good, and many analysts believe that President Sergio Mattarella will call for early elections.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Draghi’s willingness to step back, at least momentarily, from the breach overcame the day’s first hurdle for Italians hoping that the current government will continue. But the Senate had five hours of dramatic debate ahead of it, and no one was quite sure what any of the parties would do as they all weighed their personal interests.Five Star, riddled with warring factions, was in a particularly delicate situation, as a decision to back or bolt from the government both seemed likely to splinter the movement and cause defections.It was also unclear if Mr. Draghi would continue or resign without the support of Five Star if many of its members left to support him. Another confidence vote is scheduled for Thursday in the Lower House of Parliament, where more Five Star defections are likely.“What was supposed to be Conte’s vengeance against Draghi became the self-sinking of the former prime minister, whose political limitations have emerged,” wrote Stefano Folli, a political commentator with La Repubblica. “However it ends,” Mr. Folli added, “Five Star is doomed to a marginal role.”As the Senate began its debate on Wednesday, no one was sure what would happen.“It’s all uncertain,” said Giovanni Orsina, a political scientist at Luiss Guido Carli, a university in Rome. “We’ll need to see whether the parties want to play along and still support him.”Mr. Draghi, left, visited Irpin, Ukraine, in June with other European leaders, like President Emmanuel Macron of France.Viacheslav Ratynskyi/ReutersMany of the parties were concerned about an upcoming budget bill, which Mr. Draghi also emphasized in his speech, but there were also excruciating political calculations for each of the individual parties.Five Star, which won 33 percent of the vote in 2018 and is, as a result, still the largest party in the government, has since cratered. It has dreaded elections for years, but as the country’s next scheduled elections approach in early 2023, the downside of early elections has decreased.Still, the party, which has lost about two-thirds of its national support, would stand to be decimated at the ballot box. Mr. Conte’s decision to take a stand last week was widely seen as an effort to regain some of the party’s long lost anti-establishment identity. Instead, it seems to have backfired.Mr. Draghi on Wednesday made it clear that his government would not cave in to Five Star’s demands. He held firm on military support for Ukraine, which Five Star opposes, and for the building of new gas facilities to give Italy energy independence from Russia as a matter of national security, something Five Star has also opposed.He said that Italy’s universal income benefit for its poorest citizens, Five Star’s trademark achievement, was a positive development, but that it needed to be improved so that it actually helped those who needed it and did not become an incentive not to work. For now, it is loathed by the business sector and considered by many to be a drag on employment.Matteo Salvini, center, the leader the League party, on Wednesday in the Senate. The right-wing coalition of which the League is part, with Forza Italia and the hard-right Brothers of Italy, is currently leading in polls.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockThat hard line was met by heckling and disapproval from parts of the chamber.The center-left Democratic Party, which is most supportive of Mr. Draghi, was also in a difficult position because it was counting on an alliance with Five Star, or what is left of it, to bolster its own electoral fortunes in the next elections. But now an alliance with Five Star — the party that prematurely ended the Draghi era — was itself laden with danger, and fractures had emerged in the left over its wisdom.The right-wing coalition of the League party, led by the nationalist Matteo Salvini; Forza Italia, led by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi; and the hard-right Brothers of Italy, led by Giorgia Meloni, was currently leading in polls, though it was not clear how eager they were to govern at such a delicate time.Mr. Salvini and Mr. Berlusconi have vowed to no longer sit in the same government with Five Star, but they also do not want to risk their credibility — especially with a business community that likes Mr. Draghi — by being seen as the ones who brought down the government. Italy’s political observers were paying especially close attention to what Mr. Salvini would do.In his speech, Mr. Draghi mentioned as part of his government’s program the priorities of powerful League governors in the country’s north who want the prime minister to stay on, potentially driving a wedge between them and Mr. Salvini were he to consider bolting.“Politically, Italians do not love the parties who rip up the government and lead them to elections,” Mr. Orsina said. But a main member of the alliance, Ms. Meloni has skyrocketed in the polls as she stayed in the opposition, and wants elections as soon as possible. More

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      Macron’s Win Is Also a Blow to Orban’s Nationalist Crusade in Europe

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      The Hungarian leader had cast his own victory as the start of a nationalist wave in Europe — one that Marine Le Pen would have joined. Instead, Mr. Macron’s victory in France is a win for the European Union’s approach.BRUSSELS — There were sighs of relief throughout the European Union after President Emmanuel Macron beat back a serious challenge in France from the populist far-right champion Marine Le Pen.Then another populist went down, in Slovenia, where the country’s three-time prime minister, Janez Jansa, lost to a loose coalition of centrist rivals in parliamentary elections on Sunday.Those two defeats were widely seen as a reprieve for the European Union and its fundamental principles, including judicial independence, shared sovereignty and the supremacy of European law. That is because they dealt a blow to the ambitions and worldview of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, who avidly supported both Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Jansa in an effort to create a coalition of more nationalist, religious and anti-immigration politics that could undermine the authority of the European Union itself.“Europe can breathe,” said Jean-Dominique Giuliani, chairman of the Robert Schuman Foundation, a pro-European research center.After his own electoral victory earlier this month, Mr. Orban declared: “The whole world has seen tonight in Budapest that Christian democratic politics, conservative civic politics and patriotic politics have won. We are telling Europe that this is not the past: This is the future. This will be our common European future.”Not yet, it seems.With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Orban, who has been close to both former President Donald J. Trump and Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, is more isolated in Europe than in many years. He has been a model for the Polish government of the Law and Justice party, which has also challenged what it considers the liberal politics and the overbearing bureaucratic and judicial influence of Brussels. But Law and Justice is deeply anti-Putin, a mood sharpened by the war.Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary in Szekesfehervar during his party’s final rally before the election this month.Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times“The international environment for Orban has never been so dire,” said Peter Kreko, director of Political Capital, a Budapest-based research institution.Mr. Orban found support from Mr. Trump, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and from the Italian populist leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. But they are all gone, as Mr. Jansa is expected to be, and now Mr. Orban “has fewer friends in the world,” Mr. Kreko said.Ms. Le Pen’s party was given a 10.7 million euro loan in March to help fund her campaign from Hungary’s MKB bank, whose major shareholders are considered close to Mr. Orban. And Hungarian media and social media openly supported both Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Jansa.Ms. Le Pen’s strong showing was a reminder that populism — on both the right and the left — remains a vibrant force in a Europe, with high voter dissatisfaction over rising inflation, soaring energy prices, slow growth, immigration and the bureaucracy emanating from E.U. headquarters in Brussels.But now Mr. Macron, as the first French president to be re-elected in 20 years, has new authority to press his ideas for more European responsibility and collective defense.Marine Le Pen conceding to Mr. Macron on Sunday.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesAfter the retirement late last year of Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, Mr. Macron will inevitably be seen as the de facto leader of the European Union, with a stronger voice and standing to push issues he cares about. Those include a more robust European pillar in defense and security, economic reform and fighting climate change.“He is going to want to go further and faster,” said Georgina Wright, an analyst at the Institut Montaigne in Paris.But Ms. Wright and other analysts say he must also learn lessons from his first term and try to consult more widely. His penchant for announcing proposals rather than building coalitions at times annoyed his European counterparts, leaving him portrayed as a vanguard of one, leading with no followers.“Europe is central to his policy and will be in his second term, too,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director for the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. “In the first term, he underachieved relative to his expectations on Europe — he had a lot of grand plans but failed to create the coalitions he needed, with Germany and the Central European states, to implement them.”The Dutch, too, as the Netherlands and Germany together lead Europe’s “frugal” nations, are skeptical about Mr. Macron’s penchant to spend more of their money on European projects.Mr. Macron “knows that lesson and is making some efforts in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine,” Mr. Shapiro said. “But he’s still Emmanuel Macron.”In his second term, Mr. Macron “will double down” on the ideas for Europe that he presented in his speech to the Sorbonne in 2017, “especially the idea of European sovereignty,” said Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, director of the Paris office of the German Marshall Fund.But in his second term, she predicted, he will be more pragmatic, building “coalitions of the willing and able” even if he cannot find unanimity among the other 26 Union members.Prime Minister Janez Jansa of Slovenia on Sunday, hours before the announcement that his party had lost to a centrist coalition.Jure Makovec/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFrance holds the rotating presidency of the bloc until the end of June, and one of Mr. Macron’s priorities will be to push forward an oil embargo on Russia, Ms. de Hoop Scheffer said, a move that has been complicated by the fact that many in the bloc are dependent on Moscow for energy.The climate agenda is important for him, especially if he wants to reach out to the angry left and the Greens in France. And to get much done in Europe, he will need to restore and strengthen the Franco-German relationship with a new, very different and divided German government.“That relationship is not easy, and when you look at the Franco-German couple, not a lot keeps us together,” Ms. de Hoop Scheffer said.There are differences over Mr. Macron’s desire for more collective debt for another European recovery plan, given the effects of war. There is also a lack of consensus over how to manage the response to Russia’s aggression, she said — how much to keep lines open to Mr. Putin, and what kinds of military support should be provided to Ukraine in the face of German hesitancy to supply heavy weapons.Germany is much happier to work in wartime within NATO under American leadership than to spend much time on Mr. Macron’s concept of European strategic autonomy, she noted. And Poland and the other frontline states bordering Russia have never had much confidence in Mr. Macron’s goal of strategic autonomy or his promise to do nothing to undermine NATO, a feeling underscored by the current war.If Mr. Macron is clever, “French leadership in Europe will not be followership by the other E.U. countries, but their empowerment, by their commitment to a new European vision,” said Nicholas Dungan, a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council. “Macron can do this.”Campaign posters for the presidential runoff candidates in Paris last week.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times More

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      Mario Draghi Is Asked to Form Government in Italy

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMario Draghi Gets Nod to Form New Government and Guide Italy Out of CrisisThe sudden ascent of the man credited with helping save the euro was a pipe dream for Italians frustrated with a coalition paralyzed by ideological schisms and incompetence.Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, knows well the machinery of government at both the European and Italian level. Credit…Andrew Medichini/Associated PressFeb. 3, 2021Updated 8:43 a.m. ETROME — Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank who is largely credited with helping to save the euro, accepted a mandate from Italy’s president on Wednesday to try and form a new unity government that would guide the country out of the pandemic and through economic recovery.“To overcome the pandemic, to complete the vaccine campaign, to offer answers to the daily problems of the citizens, to relaunch the country are the challenges we face,” Mr. Draghi said after meeting with President Sergio Mattarella for more than an hour at the Quirinal Palace. Italy, he said, faced a “difficult moment.” And he said he had accepted Mr. Mattarella’s appeal because the emergency “requires an answer equal to the seriousness of the situation.”Until as recently as Tuesday, the idea of Mr. Draghi replacing Giuseppe Conte as prime minister remained a pipe dream for the many Italians frustrated with a governing coalition that seemed paralyzed by ideological schisms and incompetence, especially as the coronavirus pandemic raged and economic devastation set in.But on Tuesday evening, Mr. Mattarella summoned Mr. Draghi and appealed to “all the political forces in the Parliament” to support a “high profile government” to meet the historic moment.He made it clear Mr. Conte’s tenure was over and the new players, potentially political leaders proposed by the parties supporting Mr. Draghi or an all-star cast of politically unaffiliated economists, judges and scientists, was ready to take the stage.Italy’s stock market rallied on Wednesday in response to the news that Mr. Draghi had been lined up to lead the Italian government. He immediately began consultations with party leaders that will continue in the coming days in an effort to form a new Italian government.“I am confident that from the exchange with the parties and the groups in the Parliament and from the dialogue with the social forces,” Mr. Draghi said on Wednesday, “there will emerge unity and the capacity to give a responsible answer to the president’s appeal.”Mr. Draghi is himself no political novice. He has served in past Italian governments, was a director of Italy’s treasury and knows well the machinery of government at both the European and Italian level.His name has been mentioned for years as a potential candidate to replace Mr. Mattarella as Italy’s head of state in 2022. But now Mr. Mattarella himself has called on Mr. Draghi, whom he has publicly praised in the past, and brought him directly into the fray.“Now everyone of good will must heed the call of President Mattarella and support the government of Mario Draghi,” Matteo Renzi, the wily former prime minister who engineered the collapse of Mr. Conte’s government by pulling his small party’s support in Parliament. “Now is the time for sobriety.”A former prime minister, Matteo Renzi, triggered the previous government’s collapse.Credit…Pool photo by Alessandro SerranoParty leaders on the right and left quickly expressed support for Mr. Draghi after it became clear that Mr. Mattarella would ask him to form a government.Among them were leaders who had made great shows of their loyalty to Mr. Conte. Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Democratic Party that Mr. Renzi once led, released a statement that on the one hand referred to the government crisis as a “disaster provoked by the irresponsible choice” of Mr. Renzi, but he then welcomed Mr. Mattarella’s decision. “We will stand ready to discuss the common good for the country.”The Coronavirus Outbreak More