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Giorgia Meloni’s radical transatlantic playbook

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Overseas voting in the 2022 midterms has started, and Global Insider comes to you from Singapore this week, where the Milken Institute Asia Summit kicks off Wednesday.

But first, we turn to Italy, where GiorgiaMeloni will become the country’s first female prime minister after her Brothers of Italy party finished as the biggest party in this weekend’s snap election.

The right-wing coalition Meloni leads won around 44 percent of the vote — in line with POLITICO’s poll of polls forecast.

You’ve already read in dozens of headlines that Meloni will be Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini. But don’t fall for the trap of reducing this far-right firebrand to simple labels like the Italian Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán or Marine Le Pen.

THE MEANING OF GIORGIA MELONI

Global takeaway — right-wing populism is getting smarter. It could have died off with Trump’s election loss or Boris Johnson’s humiliating ejection from Downing Street, but that isn’t happening.

Cases in point: Liz Truss is more disciplined than Johnson, just as Ron DeSantis is more disciplined than Trump. The Swedish Democrats made themselves too big to ignore, allowing them to slide into a governing coalition. Meloni, meanwhile, courted foreign policy respectability. Her combination of nationalist identity politics and transatlantic solidarity makes her a hit with American conservatives and makes her harder to isolate or dismiss than a mere Italian Trump.

“Her trans-Atlanticism is a marker to show she is different. She believes Italy is part of the West, and compared to some ethno-nationalists she almost looks like a Europhile in Brussels,” Thibault Muzergues, Europe program director for the International Republican Institute, told Global Insider.

Democrats should expect Meloni to be a source of headaches in the 2024 election cycle in the U.S. By providing a playbook for how to assume power as a more disciplined version of Trump, Meloni’s tactics are also a test case for Republican presidential aspirants not named Trump.

Semi-fascism comes to the G-7 and G-20: Meloni is nationalism’s great hope, offering something leaders in Poland and Hungary cannot — leadership of a G-7 and G-20 country.

Italy is home to 60 million people and continental Europe’s third-largest economy.

How the biscotti crumbles: Three out of four voters rejected Meloni, and one in three didn’t vote at all.

Overall, only one in six Italian adults voted for Brothers of Italy. That may make them the biggest party in the new parliament — but it’s not a great basis for long-term legitimacy.

American allies: Meloni has appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference and the National Prayer Breakfast, and joined the decidedly mainstream Aspen Institute in 2020. She and Steve Bannon were filmed strategizing together as far back as 2018. Bannon said of her then: “You put a reasonable face on right-wing populism, you get elected.”

European allies — Meloni leads a group of 44 parties: The European Conservatives and Reformists party network includes the U.K. Conservatives and Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party. That means that there’s little point in trying to isolate Meloni. Italy is too big to kick out or marginalize in EU forums, its economy is too big to be allowed to fail, and she’s too well-connected. Notably, Meloni opposed Brexit.

Chinese and Russian foes: Meloni is a hawk when it comes to Beijing and Moscow. At CPAC, Meloni immediately took a firm stand against Russia’s Vladimir Putin when he invaded Ukraine in February. She told La Stampa in July that sending weapons and other support to Ukraine is a baseline for Italy being taken seriously by Western partners in Russia policy. Meloni is a long-time critic of Beijing, including a call for Italian athletes to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics, over China’s treatment of Tibet.

MELONI’S INNER CIRCLE

“A mix of good guys and people you would never want to meet” — that’s how one senior executive at an Italian multinational put it to Global Insider.

Meloni must work with coalition partners Matteo Salvini, another nationalist firebrand; and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi: a Putin buddy. Meloni’s most experienced adviser, and most important establishment validator, is Giulio Terzi, a former foreign minister under technocrat Mario Monti, and an Italian ambassador to both the United Nations and United States.

Also in Meloni’s corner are Sen. Adolfo Urso, chair of the Italian parliament’s security committee, Ignazio La Russa, a former minister of defense, and Guido Crosetto, who leads Italy’s trade association for defense companies.

An AOC-level communicator: Meloni’s speeches are lessons in clean communication. She uses simple, concrete thoughts, expressed with words that any audience can grasp and remember. For example: She is for children, but against “gender ideology.”

There are hints of Trump — “Italy and Italian people first” is one slogan — but none of the rambling of a Trump rally when Meloni rises to speak. DeSantis’ tightly drafted “DeSantis Playbook” is a bullet point mirror image of Meloni’s stump speech.

Hypocrisy alert: Meloni appeals to the cultural identity of millions of Italian Catholics, but she draws her moral lines in convenient places. She brands her own child out of wedlock — with television presenter Andrea Giambruno — as relatable. But same-sex adoptive parents are one of her political targets.

POLICY CHALLENGES

Meloni walks a tightrope balancing domestic base and foreign allies: “The faithful need to know that her government would be tough on immigration, critical of the EU, and based on traditional values,” Stefano Stefanini, a former Italian ambassador to NATO, told Global Insider. “Moderates, markets and the foreign allies want continuity,” he said.

The Biden administration prizes European Union coherence and cooperation. While a Meloni-led Italy would continue to prioritize NATO and transatlantic unity, it would also head a disruptive faction at the EU summit table — and that would offer Republicans new ways to pick apart EU unity on complicated issues from climate action to digital taxes.

Meloni’s challenge is to disrupt the EU status quo thinking from the inside, without disrupting the EU flow of money to Rome.

“We want a different Italian attitude on the international stage, for example in dealing with the European Commission. This does not mean that we want to destroy Europe, that we want to leave Europe,” Meloni told Reuters.

Italy’s public debt sits at 147 percent of GDP, and keeping it under control depends on a generous EU Covid recovery aid package that’s been promised to Italy. That would be at risk if Meloni angered Brussels by pursuing large tax cuts or violated democratic standards. Therefore, assume she won’t.

U.K., CANADA AMONG COUNTRIES GOING BACKWARDS ON KEY SOCIAL INDICATOR 

The 2022 Social Progress Index — compiled by Washington, D.C.-based non-profit Social Progress Imperative — contains bad news today. “The world is at risk of a social progress recession in 2023,” according to the index report, with social progress slowing dramatically overall, and going backward in some key countries.

The index measures 169 countries against 60 social and environmental indicators. These indicators are designed to give attention to national data points beyond economics. The index also aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, to help countries track progress.

Nordic and Scandinavian countries take five of the top six rankings, but it’s lower down that the really challenging data is found.

Canada is the only English-speaking country in the global top 10, but fell back dramatically to 111th in the world on housing affordability.

U.S. (25th) and Italy (21st) now considered “Tier 2” on social progress. The other five G-7 countries are in Tier 1 of the index.

The U.K. is in decline, after “a lost decade of social progress”: The only other countries in the similar reversals are Syria, Venezuela and Libya. Austerity and Brexit impacts are “showing up in the data in every area from education to healthcare, to rights and tolerance,” the report concluded. The U.K. slipped the 35th on rights, and 70th on freedom of religion (down from 21st a decade ago) and 91st on housing affordability.

UKRAINE — WEEKEND OF SHAM RUSSIAN REFERENDA: G-7 leaders jointly slammed Russia’s “sham referenda” in occupied territory, where residents were sometimes forced to vote to join Russia at gunpoint. The less we dignify the actions with coverage, the better.

How long until Stefan Schaller loses his job? The CEO of Energie Waldeck-Frankenberg, a publicly owned German energy provider, went to Ukraine as a self-appointed election observer and congratulated Russia on the annexation votes. Schaller’s company board is conducting an urgent meeting today to decide his future.

CANADA — POLITICO PROFILES FOREIGN MINISTER MELANIE JOLY: POLITICO’s Andy Blatchfordprofiled Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, one of several senior Liberals said to be mulling a Liberal leadership run whenever the post-Trudeau era arrives. The minister’s career has rebounded from what she admits was an “intense and sometimes difficult” stint in the heritage portfolio.

IRAN — HIJAB PROTESTS CONTINUE: More than 40 protestors have been killed over the past week, and President Ebrahim Raisi on Saturday promised a crackdown. But there’s no sign protests are abating in Iran. They’re also spreading among Iranian diaspora communities a week after the funeral of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died after falling into a coma after morality police detained her over an alleged infringement of hijab rules on women’s dress. Authorities have cut off mobile internet access, including messaging platform WhatsApp.

Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service is now up and running in Iran.

CAMBODIA — 16 YEARS AND THREE TRIALS LATER, KHMER ROUGE GENOCIDE TRIALS END: A U.N.-backed tribunal created a meticulous record of the genocide in which 1.7 million people were killed from 1975-1979, but the country’s long-time dictator Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge member, limited its prosecutorial scope. More than four in five Cambodians weren’t alive during the genocide, creating a large generational disconnect in the country.

CATCH UP WITH GLOBAL INSIDER 

Join Global Insider in America’s hottest club — the D.C. sauna diplomatic society.

DAVID MALPASS — WON’T RESIGN, WILL APOLOGIZE OVER CLIMATE REMARKS

Climate change deniers often use phrases like the one the World Bank president used last week to hedge his views on the role of humans in climate change: “I’m not a scientist,” he said.

He’s still under pressure to resign — catch up on his explanation

Video (30 minutes) | Story highlights

“It’s clear that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are causing climate change,” Malpass said. “So the task for us, for the world, is to pull together the projects and the funding that actually has an impact.” He agreed to undergo further training to better understand climate science, but wouldn’t commit to ending the bank’s financing of fossil fuel projects.

REMEMBERING SHINZO ABE: The State Funeral of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan will take place Tuesday in Tokyo.

The U.S. delegation is being led by Vice President Kamala Harris, Ambassadors Rahm Emanuel and Caroline Kennedy, USTR Katherine Tai and Sen. Bill Hagerty who, like Kennedy, is a former ambassador to Japan.

CONFLICTED — DOWNING STREET CHIEF: In what appears to be a conflict of interest, Liz Truss’s chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, is working for her on a short-term contract, on loan from his lobbying firm, Fullbrook Strategies. Prior to his current role, Fullbrook lobbied for the Libyan House of Representatives, which has twice attempted to overthrow a U.N.-established government of national unity, and won hundreds of millions of Covid-related contracts from the government to which he is now the top adviser.

FROZEN — EU PREPARING FURTHER CRACKDOWN ON OLIGARCHS: The EU has frozen around $15 billion in assets belonging to sanctioned oligarchs and entities, Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders told POLITICO in an interview. That’s around half the total private assets frozen by the G-7. Just six EU countries — Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland and France — accounted for 90 percent of the seizures.

Expect legislation: Reynders plans to present proposals this fall to make sanction evasion a criminal offense across the bloc (it’s already a crime in some EU countries).

ICYMI — ANOTHER MULTILATERAL BANKING SCANDAL: What is it with the heads of international financial institutions? There seems to be no end to the scandals whether it be predatory sexual behavior (Dominique Strauss Kahn), a corruption court case (Christine Lagarde), data manipulation (Kristalina Georgieva) or climate action controversy (Malpass). Now, Inter-American Development Bank President Mauricio Claver-Carone is reported to have threatened to “burn” or “bring” the bank down over an investigation into a rumored affair he had with a female staffer, according to an outside report.

MOVES

APPOINTED: Former ambassador Miriam Sapiro will be the next president and CEO of InterAction, the largest U.S. alliance of non-governmental organizations.

APPOINTED:Curtis S. Chin will chair the Milken Institute’s Asia Center.

APPOINTED: International Republican Institute President Dan Twining was appointed to the USAID Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid.

NOMINATED: 

Lynne M. Tracy, a career diplomat, as ambassador to Russia.

Martina Anna Tkadlec Strong as ambassador to United Arab Emirates.

B. Bix Aliu as ambassador to Montenegro.

Roger F. Nyhus as ambassador to Barbados, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Thanks to editor Dave Brown and producer Hannah Farrow.

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