Meloni and Le Pen: the relationship at the heart of European politics
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Campaigning at a crowded Sunday market in northern France, far-right leader Marine Le Pen was quizzed by journalists about her strategy for Europe if, as expected, she secures a big win in European parliamentary elections this weekend.
In response, Le Pen suggested that it might depend on another populist nationalist leader: Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni.
After recent friction between the two, Le Pen issued a conciliatory, almost plaintive appeal to the Italian leader to unite their respective political forces into a single far-right group that could end what she called European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s “disastrous policies”.
“This is the moment for us to join forces; it would be truly useful,” Le Pen told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “If we succeed, we could become the second-biggest group in the EU parliament. I don’t think we should miss such an opportunity.”
Just how Meloni answers that appeal could be decisive for Europe’s future. The two powerful women — whose parties belong to separate nationalist, anti-immigration blocs in the European parliament — are set to emerge as the biggest winners in the elections taking place on June 6-9, the twin figureheads of a rightward swing across the 27-member bloc.
The elections could tilt EU policy to the right on contentious issues ranging from the energy transition and agriculture to immigration. The ballot will also help determine the next commission president — whoever the 27 member states nominate must win the support of a majority of MEPs.
Meloni and Le Pen have much in common. Both women have thrived in the male-dominated ranks of far-right political movements historically rooted in fascism. Both have pursued a strategy of detoxifying their parties to make them more acceptable to a wider swath of their electorates. They share ideological ground, including the belief in a Europe of nation states rather than a more closely integrated federal union.
“There is a convergence and I would say competition between Meloni and Le Pen in terms of their ambitions,” says Marc Lazar, a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris and Luiss university in Rome. “Both of them are seeking to become the reference figure for national populist movements in the region”.
Yet on some issues their differences are stark — on relations with Nato, on arming Ukraine, on immigration, and most of all, on the question of whether to work within the EU system and its mainstream leaders, or whether to fight them.
Meloni is governing as a pragmatist “within the system”, says Lazar. Le Pen, a more radical opposition figure gunning for the French presidency in 2027, “is against the system and outside it”.
Since her own election as Italy’s prime minister in late 2022, Meloni, once a Eurosceptic firebrand, has surprised friends and foes alike with her collaborative and constructive approach to Brussels as it dispenses €200bn to Italy for its post-pandemic recovery, reform and investment programme.
Meloni sees herself as a “bridge-builder” between the mainstream right and the EU’s nationalist Eurosceptic forces such as Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, says Catherine Fieschi, a visiting fellow at the European University Institute and an expert on populism. She is also an ideologue “who can see a path to true conservatism within Europe”, she adds.
The question now is what role Meloni decides to play after an election: the pragmatist eager to convene the forces of the right and centre-right, or a radical disrupter who wants to overhaul the EU to hand power back to nations. Von der Leyen’s future may rest on the former, while Le Pen and her allies are hoping for the latter.
“The future of the sovereigntist camp in Europe today lies in the hands of two women,” Orbán told Le Point magazine on May 30. “Everything will depend on the capacity of Marine Le Pen in France and Giorgia Meloni in Italy to co-operate.”
A decade ago, Meloni expressed strong admiration for Le Pen as a role model, given their shared hostility to EU integration. But in those days, Meloni was a political irrelevance, and Le Pen struck up a friendship and alliance with the more powerful Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right League. That alliance is still in place.
As Meloni emerged from Salvini’s shadow, her ardour for Le Pen cooled, as did her once fiery anti-Europe rhetoric. In the European parliament her party, Brothers of Italy (Fdl), is in the European Conservatives and Reformists grouping originally founded by David Cameron; its partners include Poland’s Law and Justice party and Spain’s Vox. Le Pen and Salvini’s parties are in the harder right Identity and Democracy group.
Both of their parties are set to gain in the European elections next week. The National Rally (RN) is now polling at 33 per cent, up from 23 per cent in 2019, while FdI is on course for 27 per cent, up from only 6 per cent. As a result, polls suggest the ID grouping could win around 66 seats, while ECR should get some 74 seats, with another 16 for potential new members. Von der Leyen’s centre-right European People’s party (EPP) is again set to win the most seats, but will need coalition partners to form a majority.
Just as Meloni’s domestic political strategy has been to take power by uniting the Italian right, so has she set out to do the same in the EU — by implication, working with both the EPP and ID. “We want to do in Europe exactly what we did in Italy,” Meloni told her FdI party conference in April. “Create a majority that brings together the forces of the centre-right and finally sends the left into opposition in Europe too.”
Yet such a coalition is highly unlikely to be replicated at the European level. The EPP has ruled out working with Le Pen or her allies in the ID group on the basis that they are too extreme and have pro-Russia sympathies.
Among ID’s historical members are the extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose lead candidate recently downplayed the role played by SS soldiers in the Holocaust. In the ensuing furore, AfD was kicked out of the ID parliamentary group after Le Pen’s party said it could no longer sit alongside it.
Le Pen herself has already ruled out any coalition in Brussels that involves von der Leyen. “Her time is up,” Le Pen said in late May. “As far as we are concerned, we will never, I repeat never, vote for Ursula von der Leyen.”
Instead, the ECR grouping, of which Meloni is president, is being wooed by both the mainstream centre-right and the hard-right.
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Von der Leyen, who has worked closely with Meloni, especially on the migration issue, may need the Italian premier’s support in a potentially tight parliamentary vote on her sought-after second term. That would put the Italian leader in a powerful kingmaker position.
The EU’s liberal and centre-left leaders have become so alarmed at the prospect of von der Leyen forming a pact with Meloni that they have threatened to vote against re-electing her.
The hard-right is just as opposed to such an agreement. Back in March, Le Pen made a combative video demanding that Meloni tell “the truth to Italians” about whether she would support von der Leyen’s re-election, which the French leader said would “aggravate the policies that are causing so much suffering to the people of Europe”.
More recently, Le Pen’s tone has shifted markedly as she has invited Meloni to merge ECR and ID into a hard-right “supergroup”, which would have more power within the assembly than as two entities. So far, the Italian premier has been ambiguous. Instead, she has talked publicly of co-operating on selected issues of mutual concern.
As long as Meloni sticks to her moderate path, that scope for co-operation appears limited.
She has of late pursued mainstream conservative goals, depicting herself as a serious leader able to fulfil Italy’s commitments to unlock its share of EU recovery funds and reassuring markets that she is a safe pair of hands.
She has largely accepted the basic tenets of EU economic policy: the rules of the single market, deficit and debt limits, and economic and administrative reforms in return for securing this economic support.
On foreign policy, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 put a new focus on geopolitical issues. Though Meloni had previously expressed admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin, she came down quickly and unambiguously in support of Kyiv. As prime minister, Meloni continued sending weapons to Ukraine and backed its accession to the EU.
“The world changed in February 2022 and she understood she had to take a position and not move from that position,” says Ernesto Di Giovanni, co-founder of the Rome-based political consultancy, Utopia.
“This is one of the things she is doing to normalise the party, and let Brothers of Italy not be seen as a far right party, but a conservative right party, as the Tories, as others around western countries.”
Le Pen has also moderated her Euroscepticism somewhat, especially since losing the 2017 presidential election. She no longer calls for France to leave the EU or abandon the single currency — a position seen as unpopular after Brexit.
But RN’s proposals to drastically cut immigration and give French companies preference in public procurement would, say the party’s opponents, break EU law and amount to a soft “Frexit”.
Unlike Meloni, Le Pen wants to gain power not by working with mainstream conservatives but by supplanting them, while also appealing across the political spectrum, especially to the young and working class, with more radical, populist and often left-leaning economic positions.
“She has a totally different approach,” says Lazar, the Sciences Po professor.
Privately, many of Le Pen’s closest allies are critical of Meloni, suggesting the Italian prime minister has been forced into a position of subservience to Brussels because of her country’s fragile public finances.
“When you have a recovery plan to get €190bn as Italy does, you cannot bite the hand that feeds you,” says Renaud Labaye, secretary-general of the RN group in the French parliament.
RN leaders were also unhappy with Meloni giving more work permits to migrants and her role in securing agreement for an EU migration pact, which introduced a system for EU members to share the burden of asylum-seekers arriving in frontline border states like Italy, an approach they staunchly opposed. “Meloni’s policies on immigration are baffling and horrifying,” says one Le Pen ally, who asked not to be identified.
Meloni’s position on Ukraine and European defence puts her at some distance from Salvini and Le Pen, who both had personal, political and financial ties with Putin and his United Russia party.
Le Pen, whose party was once financed by a Russian bank loan, also switched to denouncing Putin for breaking international law. However, the French opposition leader, who has a long history of anti-Nato statements, is against arming Kyiv and says there should be immediate peace talks even if that means accepting Russian territorial gains.
These fissures are emblematic of the wider splits between the main pan-European populist and far-right political parties — and indeed divisions within them — that, say analysts, demonstrate why nationalists are inherently bad at the kind of international co-operation needed to wield power in the EU.
“I expect the far right to remain electorally successful but politically marginal, mostly because of its internal divisions,” says Cas Mudde, professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia and an expert on populism.
Despite this, some hard right politicians on both sides of the Alps see the differences as bridgeable. They suggest that prospects for collaboration — or even a broader reconfiguration of the party groups — are greater than the pre-electoral positioning would suggest, especially after Le Pen’s split with the more extreme AfD made her less toxic by association.
“We are in a moment of real evolution in European politics,” says Jean-Paul Garraud, an MEP for Le Pen’s RN. “And these two women of stature truly embody this change. The possibility of working together really does exist.”
One sign was Le Pen’s appearance at a conference in Madrid last month hosted by Vox and involving Meloni and other nationalist leaders, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who may also play a key role in any recomposition. In an online campaign event, Meloni also said last week that she felt Le Pen was “on an interesting path”.
Claudio Borghi, an Italian senator who is running in the European elections for the League, says historic differences over Russia are no longer so relevant, since most of the parties that could form a new unified “rightwing euro-critical” party had condemned Putin’s invasion. “This subject is not on the table anymore,” he says.
Borghi also predicted that relations between Rome and Brussels would become more fraught this year when the commission starts to enforce EU fiscal rules that had been suspended during the pandemic. Italy’s public deficit stands at 7.4 per cent of GDP, the highest in the Eurozone.
Most of the populist and far-right parties could join a bigger, broader group “that will not be monolithic,” says Garraud, but would instead “understand and deal with” divergent national interests.
As for Meloni, “we see her as an ally in terms of ideas and we have lots of political points in common, but there are differences in approach,” Garraud continues. “Madame Meloni is confronted with the realities of power. We know very well that the Italian situation is complicated, including with regard to finances.”
Le Pen feels no such pressure in opposition, however, and her allies say she will not become any less radical in her push to win the presidency. Meloni “fit into the mould since she had to do so,” says Labaye, “and we will not”.
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