To Save Italy, Meloni Must Depoliticize Its Judiciary

Mere survival is not often a praiseworthy virtue in the realm of politics. But it is in the case of Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni. Her masterful politicking has made us all forget about just how labyrinthine the halls of power are in Rome. Italy, after all, is a land of collapsing coalitions, of imploding governments, and of prime ministers whose tenure one could often measure in days. Just as de Gaulle’s 1958 French Constitution had the goal of assuring stability by building a powerful executive, the Italian political system was carefully designed to prevent governability: the Head of Government, the President of the Council of Ministers, has to navigate a constitution that makes her the hostage of a parliament-approved President of the Republic as well as of the legislature’s two equally important chambers, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic. This, together with Italy’s geographically pluricentric political order, has made the Italian Republic a chaotic, trembling mess that few politicians have survived. Italy has seen 30 prime ministers and 70 governments since 1947. The U.S. has had 15 presidents in the same period. France has had eleven.

And yet, Meloni, a woman once dismissed by the European press as a passing nationalist fever, has now become the third-longest-serving premier of the republic. Already in the probable beginning of her career, Meloni has surpassed the tenure of the great Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi. She enjoys steady popularity and would crushingly win any election that were to occur today. It is as if the usual gravitational laws of Italian politics do not apply to her.

She managed this longevity at least in part through a sort of strategic patience that her critics had assumed she lacked. To be honest, I was once one of them. During the first years, she governed with one eye fixed on the screeching coming out of Brussels, signaling calm, moderation, and predictability. This served to diffuse the dread felt by the liberal Brussels establishment due to Meloni’s nationalism. But while the spotlight was on her tone, she quietly racked up wins on cultural and social issues, stitching together the early threads of a pan-Western  nationalist, conservative, and populist movement that stretches well beyond Italy’s borders.

Now, with her position stable, a much ameliorated international situation following the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and a strengthened budget reducing Rome’s dependence on Brussels and the European Central Bank, Meloni has started growing bolder. And the most consequential of her plans—the one that’s provoked a kind of institutional panic across Italy’s upper echelons—is her attempt to rewire the heart of Italy’s deep state: the country’s judicial system.

The recently revealed plot involving Francesco Saverio Garofani, a senior adviser to President Sergio Mattarella, with the apparent aim of weakening and replacing Meloni, shows that a complex game is still being played in the shadows. Meloni’s proposed judicial reform has nothing to do with it; the policy predates the presidency’s shady moves. But what it does show is that, finding itself unable to recapture the trust and votes of the Italian people, the Europhile establishment is, indeed, working hard to subvert the political process to its advantage. The utterly partial judicial system is, with the presidency, its chief weapon.

Meloni’s reform is structural: a division between judges and prosecutors so that the same person cannot play both roles; a restructuring of the oversight council so that it is not an internal club of self-policing magistrates; and the shift from elections—long manipulated by activist blocs within the judiciary—to a system in which half the council is chosen by lot. Hardly a revolution—but transformative nevertheless.

Yet, Italy’s opposition reacted as if Meloni had proposed dissolving the constitution and installing herself as regent. “A threat to democracy,” lawmakers shouted, “an assault on the rule of law.” Indeed, parliamentarians almost erupted into a fistfight when the bill was approved. It would all be very dramatic if it weren’t so deeply predictable. 

To understand the ferocity of the backlash, looking beyond Italy’s borders is paramount. Across Europe and the broader West, judicial elites have persistently acted as the establishment’s weapon of choice against conservative populists. In Romania, a massively popular nationalist candidate, Calin Georgescu, was barred from standing for office because apparently, voters had to be ‘protected’ from the possibility of voting for him. Germany prosecuted a member of the AfD for stating an uncomfortable statistical truth, and when the case began to look unseemly, politicians changed the rules—not to correct the imbalance, but to “protect” the judiciary from future populist governments.

Poland is the cautionary tale in reverse: the judges appointed by the right-wing, conservative Law & Justice were labelled illegitimate by the opposition, and now Donald Tusk simply ignores their rulings when he doesn’t like them. He has even gone as far as purging them to replace judges with obedient cronies. Judges, it seems, are independent when they rule for the establishment, political when they do not.

Behind the anger over the Meloni reforms lie the fears of an endangered establishment: judicial systems across Europe increasingly view themselves not as neutral organs but rather as guardians of an ideological order that treats populists not as a constituency to be represented but as a pathology to be contained.

Italy is no exception. The leaked remark from an Italian judge calling Meloni “dangerous” revealed more than it intended. It showed that the judiciary, or at least substantial parts of it, views itself not as an arbiter but as an active political participant—one that feels entitled to intervene when democracy delivers the wrong result.

To succeed in returning Italy’s judiciary to the people, Meloni will have to go beyond mere administrative tidying. What Italy needs is not just a cleaner judiciary. She needs a less political one: a judiciary, that is, that cannot enforce its own ideological preferences through backchannels, one that enacts impartial justice rather than attempts to govern. Populists across the West have learned the hard way that if you do not address this imbalance early on, courts will fill the vacuum of authority with astonishing speed. One needs only mention Brazil’s Alexandre de Moraes, an unelected judge who has managed to accumulate a breathtaking degree of political power without ever facing a ballot, while using it to persecute the Right with little to no moral qualms.

If Italy is to be saved from its own institutional reflexes, the judiciary needs to be depoliticized. Anything less than that will be swallowed whole by the old order. Meloni understands it, thankfully—she must, therefore, press on until the job is done.