{"id":45809,"date":"2026-04-27T08:13:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T08:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/45809\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T08:13:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T08:13:26","slug":"trumps-iran-war-is-causing-problems-for-his-ally-in-italy-giorgia-meloni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/45809\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Iran War Is Causing Problems For His Ally in Italy, Giorgia Meloni"},"content":{"rendered":"

During a visit to the White House<\/a> last year, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy bonded with President Trump over their shared opposition to \u201cwoke\u201d ideologies and migration. After the meeting, Ms. Meloni, the only sitting European leader<\/a> to attend Mr. Trump\u2019s second presidential inauguration, said she was proud of their \u201cprivileged relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, as an American war with Iran causes economic pain throughout Europe, Ms. Meloni\u2019s once vaunted friendship with Mr. Trump is proving to be a liability, just as she is seeking to win a tight referendum later this month over a contentious judicial change.<\/p>\n

Ms. Meloni has led one of the longest and most stable governments<\/a> in Italy\u2019s tumultuous postwar history \u2014 and her party still outperforms its rivals in the national polls. Yet the war and her handling of it is raising some of the thorniest political challenges she has faced since entering office in 2022.<\/p>\n

Critics have condemned her for failing to wield any visible influence over President Trump\u2019s wartime decisions and for her ambivalent response to his decision to attack Iran.<\/p>\n

New surveys suggest the opposition is gaining ground in the referendum campaign and may even defeat the judicial proposal in the vote later this month. The proposed changes center on a plan to divide oversight of prosecutors and judges, who are currently jointly supervised by a single body, and to make it harder for lawyers to move between the two professions. Ms. Meloni\u2019s government says the changes would help make judges more independent from prosecutors, while critics say the new system would make prosecutors and judges more beholden to politicians.<\/p>\n

Because many voters and commentators find the details of the proposal arcane and confusing, the vote to approve them has instead been framed as a plebiscite on Ms. Meloni herself \u2014 presenting her with a moment of rare jeopardy.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolitics is made of these kinds of moments in which at some point someone looks invincible and they slip on a first banana skin,\u201d said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs, a Rome-based research group. \u201cAnd all of a sudden they lose their luster.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Meloni was caught on the back foot when the United States began bombing Iran late last month without consulting any European allies. While some European leaders received a courtesy call<\/a> just before the attacks, the Italians were left unaware. Ms. Meloni\u2019s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, was in Dubai for a family vacation<\/a> and had to be evacuated by military plane.<\/p>\n

Her critics pounced. \u201cFor months, they\u2019ve been telling us across all networks that Meloni was the bridge between Trump and Europe. Unfortunately, it was all fake news!\u201d Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister and centrist opposition leader, wrote on social media<\/a>. \u201cWhat an embarrassment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Meloni has since been forced to triangulate between placating Mr. Trump by avoiding outright condemnation of the war; trying to fulfill defense cooperation agreements with Arab countries in the Persian Gulf; and assuaging Italian public opinion, which is firmly against the war. Polls show that about two-thirds of Italians have a negative view of the attacks on Iran.<\/p>\n

Illustrating that balancing act, Ms. Meloni said in Parliament on Wednesday that the world was \u201cfacing an evident crisis in international law and multilateral organizations, and the collapse of a shared world order\u201d but stopped short of explicitly condemning Mr. Trump\u2019s decision to attack.<\/p>\n

Her government has agreed to send naval ships to defend the Republic of Cyprus, a Mediterranean state that has come under retaliatory fire from Iran, and missile and drone defense systems to protect Arab allies in the Persian Gulf that have suffered Iranian bombardments. Still, Ms. Meloni said in Parliament, \u201cItaly is not taking part and does not intend to take part\u201d in the conflict.<\/p>\n

From a strategic point of view, keeping a fluid position \u201cis very rational to stay in power,\u201d said Leila Simona Talani, director of the Center for Italian Politics at King\u2019s College London. \u201cAny position that she takes could be detrimental to her own role.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Meloni has always been more aligned with Mr. Trump on culture war issues and immigration than on foreign policy, said Mariangela Zappia, Italy\u2019s ambassador to the United States from 2021 to 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey see eye to eye on many things,\u201d said Ms. Zappia, president of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, a research group in Milan. But in foreign policy, Ms. Meloni is \u201cmuch more careful\u201d and \u201cmuch more European really than people tend to believe,\u201d Ms. Zappia said.<\/p>\n

Even before the war, the Italian public was cooling on Mr. Trump and his administration\u2019s policies. Before the Winter Games in Milan last month, protesters objected to news that a special unit of ICE would accompany the U.S. delegation<\/a> to the Olympics because they were angered by the conduct of ICE agents in Minneapolis. At the Games\u2019 opening ceremony, some spectators booed when Vice President JD Vance<\/a> appeared on large screens in the stadium.<\/p>\n

Given public sentiment in Italy, Ms. Meloni has been \u201ctrying to distance herself, let\u2019s say, from the Trumpian guys, because, you know, they are becoming a little bit more radioactive,\u201d said Lorenzo Castellani, a political scientist at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. Now, he said, Ms. Meloni\u2019s \u201cambition is more to maintain stability at home.\u201d Rather than being left out of the loop by Mr. Trump, as some critics have suggested, Ms. Meloni is distancing herself from the American president\u2019s inner circle as a shrewd political tactic, Mr. Castellani said.<\/p>\n

Opposition leaders criticize Ms. Meloni for not being clearer in her censure of the attacks on Iran. If she is \u201cclaiming a privileged relationship she should use it to say openly to President Trump that what he is doing is wrong,\u201d Elly Schlein, leader of the center-left Democratic Party<\/a>, said in an interview. \u201cThe Italian government should work for a cease-fire to de-escalate the dramatic situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only criticism Ms. Meloni has clearly made is to condemn what she called a \u201cmassacre\u201d at an elementary school in southern Iran<\/a>. In her speech to Parliament, she called for \u201cthose responsible for this tragedy to be swiftly identified.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the upcoming referendum and a parliamentary election due next year, Ms. Meloni is counting on her continuing solid support \u2014 she has approval ratings of around 44 percent \u2014 to weather criticism from the left flank.<\/p>\n

For now, Italians \u201cdon\u2019t like this war, but these are things that they perceive as far away,\u201d said Lorenzo Kamel, a professor of history of international relations at the University of Turin.<\/p>\n

If the war lasts for much longer and the economy takes a steep stumble, he said, \u201cshe could have at that point a big backlash.\u201d<\/p>\n

Josephine de La Bruy\u00e8re contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During a visit to the White House last year, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy bonded with President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[13624,27945,273,952,2516,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-45809","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-giorgia-meloni","8":"tag-donald-j","9":"tag-giorgia-1977","10":"tag-giorgia-meloni","11":"tag-italy","12":"tag-meloni","13":"tag-trump"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116475671708159421","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}