At the January 2025 inauguration of United States President Donald Trump, only one European leader was on the guest list – Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s right-wing prime minister. The month before, she had been pictured holding an intimate tete-a-tete with Trump in the dining room of the Elysee Palace, where France’s President Emmanuel Macron was hosting a celebration for the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.From the very start of Trump’s second term as US president, Meloni – once at the fringe of Italian politics with her particular brand of neoliberalist, far-right views – was seen as the “chosen one”, the European leader Trump said he could work with to “straighten out the world a little bit”. He affectionately referred to her as “a real live wire” during her visit to the White House in April last year – once again, the first European leader to make the trip after Trump announced sweeping global trade tariffs.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listMeloni lapped it up. Presenting herself to the world as the only European who could de-escalate Trump’s trade war, she called him a “brilliant man” and asserted that, with him, she would “make the West great again“.A little over a year later, that bonhomie now stands punctured – with Trump’s war on Iran the trigger.“When we don’t agree, we must say it. And this time, we do not agree,” she said last weekend, of the US-Israeli war …
