Meloni between international vision and parliamentary congestion
The Prime Minister’s press conference marks a politically significant moment because it lays out, with an unusual degree of coherence in the current public debate, the trajectory the government intends to follow in 2026: a strong international projection presented as a defining feature of the executive, alongside a domestic agenda that appears ambitious but structurally fragile on the parliamentary front. On foreign policy, Meloni chose to anchor Italy firmly within clear coordinates, reaffirming the euro-Atlantic alignment as a non-negotiable pillar of national strategy, even when this entails open disagreement with individual allies, as in the case of Donald Trump’s positions on Greenland and international law. Her insistence on deterrence as a tool for peace in Ukraine, support for the prospect of a European multinational force as a security guarantee, and openness to a more active European role in dialogue with Russia—provided it is not fragmented—project the image of a leader attempting to balance strategic firmness with political realism. At the same time, the Middle East is framed as a theatre in which Italy can play a distinctive role, not only on the humanitarian front but also operationally, through the offer to train Palestinian security forces and an explicit willingness not to rule out more advanced forms of participation within the framework of a two-state solution. This narrative reinforces the idea of a non-marginal Italy, capable of leveraging political capital built through bilateral and multilateral credibility. The same approach is reflected in European dossiers, where Meloni claims to have reshaped the EU agenda, particularly on migration and the Green Deal, shifting the focus from redistribution to border protection, returns and a pragmatic approach to the transition. Her stance on Mercosur follows the same logic: openness to free-trade agreements, but only if accompanied by a rollback of what she defines as excessive internal EU regulation, seen as unsustainable for the productive system. On the domestic front, however, the press conference reveals a structural tension. On the one hand, the government highlights encouraging macroeconomic indicators on employment, growth and purchasing power, defending its choices on wages, pensions and energy as realistic rather than ideological; on the other, the sheer number of announced initiatives—from the housing plan to productivity, from demographic decline to security, justice and the referendum on the separation of judicial careers—collides with a parliamentary agenda that looks increasingly congested. The reopening of parliamentary work in 2026, as also suggested by the first dossiers before the Chambers, takes place in a context in which emergency law-making risks once again becoming the dominant instrument to ensure certainty of timing for the executive’s priorities, through decrees, conversions and omnibus measures. This risk concerns not only the volume of emergency legislation but also the quality of the relationship between government and Parliament, increasingly called upon to ratify decisions already taken rather than to shape them. In this sense, Meloni’s press conference also serves as a pre-emptive act of political positioning: strengthening the executive’s legitimacy on the international and programmatic fronts, fully aware that the domestic challenge will lie less in setting direction than in sustaining, without excessive erosion, a legislative cycle likely to be dominated by urgency rather than ordinary reform.
