Italy’s far right has spent the past two years trying to look both governing and insurgent at once. Giorgia Meloni’s success depended on holding that contradiction together: she kept her post-fascist base close enough to stay loyal, whilst presenting herself abroad as a usable Atlantic ally, especially to Donald Trump and the American right.
That balance is now under pressure from both sides. The internal pressure comes from Roberto Vannacci, whose new party is pulling voters away from the coalition. The external pressure comes from Trump, who used the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains this month to publicly humiliate an ally he once called a “fantastic woman.”
The two pressures are related. Meloni’s domestic authority has always rested partly on her international credibility. When that credibility frays, the harder right gains room to argue that restraint has brought her nothing. Vannacci is making exactly that argument, and Trump has just handed him new evidence for it.
Vannacci is the Revolt Against Restraint
Vannacci’s appeal is not mysterious. He launched Futuro Nazionale in February 2026 after breaking from Matteo Salvini’s League, having gathered more than 530,000 preference votes as a League candidate in the 2024 European elections.
His rhetoric centres on cultural homogeneity, hostility to immigration and a more openly hardline nationalism than Meloni can comfortably perform in office.
A YouTrend survey published on 18 June for Sky TG24 placed Futuro Nazionale at 5.9 per cent, narrowly ahead of the League at 5.8 per cent. That does not make Vannacci a prime minister-in-waiting, but it does make him a structural problem for the coalition.
He is more dangerous to Meloni than Salvini currently is because he looks fresher. Salvini is familiar, compromised and already partly contained by government. Vannacci arrives dressed in military authority, outsider anger and the promise of ideological clarity. As Wanted in Rome reports, scenario modelling already suggests the centre-right could lose the 2027 election if Vannacci’s voters remain outside the coalition.
His central accusation is simple: Meloni has spent too much time becoming respectable, too much time speaking Brussels language and too much time governing like a conventional prime minister. Its political potency does not depend on whether it is fair.
The Trump Relationship Built Her Domestic Case
For a while, Meloni could answer that accusation by pointing to her international standing.
She was the nationalist who could still speak to Washington, NATO and markets, and her relationship with Trump helped reinforce that image at home. It suggested she could be both establishment and insurgent, both a European leader and an ideological cousin to America’s populist right. She was the only EU head of state to attend Trump’s second inauguration, a detail her base noticed and her critics could not easily dismiss.
Her international posture was part of her argument for discipline at home: she could ask the Italian right to accept some restraint because she was converting ideological affinity into geopolitical access. That logic required the relationship with Washington to look like a source of strength. What happened in Evian changed the terms of that calculation entirely.
Trump Turns an Asset Into a Liability
Trump told Italian broadcaster La7 on 19 June that Meloni had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit, saying he agreed only because he felt sorry for her.
Meloni called the claim “completely fabricated,” her foreign minister cancelled a planned trip to Washington in protest, and solidarity poured in from across the Italian political spectrum. The damage is symbolic as much as diplomatic. Once Trump starts treating Meloni as disposable or mockable, the old prestige of that relationship weakens and the harder right has a much easier case against her.
In that sense, Vannacci and Trump are now linked in Meloni’s problem: one attacks her from the nationalist flank, the other reduces the value of her balancing act. EUobserver notes that Vannacci’s movement openly invokes the language of a “true” right allegedly betrayed by both the League and Brothers of Italy, a frame that grows more credible each time Meloni is seen bending to foreign pressure and receiving humiliation in return.
The Threat is Not Immediate, But it is Real
Vannacci is still some way from threatening Meloni directly for power.
Fratelli d’Italia remains far larger, polling above 27 per cent, and Futuro Nazionale is still a young organisation. But politics does not only move through outright replacement; it also moves through pressure, drift and redefinition. A 5 to 6 per cent insurgent party can force a prime minister to harden her tone, recalculate alliances and govern more nervously. Once enough right-wing voters decide that authenticity now lies somewhere to Meloni’s right, every compromise she makes starts looking weaker and every international embarrassment looks more expensive.
Meloni’s success always depended on a delicate formula: radical origins, disciplined government and international relevance. Vannacci threatens the first part by accusing her of softness; Trump is now threatening the third by making her Atlanticist balancing act look less glamorous and more degrading. He is not simply another loud general on the nationalist fringe.
He is the political bill coming due for Meloni’s attempt to make the Italian far right both respectable and dominant at once, and just as that bill arrives, one of her most valuable foreign-policy assets is starting to look like a liability instead.
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