A thousand days of Meloni's government: weakness where it matters most: in the daily lives of Italians.

It's a fairly widespread belief that Giorgia Meloni's main Achilles heel is ultimately her domestic policy agenda. Whether due to the prime minister's busy schedule of international meetings or the apparent weakness of her team, the government certainly isn't known for its timely and effective approach to domestic issues. It's also lacking in developing solutions to the problems that arise. The impression is that Meloni is investing more energy in broadening her team's "nominal" consensus and influence (see her support for Monte dei Paschi in its takeover of Mediobanca) than in addressing the day-to-day issues facing Italians. Meloni has certainly achieved gratifying successes, securing the goodwill of both Confindustria and the CISL (Italian General Confederation of Labour, or CISL), thus broadening her personal sphere of empathy to include organized civil society—the intermediate bodies—but she has been weak in anticipating and implementing policies of true "exchange." Take the case of industrialists: he flatters them every time he meets them, but in the latest budget law he removed resources for sectors in crisis (the so-called Auto Fund), abolished the ACE (Association of Italian Employers' Compensation for Employment), and returned little or nothing. The infamous IRES bonus—which became the object of Confindustria's desire in the weeks of December—has proven to be a bluff. An unenforceable measure.

During a meeting in the Sala Verde, Meloni threw out the mega-sum of €25 billion in aid for businesses, surprising her interlocutors, only to never mention it again. She forgot about it, counting on the lapses of the press and the opposition. She didn't even manage to outperform Carlo Calenda as minister with Industry 4.0, because his Transition 5.0 remained essentially an ugly duckling and a wasted opportunity to revive investment. In her defense, some will argue that it's not the prime minister's fault (she's constantly forced to travel) but rather the Ursos and Lollobrigidas, whom she chose by selecting the best from the ranks of the party she knew best. But no.

Her ability to govern everyday life appears—for now—to be a limitation of her political leadership . As a woman raised within the secretive chambers of a party—a minority one, moreover, and not very open to society—she seems to have absorbed its, so to speak, structural limitations. She knows little about Italians, about the problems with healthcare waiting lists or the shopping cart that outpaces inflation, about erratic transportation or taxis that can't be found. Or at least, she hears too little. Thus, for her, appointing a Sbarra to head a nonexistent policy for the South is more important than developing a real policy of exchange with the CISL and the other unions. All politics, no policy. For now, consensus isn't suffering, but the inability to address the "problems" and surround herself with real experts remains. That's no small thing.

Dario Di Vico

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