Giorgia Meloni shows Silvio Berlusconi who’s boss

Giorgia Meloni, who is about to become Italy’s first female prime minister, has won her first major battle. It was fought, not against her countless enemies, but against her ally Silvio Berlusconi.

In a crucial victory, Meloni has forced Berlusconi, the four-time prime minister, to concede unequivocally that she – not he – is the boss of the right-wing coalition that won such a large majority at the general election last month.

The 86-year-old rogue may well look these days like a waxwork model that has somehow come alive, but he remains a classic macho Italian man who finds it virtually impossible to take orders from women. Yet he has had to take orders from her.

The battle began when 45-year-old Meloni – whose Brothers of Italy party has by far the most seats in the victorious right-wing coalition – refused to appoint a Berlusconi favourite, the glamorous Licia Ronzulli, to a senior cabinet post. Last Thursday, in a move designed to blackmail Meloni into submission, he ordered his senators to vote against her candidate for senate president at the first sitting of the new parliament. Berlusconi then ungallantly called Meloni ‘patronising, bullying, arrogant and offensive’. He had written the words on a large notepad as he sat in the senate – and they were picked up by an eagle-eyed tv cameraman. Meloni retained a cool silence except to tell reporters: ‘There’s one thing missing: I’m not blackmailable.’

The media tycoons plot to force Meloni to cave in to his demands backfired when a group of opposition senators voted for her candidate, who was duly elected. Nevertheless, for several days Italy’s talk-shows (which are, on the whole, left-wing) were full of gleeful chatter about the right-wing coalition being so disunited that it cannot possibly survive. Indeed, their ardent hope was that the coalition would collapse even before it is sworn in to form Italy’s next government. This is expected to happen any day now. The international press, as ever, played parrot.

On Monday, however, the talk-show hosts and their guests were forced to change their tune when Berlusconi turned up at the Rome headquarters of Brothers of Italy in the aptly named Via della Scrofa (Sow Street) to eat humble pie. Normally, people travel to one of Berlusconi’s palatial villas – not the other way round.

To get an idea of how symbolic a moment this was, it helps to recall that in 2008 Berlusconi appointed Meloni as Youth Minister in his last government. She was 31 –Italy’s youngest ever minister – and he used to call her, dismissively, ‘La Piccolina’ (the little one). Times have changed.

Yes, Meloni needs him. But he needs her more. And she is now the boss. (Brothers of Italy has 118 deputies and 66 senators compared with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, which has 45 and 18 respectively. The third coalition partner, Matteo Salvini’s League, has 65 deputies and 29 senators. The Chamber of Deputies has 400 seats, the Senate 200). Berlusconi wants five major ministries. He’ll probably only get one.

His defeat is ‘total’, said the columnist Tommaso Ciriaco in La Repubblica, Italy's equivalent to the Guardian. Meloni has ‘won’ announced Lili Gruber, host of prime talk-show Otto e Mezzo and Italy’s answer to Emily Maitlis.

But the first big test of how solid the right-wing coalition is and how long it can endure will come from another quarter: Ukraine. Meloni is a more robust supporter of arms to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia than either Emanuel Macron or Olaf Scholz. She is probably the strongest supporter among Eurozone leaders of Nato and America. Yet both her coalition partners, Berlusconi and Salvini, are wobbly to put it mildly.

Salvini was for years one of the loudest supporters of Vladimir Putin in Europe and was photographed more than once wearing a pro-Putin T-shirt. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he suddenly transformed from a firebrand who wanted to arm Italians to shoot burglars into a pacifist who opposed arming Ukrainians to shoot Russians. It will only cause more bloodshed because Ukraine cannot win, he bleated.

As for Berlusconi, he was a friend and, it is said, business partner of Putin’s for many years. He also has a huge bed given to him by the Russian dictator – nicknamed ‘Putin’s Bed’ – which achieved legendary status as a key prop at his notorious Bunga Bunga parties. At the start of the war, he said he was disillusioned by Putin and that he was not the man he used to know. But shortly before the elections he told a television talk-show that Putin was pushed into the invasion by the Russian people, his party, and his ministers who only wanted to replace Volodymyr Zelensky with ‘decent people’ by means of a special operation that escalated only when the West began to send arms to Ukraine.

Yet when push came to shove Salvini and Berlusconi (unlike Meloni, both were members of outgoing Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s national unity government) always signed up to support arms and sanctions. On Tuesday, however, the day after Berlusconi visited Meloni, he apparently told a private meeting of Forza Italia parliamentarians that he had re-established relations with Putin who had sent him 20 bottles of vodka for his birthday on 29 September – four days after the election – with ‘a very sweet letter’.

According to an alleged recording of the meeting, published by the news agency LaPresse, he said: ‘I responded with bottles of Lambrusco and an equally sweet letter… Russian ministers have said on several occasions that we are at war with them, because we are providing arms and funding to Ukraine. I can’t personally give my opinion because if the press are told it will be a disaster. But I am very, very, very worried.’

Pressed by reporters, Berlusconi denied he had rekindled anything with Putin while Forza Italia coordinator Antonio Tajani – widely tipped to become Meloni’s foreign minister – said that Berlusconi was talking about old stuff, from 2008’. But the audio clip, if genuine, would seem to suggest otherwise. Even more significantly, a hefty majority of Italians oppose Nato and EU policy on Ukraine.

Meloni’s Brothers of Italy got by far the most votes of any party at the general election (26 per cent) yet its support for Ukraine is opposed by most Italians. Less than half (42 per cent) agree with sanctions on Russia. Only a quarter (25 per cent) think Nato should continue to send arms to Ukraine. Well over half (60 per cent) think Zelensky must agree to a compromise with Putin.

When I interviewed Meloni in Rome during the election campaign she told me that she had insisted Salvini and Berlusconi sign a contract with her, which outlined conditions including a pledge to support her policy on Ukraine. Sooner or later, however, the fault line between Meloni and the Italians over Ukraine will severely test her government.