Mid-term elections: Fdi sees a lesson for Trump and the MAGA movement: ‘Meloni is the model for the right of the future’

The Italian Government had been hoping for a mixed result for Donald Trump, with the Republicans retaining at least a majority in the Senate. Instead, the US mid-term elections have brought to pass the prophecy of a completely lame duck, without control of Congress and therefore ‘capable of anything’. Giorgia Meloni has no intention of commenting: she has kept a safe distance from the vote and will continue to do so. But the mood at Palazzo Chigi and amongst the right-wing in Parliament is clear.

Early in the morning, it was Meloni’s MP Ylenja Lucaselli, Fdi group leader on the Chamber of Deputies’ Budget Committee, who set the tone: during ‘Breakfast in America’, Adnkronos’s live broadcast, she said that the lesson to be learnt from the Republican Party’s defeat is ‘first and foremost for Trump, for American politics and for the sometimes rather over-the-top handling of certain issues that are, in fact, very dear to the American people’. “I believe,” she added, “that American Republicans want to return to the true Republican Party, which Trump has clearly never actually represented.”

Whilst considering the temptation to engage in ‘stadium-style cheering for one candidate or another in a different country, with different needs and a completely different culture’ to be inappropriate, the MP sets out the position: ‘It is absolutely clear that the interpretation of conservatism that has emerged primarily in Italia, thanks to President Meloni, is the one that will shape the future of centre-right parties’. This is the gamble Rome has so far been playing out quietly: to champion the ‘Meloni model’ as the ‘new conservatism’ which, in the Italian context the foreign press had already identified. A blend of the traditional values dear to the right – the nation, the family, identity – and pragmatism.

‘A nation is truly a nation when it recognises the value of those who have defended it, preserves their memory and passes on to new generations a sense of pride in belonging to it,’ writes the Prime Minister in her message to mark 4 November, Armed Forces Day, and when asked, she says that as for the US, ‘we’ll talk about that another time’. In fact, whilst we wait to see whether Marine Le Pen will indeed win the Élysée Palace in France in the spring of 2027, Meloni is currently the only right-wing leader considered capable of embodying a winning alternative to the MAGA culture. She is so firmly in the saddle that she has led the government to break the record for longevity in the history of the Republic and has kept her party at around 28 per cent in the polls for four years running.

Within the centre-right, the mid-term election result is interpreted as follows: confirmation that Italy is on the right track. And that Trump has paid the price for his excesses, which Meloni herself has also suffered in the form of insults and abuse. But the alliance with the US is not up for debate: the United States ‘is a historic and valuable ally’, officials at Palazzo Chigi emphasise, and for the Prime Minister, the unity of the West remains the guiding light.