The usual owls, solons and rosiconi, those radical chic who in Roman living rooms had renamed her the ‘pesciarola of Garbatella’, will now be tearing their hair out seeing that a well-known international magazine has crowned Giorgia Meloni as the most powerful person in Europe.

The Italian and European left could do nothing in the face of the right-wing leader of the Brothers of Italy who, in less than a decade “went from being dismissed as a crazy ultranationalist to being elected prime minister of Italy, establishing herself as a figure with whom Brussels, and now Washington, can do business”, as we read verbatim on Politico.eu. Attempts to boycott the appointment of Raffaele Fitto as executive vice-president of the European Commission have failed miserably. The attempt, carried out with journalistic investigations such as that of Fanpage on the Melonian Youth, to pass off Meloni as the leader of a far-right phalanx, failed. The ‘cordon sanitaire’ hypothesized by the France of Emmanuel Macron and the Germany of the resigning Olaf Scholz to isolate Meloni from an international point of view did not work. Indeed, Scholz will soon give way to CDU leader Mertz, while Macron finds himself in the midst of a government crisis implemented at the hands of Marine Le Pen.

Melons better than Angela Merkel

In this context, in the absence of an Angela Merkel, it is clear that the ball of European politics is in the hands of Meloni who for years has enjoyed a close relationship with the billionaire Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s new right-hand man, the new US president who will find in the Italian premier the main point of contact in Europe. And, even if the latest economic data seems contrasting with the GDP slowing down and employment levels quite satisfactory, the birds of ill omen have had the worst of it. The Italian centre-left, both during the election campaign and in the months immediately following the defeat, was betting on the explosion of the spread and the imminent arrival of the Troika.

The shadow of the Albania model

The only hold that, for the moment, the opposition can cling to is the ‘Albania model’ which is experiencing more than one difficulty in its implementation. Migrants going back and forth and law enforcement officers suffering a sort of mobbing in luxury hotels are certainly not a good start. But nothing is lost. The so-called red robes will still have one year to contest the government decrees because then the list of Safe Countries will be drawn up at European level. But, beyond the technicalities, the path is clear.

With Trump at the helm of Capitol Hill, the conservative-majority European Council is clear that immigration guidelines will not be very dissimilar to those imposed by Meloni over the past two years. On the other hand, the Spanish socialists also reject the migrants in Ceuta and Melilla, while the French from Ventimiglia send the migrants back to Italy and Starmer’s English look with interest precisely at the ‘Albania model’. And so Giorgia Meloni’s undisputed star will continue to shine in Europe for a long time.