Accounts and financial statements in order: good

“Primum: non nocere”. If the doctors’ imperative also applies to politicians, then Giorgia Meloni’s greatest merit is that she has not made the already disastrous state of our public finances any worse. In 2022, public debt had skyrocketed due to runaway spending linked first to the pandemic, then to the Superbonus, and finally to the energy crisis. Over the past few years, the Prime Minister has not implemented any reforms – the only one, the judicial reform, was resoundingly rejected – but she has managed to resist the temptation to use public spending as a tool to win support. She has given full political backing to the sometimes unpopular decisions and the many ‘no’s’ uttered by Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti. Our tax system has thus become more progressive and, apart from a few minor flaws, a little more internally consistent. Now that her government has set a record for longevity, Meloni may be criticised for everything she should have done but did not, but she deserves praise for everything she could have done had she yielded to the pressures from within and outside her majority – pressures she managed to avoid. This, ultimately, is the most significant outcome of her economic policy: having preserved the country’s financial stability by embracing those European constraints which she had previously fought so hard against. This is no small feat, because public debt is a measure of future taxation and therefore poses a threat to citizens’ freedom and property. And this is precisely where her most curious limitation lies. Her resistance to fiscal populism has been a practice lacking any underlying theory to support it. Thus, what could have been the most distinctive feature of her time in government never really materialised into a genuine political programme.