Giorgia Meloni: You cannot champion European unity while legislatively dismantling your own country from the inside

It’s the oldest trick in the populist playbook, look less dangerous than the last guy, and people will thank you for the erosion of their rights.

TIME Magazine’s recent profile of Giorgia Meloni is a masterclass in respectable framing. Here is the far-right leader of a post-fascist party, once dismissed as a fringe radical, now being applauded for her moderation, pragmatism, and international charm. She quotes nationalist antisemites and flirts with autocracy, but does so with a smile. She governs a party with Mussolini-era nostalgia baked into its DNA, but wins over Biden and Vance alike. She courts Elon Musk, disempowers judges, sues journalists, and slashes protest rights, yet somehow still earns applause as a woman of the people.

This is what happens when fascism stops goose-stepping and starts networking.

We were warned about boots. We weren't warned about heels.

What TIME gets right is that Meloni is building something new: a form of acceptable nationalism that merges the language of Western values with the architecture of digital populism. She has figured out how to sound like a European stateswoman while acting like a soft authoritarian. Her genius, if we must call it that, is narrative management. It’s not what she dismantles, it’s what she makes palatable. You don’t notice the corrosion when the rust looks like gold.

You see, Meloni doesn’t need to invoke Mussolini. She only needs to refuse to disavow him completely. She doesn’t need to attack democracy directly. She simply redefines it, one law, one lawsuit, one migrant scapegoat at a time. She doesn’t need to defeat liberalism. She just needs to replace it with “pride.”

But pride, divorced from empathy, is just a prettier name for fear.

And here’s where the danger becomes systemic.

1. Constitutional Engineering for Eternal Power

Meloni is currently pushing through a radical constitutional reform that will make the Prime Minister directly elected by the people. Sounds democratic, doesn’t it? Until you realise that the same reform grants sweeping new powers to the executive, weakens the President of the Republic, and reduces parliamentary checks. It’s not reform. It’s concentration.

In Italy’s post-fascist constitution, power was deliberately fragmented to avoid another strongman. Meloni’s plan rewrites that intent. It's populist centralisation disguised as electoral clarity. And it’s paired with another manoeuvre: if she wins the next election under this new system, she will not just govern, she will rule.

2. The Autonomy Bill: A New North-South Divide

In June 2024, Meloni’s government passed the Differentiated Autonomy Law, empowering Italy’s wealthier northern regions, like Lombardy and Veneto, to manage education, health care, and transport independently. This has been rightly called a death blow to national cohesion, a legal sundering of what Italy’s unification in 1861 fought to establish.

It creates a two-speed Italy, where the south becomes institutionally dependent and permanently disadvantaged. Hospitals, schools, and public services in Calabria or Sicily will not operate on the same plane as those in Milan or Bologna. It’s not just policy, it’s a structural injustice baked into law.

And here’s the irony: the same woman fragmenting Italy’s national unity is now positioning herself as a leader for European integration. The hypocrisy is grotesque. You cannot champion European unity while legislatively dismantling your own country from the inside.

But this is how authoritarian populism works in the 21st century: it doesn’t destroy institutions with violence. It hollows them out from within.

3. Media and Protest Suppression

Meloni’s government has passed new security laws that criminalise “unauthorised” protests and expand punishments for activists, especially around infrastructure and climate demonstrations. Simultaneously, she has launched a wave of defamation lawsuits against journalists, using the courts as an intimidation mechanism. This isn't Law and Order, it’s controlled expression.

4. A Hostile Environment by Design

From the outsourcing of migrant detention to Albania (struck down by the courts), to Italy’s tacit complicity in pushing refugees back to Libyan detention centres, Meloni’s signature policy has been to normalise hostility. She claims immigration has dropped 64%, but at what human cost? At what ethical cost?

Meloni is not the moderate Europe hoped for. She is a carefully packaged Trojan horse, her moderation is the disguise, not the essence. Her party, Fratelli d’Italia, is still home to Mussolini nostalgics. Her rhetoric still draws on “globalist” conspiracies. Her politics still prize obedience, hierarchy, and ethnic identity over pluralism.

What makes her different from Orban or Trump is not ideology, it’s sequencing. She has the discipline to look centrist while laying authoritarian scaffolding, brick by legislative brick.

So when the international press frames her as a surprise success story, we should ask: success for whom? She may look competent, even composed. But so did plenty of historical figures, until it was too late to stop them.

But perhaps the most troubling element of this story isn’t just Meloni herself, it’s the respectable packaging she now enjoys.

Once again, we are watching how nuanced authoritarianism gets normalised not through violent takeover, but through media oversimplification. Profiles like TIME’s don’t intend to support autocracy, but by framing Meloni’s restraint as virtue, rather than strategy, they risk doing just that.

This is the deeper failure of modern journalism: trading systems-level insight for character studies. Fascism 3.0 doesn’t arrive with boots and banners, it arrives with ratings, relatability, and a well-lit photo shoot.

Meloni is not the moderate Europe hoped for... Meloni doesn’t need to break Europe. She just needs to convince it she’s fixing it.