The evolution of Giorgia Meloni: Her plan for Italy and fears of AI

ROME - Ms Giorgia Meloni, like everyone else on the planet, is trying to work out what to do about artificial intelligence.

In some ways, the Italian Prime Minister is old school. She still writes campaign speeches by hand, as the ink stains on her manicured fingers can attest – fountain pens have a tendency to explode on planes, she jokes. But she is acutely aware of her responsibilities.

She leads a country that struggles to achieve growth past 1 per cent, and she is clear-eyed about the transformative period into which the global economy has been plunged by disruptive new technologies.

Ms Meloni’s strategy of keeping it steady has convinced foreign investors, galvanised voters and helped Italy to navigate the turbulence of US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. But she is aware that she might not be able to handle the impact of AI, and perhaps no government can.

“Politics is moving too slowly and artificial intelligence is advancing very quickly,” she says in an interview in the 16th-century Chigi Palace in Rome, surrounded by artefacts from Italy’s storied past. “I see enormous risks.”

She adds: “I fear that we are not understanding many of the processes that are being generated. I fear that when we do understand them, it will be too late.”

Ms Meloni herself has repeatedly broken new ground since she started out in politics at 15. She was the Italian republic’s youngest-ever minister at 31 and the first woman PM at 45.

As she sizes up her prospects for re-election in 2027, she is aware that there are more records to break. She is months away from leading Italy’s longest government of the post-war era, eclipsing her former boss Silvio Berlusconi.

Along the way, Ms Meloni has gone through her own transformation.

Her days as a populist rabble-rouser and vocal Eurosceptic are long gone. Now she is a European stateswoman, with a track record for navigating the complexities of coalition politics and economic management that is the envy of many of her colleagues.

After France’s Emmanuel Macron leaves the scene in 2027, she will be the most experienced leader in the Group of Seven nations when it comes to handling Mr Trump.

In under four years, she has changed perceptions of Italy, prompting an influx of hundreds of billions of euros from foreign investors.

Under Ms Meloni, Italy is now both stable and governable. It’s neighbouring France that has become the European Union’s problem child.

But if she is going to clinch re-election in 2027, and consolidate her place in the Italian history books, she knows that she needs to maintain that economic track record, regardless of the cross-currents that might buffet her from AI or the White House.

The budget is her first focus. She intends to keep a lid on spending and resist the temptation to squander the hard-earned respect of ratings agencies with voter-pleasing tax cuts.

“The issue of stability has completely made the difference,” she says. “We concentrated the few resources that we had and kept our accounts in order. That in itself is a statement of seriousness.”

Ms Meloni, who turns 50 in January 2027, learned one of the most important lessons of her career during the torrid Roman summer of 2011.

Europe was in the grips of a debt crisis, Italy was lumped in with troubled countries like Greece and investors were dumping Italian debt. Caught between the market’s demand for budget cuts and voters dependent on benefits, Mr Berlusconi tried to downplay the turmoil.

But that did not dissuade investors, with a further sell-off triggering the collapse of his administration in late 2011.

“We have paid dramatically for the instability of our governments,” Ms Meloni says, as she reflects on the turbulent history that she aims to leave behind her.

If the first plank of her plan is to earn the trust of the markets, then the second one is to build the trust of voters. She aims to persuade Italians that long-term prosperity cannot be achieved by quick fixes –and polls suggest she has their support.

Ms Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is running ahead of the opposition Democratic Party, according to the latest YouTrend poll for SkyTG24. She has also sewn up a deal with her parliamentary allies that would potentially bolster her position after the 2027 election.

“When you have a longer horizon, you can afford to put a strategy in place without spending the resources to get immediate results,” she says. “You have time to see those results.”

The deeper challenge is to revive the Italian economy, which has not generated any sustained expansion since Mr Berlusconi’s ouster 15 years ago.

“In Italy there is a growth problem,” she says. “We have an industrial production problem in an interconnected system.”

Italy’s economy has a problem because so does Germany’s and so does France’s.

Ms Meloni has no silver bullet, and does not claim to have one either, unlike anti-establishment contenders on the rise in Britain, France or Germany.

But bringing jobs to Italy’s South is key, both to her economic plan and to staying in power.

Known as Mezzogiorno, the regions south of the capital have traditionally lagged behind the more industrialised North, forcing successive governments to splash economic aid to keep the local economy afloat.

While she is avowedly Roman – born and bred – Ms Meloni’s mother, who essentially raised her as a single parent, has Sicilian roots.

“Southern Italy, which was always last, is now the driver. Employment is growing more than the national average, gross domestic product is growing more than the national average,” she says.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of her political journey is precisely the evolution of her views on the EU, the bete noire of so many anti-establishment politicians who make Brussels the scapegoat of all of the continent’s woes.

At one point, Ms Meloni was close to Mr Viktor Orban, who is still attacking the EU as he fights for his political future ahead of Hungary’s election in April. That is not her approach any more.

Ms Meloni argues that the EU is overstretched because it has overreached. The European Commission, she says, is guilty of trying to make itself the solution to every problem rather than focusing on where it can be really effective.

“Let Brussels leave to Rome what Rome can do better,” she says. “What Rome cannot do alone, that’s where it needs Brussels.”

Trade is one area where EU membership can benefit member states, she says.

Although when it comes to discussing Mr Trump’s decision to ramp up tariffs on European imports, she is careful not to mention the US President by his first name.

She is aware of her direct line to Mr Trump – Italian pasta makers got a special break from his tariffs – and that he likes her. But unlike Mr Mark Rutte, who often refers to the US President as Donald (or infamously “Daddy”), sycophancy is not Ms Meloni’s style.

“I think that we should go in the direction of a free trade area and therefore it is a decision that I do not agree with,” she says of Mr Trump’s decision to impose levies.

“I happened to point out to my American counterpart that when we sell a bottle of extra virgin olive oil on the American market, we sell it for around €5 (S$7.50). In an American supermarket, you can find it for around US$22 (S$28). So who has the highest revenue? Who will pay the highest price?”

So Ms Meloni has largely avoided the wrath of the US administration, which has been quick to lash out at other allies like Canada or Denmark. Just as she has maintained the confidence of investors and the support, so far, of Italian voters.

Meanwhile, her tense relationship with Mr Macron has been the subject of frequent headlines describing their skirmishes over the years. The latest was earlier in February and a summit between the two was postponed. Observers were quick to see cause and effect.

“Too often I see foreign policy described in a childish way,” she said. “Italy and France are two great European nations that share a lot, that work together on many issues, and that disagree on some things.”

And as for the summit: “The date was postponed at my request because there was a scheduling conflict for a logistical issue. I asked Emmanuel if we could change the date.”

Her real worries are elsewhere. In the week that she spoke to Bloomberg, markets tumbled on a report that AI will destroy millions of white collar jobs, Mr Jack Dorsey announced he would cut his workforce at Block in a pivot to AI automation, and IBM shares suffered their biggest drop in a quarter century on fears that its core business will be cannibalised.

Ms Meloni asks if we are making “the same mistake we made with unregulated globalisation.”

“To believe that the invisible hands would solve all problems, that all systems would have democratised, that everyone would become richer,” she says. “That’s not how it went.” BLOOMBERG