Follow Ryan on Twitter. 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 Giorgia Meloni 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.
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