How Giorgia Meloni became Donald Trump’s EU whisperer

Henry Kissinger once complained: “Who do I call when I want to speak to Europe?” Today the answer would be Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female Prime Minister, who has emerged as the most important leader in the European Union. No Italian leader has filled this unofficial role before: it is usually reserved for the heads of the bloc’s two largest economies, Germany and France. Yet Meloni has capitalized on the weakness of their leadership. French President Emmanuel Macron may delude himself that he is Napoleon or Jupiter, but in reality he is the deeply unpopular head of a lame-duck government. To borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, he doesn’t “have the cards.” Meanwhile, Germany’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, heads up a flimsy coalition.

Meloni’s government, by contrast, remains rock solid after two and a half years in power. Italy’s economy – the third-largest in the EU – is, like most of the eurozone, fairly stagnant. But it is stable. Public debt, though still the second-highest in Europe – after Greece – at 135 percent of GDP, is coming down significantly from a high of 160 percent in 2021. Meloni is closing the gap between revenue raised and money spent, with the country’s deficit falling to 3.4 percent of GDP last year, down from 7.2 percent in 2023.

According to opinion polls, support for Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, is higher now than when her coalition won the September 2022 general election. This is remarkable in a country that has had 69 governments since the fall of fascism in 1945 – nearly one a year on average.

Trump has agreed that Meloni should play the role of mediator between him and the EU

Signora Meloni’s success has made her the European figurehead of the national populist cause which has swept the globe in recent years. Crucially, she believes that Italy and Europe must stay close to America regardless of whether the Democrats or Republicans are in power. This is something most European leaders – except those in Britain – have traditionally been loath to do, thanks to a latent hostility to American global dominance.

Meloni was a more devout supporter than most European leaders of Joe Biden’s arms and aid program for Ukraine. Indeed, in March last year he invited her to the White House, where he played “Georgia on My Mind” on the soundsystem as she arrived, and kissed her on the head.

Yet she is also Trump’s favorite EU leader – and the only one he invited to his inauguration ceremony at the Capitol. He has called her “fantastic,” while she has adapted her position on Ukraine to fit his. She now believes, as so many do, that Kyiv cannot hope to retake the conquered territories from Russia. So she supports his “Just Get Peace Done” policy.

When Trump invited Meloni to the White House in April, he showered her with praise; the newspapers branded her the “Trump Whisperer.” Trump may believe that the EU was founded “to screw” America and be determined to reset the rules of international trade. But he still needs to do a deal. So he has agreed that Meloni should play the role of mediator between him and the EU and accepted her invitation to come to Rome “very soon” to meet EU leaders. “There will be a trade deal, 100 percent,” Trump said. It was a serious change in tone from the President.

That the Italian Prime Minister had gone to Washington on behalf of the EU was hard for Europe’s high command to swallow, but EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had to agree that Meloni’s privileged relationship with Trump was the bloc’s best chance of reaching a compromise. Meloni’s mainly left-wing critics insist that she must choose between Europe and America. She has chosen instead, she retorts, to “make the West great again.” Meloni regards the West as a civilization, not a geographical space.

In May, Meloni succeeded in bringing Vice-President J.D. Vance and Von der Leyen together in Rome for talks on tariffs after they attended Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. Up to that point, Meloni’s critics had taunted her relentlessly that her role as “self-styled” mediator was a figment of her imagination. The Rome meeting silenced these voices until ten days later, when Trump announced, out of the blue, that the EU was impossible to negotiate with. As of June 1, he would cancel the 90-day reprieve he had granted and impose a 50 percent tariff on all EU imports to America.

As one opposition Italian senator insisted: “At least this fairy tale about Giorgia Meloni as bridge-builder is well and truly finished because, as of today, we can dispatch such idiocy to the rubbish tip.” Two days later, however, Trump changed his mind – after phone calls from Meloni, it was said – which led to von der Leyen phoning the President to say the EU was ready to give ground.

When Meloni became Italy’s Prime Minister in 2022, the global mainstream media’s default description of her was that she was “the heir to Mussolini” and, as such, a “far-right” threat to democracy. They were able to roll out the specter of Italy’s fascist dictator in connection with Meloni because she, and others who had founded Brothers of Italy in 2012, had been members of Italy’s long-defunct post-fascist party in the 1990s.

But Meloni has repeatedly denounced dictatorship as a form of government and condemned the evils done by fascism. Brothers of Italy is a conservative party, she insists, whose inspiration is not Benito Mussolini, the ex-revolutionary socialist who invented fascism, but classical conservative thinkers such as the British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, who died in 2020.

Von der Leyen assured the world in September 2022 that, if necessary, the EU had the “tools” to deal with Meloni if she proved a danger to democracy and unity in Europe. But within a few months the two women were constantly by each other’s side in public. Meloni swiftly persuaded the EU leader that the only way to solve the Mediterranean migrant crisis was to pay North African countries to stop migrant departures.

This prompted a series of EU deals, above all with Tunisia, to stop the boats putting to sea. Last year, there was a 60 percent fall in the number of migrant sea arrivals in Italy compared to 2023.

Such deals were a clear sign that the EU was being taken over not by fascists but by realists, prepared to take concrete steps to do something the majority of voters had demanded in vain for years.

The media, which once called her ‘the heir to Mussolini’, now makes much of her charm and good looks

The second key part of Meloni’s strategy to stop illegal migrants is to offshore those from safe countries of origin (thus technically not refugees) to Albania, which is not part of the EU, for the fast-tracking of their asylum applications within a month and swift deportation thereafter. Von der Leyen has praised Meloni’s Albania scheme as “out of the box thinking” and many other EU member country leaders, even left-wing ones, now say they want to do the same thing. Across the Atlantic, the Trump administration is also considering “third-country” options to process migrant claims.

Meloni has also struck up a good rapport with Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s left-wing Labour Prime Minister. He wants to copy some of her allegedly “far-right” measures to tackle illegal migrants.

The media, which still calls Meloni “far right,” now makes just as much of the 48-year-old’s charm and good looks. As an Italian, she is also extremely tactile. Such attributes make her stand out a mile at summits where she is often one of the only women present. She is also a single mother who unceremoniously dumped television presenter Andrea Giambruno, the father of her child, when off-air tapes of him in the studio, suggesting threesomes with female colleagues, were leaked to the media.

The power of her beauty and personality can sometimes produce extraordinary results. In May, at a summit of European leaders in Tirana, Albania, the country’s Prime Minister Edi Rama knelt down in the rain on the red carpet as she arrived, with his hands pressed together as if she were manna from heaven, to welcome her. “Oh Edi!” she said, coyly.

She and Elon Musk are also friends. Last September, there was media speculation about a possible romance between the two when he presented her with a prestigious Global Person of the Year prize, awarded by Washington think tank the Atlantic Council. “She is even more beautiful on the inside than the outside,” he said in his speech at the awards dinner in New York. Later, he felt compelled to issue a denial on X. “There is no romantic relationship whatsoever with PM Meloni.”

There’s no denying that Meloni has replaced Europe’s other statesmen as a leader with whom America can do business. On April 26 there was a symbolic moment in the Vatican, before the Requiem Mass for Pope Francis, when Trump had his impromptu chat in the nave with Volodymyr Zelensky. Macron tried to muscle in on the situation and sit down with them as well, but Trump abruptly told him to withdraw.

He would never have done that to Giorgia Meloni, would he? She is “one of the real leaders of the world… I wish there were more like her,” the President said during her visit to the White House. Asked if Italy could become America’s strongest ally in Europe, he replied: “Only if the Prime Minister remains the Prime Minister, because she’s doing a great job.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.