Giorgia Meloni

Losing a referendum is a setback — but don’t write off the Italian PM yet, says Hannah Roberts

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Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was once thought politically unstoppable.

Her defeat in last week’s high-risk referendum, in which voters rejected her proposed judicial reforms, marks the first clear misstep of her premiership.

While it is a significant setback, the loss is unlikely to dent her dominance of Italian politics for long. In September, Meloni, who leads the far-right, anti-immigration Brothers of Italy party in coalition with the centre-right and the anti-immigration League, will surpass the late Silvio Berlusconi’s record for the longest continuous term in office in Italy since the second world war.

In hindsight the referendum was an unnecessary gamble. Yet she forged ahead, appearing to overestimate both public appetite for reform and her ability to carry it. What began as a technical overhaul of judicial governance was recast by opponents as an attempt to place the courts under political control. Bad blood between politicians and prosecutors dates back to sweeping corruption investigations in the 1990s; Berlusconi claimed decades of persecution by a leftwing judiciary, culminating in his “bunga bunga” trial.

Meloni’s government has clashed repeatedly with judges, including over the trial of her firebrand deputy, Matteo Salvini, for holding immigrants on board an NGO rescue vessel, She attacked the courts for blocking elements of her security agenda, including offshore migrant processing in Albania. But many voters appear to have used the referendum to register a broader unease about institutions, the economy, and political power itself.

It has weakened her. The former PM Matteo Renzi predicted she would become “a lame duck”, having lost her “magic touch”. A long-divided opposition senses an opening.