Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen have never been so far apart

Judging by the former’s speech in Parliament yesterday, and reading the latter’s comments, also yesterday, in an interview with the Financial Times, it must be said that Giorgia and Marine are truly two very different people who could not be more different. Like Le Pen, Meloni has always been in opposition – a systemic opposition, often vociferous, driven by the myths of a fantasy right-wing in Italy, more Tolkien than Mussolini – just as Le Pen, herself outside the constitutional framework, was aligned with the French ideology, as Bernard-Henri Lévy called it in a famous and controversial pamphlet, which has always been tinged with national-fascism and a restless reactionary spirit – the original sin, alongside xenophobia and anti-Semitism, of Marine’s father’s National Front, from which she expelled him from the new Rassemblement National due to his fascist and racist tendencies. Marine, too, has done everything in her power to legitimise herself as a potential president of the Fifth Republic, with little success amongst intellectuals and the educated classes who focus on Paris’s leading role, but with resounding and now dazzling success amongst the working classes and the petty bourgeoisie of the famous ‘deep France’, the ‘France d’en bas’. Now we come to the crux of the matter. The diversity is plain for all to see.

Meloni has been in office for four years of conventional governance; whether one likes it or not, whether it provokes ideological reactions and automatic aversion or not, but she has governed without excesses or contrivances, without burdening the budget with new debt beyond permitted limits, never – or almost never – engaging in demagogic disputes with the markets or fighting against democratic and liberal globalisation, in harmony with the Europe of Brussels, where she has an independent voice yet also the capacity to listen and cooperate. Giorgia has a habit of saying ‘nation’ rather than ‘country’, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, out of a mixture of pride and shrewdness that has not caused upheaval; it has helped the system to improve through the long-awaited alternation of power, now extended to the full spectrum of political forces that form part of the republic’s and the constitution’s history. Meloni has achieved all this, despite her quirks, right-wing reflexes and opposing pressures, through two key levers: foreign and security policy – namely, support for Zelensky’s Ukraine as it resists Putin’s Russia and its aggression – the goal of Western unity in these calamitous Trump-era times, and a policy of controlled immigration which has yielded controversial results, if you will, but has not been brandished as an ambiguous aspect of national identity; rather, it has been managed in concert with Europe and with reasonable mainstream success, from London to Copenhagen.

Marine Le Pen wants to lead France with different ideas in mind, in some respects opposed to those of the Italian right, which is, incidentally, allied with a centrist party that was at the origin of the centre-right coalition itself – Berlusconi’s party, which did much to reorganise and reform the Italian political system without upheaval, despite the utter incomprehension and hostility of its many enemies. Speaking to the Financial Times just yesterday, Marine said that should she win next spring’s presidential election, support for Ukraine would cease, because France cannot afford it; that sanctions would be lifted; and that an energy truce with a country waging a war of aggression against democratic Europeans would necessarily have to be established: in short, a white flag on the eastern front. Furthermore, a key feature of Le Pen and Bardella’s party platform is ‘national preference’ – that is, a criterion for the provision of public services that abolishes the concept of equal citizenship and fans the flames of intolerance towards foreigners and immigrants. These are issues on which opinions may differ; they are also the kinds of slogans for which Marine is counting on Santiago Abascal and Giorgia Meloni, in the hope that a Le Pen-style shift in France will also influence Italy and Spain in a process of weakening the European Union.

Listening to Meloni speak in the Chamber of Deputies yesterday, one was left with the clear impression that a victorious Marine in Paris might, fortunately, end up being disappointed by the Italian right.