Giorgia Meloni Sets Italy’s Postwar Record For Government Longevity — But Growth Stagnates

But political durability has proved easier to achieve than economic transformation.

Meloni’s government has brought Italy something its recent history has rarely offered: predictability. It has also shown that a party once associated with hard Euroscepticism can govern with considerable fiscal restraint while pursuing one of Europe’s toughest migration agendas. What it has not yet demonstrated is that stability itself can overcome Italy’s deeper economic weaknesses.

That distinction matters as Italy approaches the 2027 parliamentary elections.

From anti-system politics to European pragmatism

Meloni entered government in 2022 after years in opposition, where her politics had been sharply critical of Brussels. In office, the approach changed considerably.

Her coalition of Fratelli d’Italia, Lega and Forza Italia has remained intact, giving the prime minister room to pursue a consistent policy agenda. Rather than confronting European institutions head-on, Rome has worked with the European Commission and accepted the conditions attached to EU recovery funding. Italy has also maintained support for joint NATO action.

The political adaptation has been significant. Meloni has moved from the language of an anti-establishment opposition leader towards that of a predictable European head of government.

For Brussels and financial markets, this matters almost as much as the individual policies themselves. Italy's public debt remains exceptionally high, but the government has avoided the kind of uncontrolled fiscal expansion that could have intensified market concerns. The deficit fell from 3.4 per cent of GDP in 2024 to 3.1 per cent in 2025, with the European Commission forecasting 2.9 per cent in 2026.

That discipline has come partly through politically difficult decisions.

The government dismantled the Superbonus 110 per cent tax incentive for energy-efficiency renovations, a programme that generated about €174bn in fiscal liabilities overall, including €8.4bn in 2025. It also abolished the broad-based Reddito di cittadinanza welfare scheme and replaced it with more targeted support.

The message was clear: the state could no longer afford the expansive spending commitments inherited from previous governments.

Meloni’s political success has therefore depended less on ideological consistency than on adaptation. The government has retained a hard-right identity while abandoning some of the assumptions that once made that identity incompatible with European economic governance.

The migration paradox

Migration offers another example of this transformation.

Irregular arrivals fell from 157,651 in 2023 to 66,316 in 2024 and roughly the same level in 2025. During the first half of 2026, arrivals fell a further 52 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier, reaching 15,323 by July 15. Repatriations increased by 34 per cent during the first six months of 2026, to 4,442 people.

The government has pursued this through a combination of restrictive legislation, tougher enforcement and externalisation. It imposed temporary bans on NGO rescue vessels entering Italian waters, with restrictions ranging from 30 days to six months, and established migrant detention and processing centres in Albania. Police powers over detention were also expanded.

Yet the most revealing element of the policy is not its restrictive side. It is the simultaneous expansion of legal migration.

Italy has approved almost 498,000 legal work permits for 2026–28, including 164,850 for 2026 alone.

This is not necessarily a contradiction. It is a sharper distinction between migration that the government considers controllable and migration that it considers irregular. The political objective is not simply fewer foreigners entering Italy; it is greater state control over who enters, under what status and for what purpose.

That distinction could become increasingly important for European migration policy. Italy is effectively testing a model in which externalised border enforcement and legal labour migration coexist rather than compete.

The approach has nevertheless generated diplomatic costs. Relations with Germany have been strained by disputes over German-funded rescue organisations operating in the Mediterranean and over how responsibility for migrants should be shared. Rome’s migration policy has therefore strengthened its position domestically while complicating relations with one of its most important European partners.

Stability has not become growth

The economic record is more difficult to celebrate.

Italy created roughly 1.2 million jobs during Meloni’s tenure and unemployment has fallen below 6 per cent. Those are substantial improvements in the labour market.

GDP, however, tells a much less impressive story.

The economy grew by only 0.5 per cent in 2025, while growth of just 0.4-0.5 per cent is expected in 2026, compared with roughly 1.1 per cent across Europe. Italy’s economy even contracted in the second quarter of 2025, its first quarterly decline in two years.

Meanwhile, public debt is still moving upwards. It stood at 137.1 per cent of GDP in 2025 and is projected to reach 138.5 per cent in 2026 and 139.2 per cent in 2027.

This is the central tension in Meloni’s record.

Fiscal discipline can reduce immediate risk without creating new sources of productivity. Eliminating expensive tax incentives can prevent further pressure on public finances, but it does not by itself make Italian companies more competitive or raise potential growth. Reducing welfare spending can improve the budget balance, but it cannot substitute for deeper reforms to the economy.

Italy has achieved a degree of fiscal and political stabilisation without achieving an equivalent transformation of its economic model.

The distinction is crucial because high debt makes sustained low growth particularly problematic. If nominal economic expansion remains weak while the debt ratio continues to rise, political stability buys time rather than resolving the underlying constraint.

The limits of governing strength

Meloni’s record is also less complete than the length of her tenure might imply.

Her government suffered a major defeat in a national referendum on its flagship judicial reform, which sought to separate the careers of judges and prosecutors. The result exposed the limits of the coalition’s ability to convert political longevity into institutional change.

This matters because Italy’s problem has never been simply that governments do not last long enough.

Short-lived cabinets have certainly made long-term policymaking difficult. But longevity is useful only if governments can use it to alter the structures that constrain growth, productivity and state capacity. A government that survives for four years but cannot push through major reforms may be more stable without being substantially more transformative.

Meloni’s coalition has proved exceptionally effective at avoiding collapse. It has been less successful at demonstrating that the same cohesion can produce big institutional change.

That is perhaps the most important lesson of the record itself.

A new model for Europe’s right

The significance of Meloni’s government extends beyond Italy because it offers European right-wing parties a different route into power.

The Italian experiment suggests that a populist movement does not necessarily have to abandon its political identity once it enters government. It can instead moderate its relationship with European institutions, accept fiscal constraints and preserve a strong national position on migration.

For the European mainstream, this creates a complicated bargain.

Meloni is no longer the destabilising Eurosceptic figure that her earlier political rhetoric might have suggested. She has become a government partner capable of working with Brussels while pushing the European debate on migration towards stricter border controls and external processing.

That makes Italy simultaneously more predictable and more influential.

It also changes the political calculation for the European right. The Italian case weakens the argument that radical right parties inevitably implode once confronted with the practical demands of government. Meloni has already disproved that assumption.

The unanswered question is whether endurance can eventually produce results that voters can feel in the wider economy.