One of the more striking images from June’s G7 summit showed a small group of world leaders engaged in an impromptu and informal evening chat at the venue’s restaurant. In the foreground of that photo was a familiar blond head: Giorgia Meloni.
During her three years as the Italian prime minister, Meloni has moved beyond her hard-right populism, not to mention her fascism-adjacent origins, to earn at least the respect of other leaders – Keir Starmer among them – for her pragmatism and flexibility. Among those watching this transformation from the sidelines will be the man hoping to be Starmer’s replacement: Nigel Farage.
If campaigning is, as the political truism goes, conducted in poetry while government is prose, this is doubly so for insurgents and outsiders, whose careers are built on promising rapid and straightforward solutions to seemingly intractable national troubles.
When this unstoppable force of rhetoric meets the immovable object of actual government, the results can be turbulent, as with the currency bailouts and increased poverty of Javier Milei’s Argentina, or the stability-shedding chaos of Donald Trump’s impetuous policymaking.
Although Meloni arrived in power as the overtly far-right leader of a party, Brothers of Italy, with neofascist roots, she has tempered her ideology with realism and compromise, for example mixing plans to process asylum claims in Albania with a marked increase in work visas to address labour shortages.
As shown by the G7 photo, she has also been able to work closely with a series of very different world leaders, among them Starmer, helped by a relaxed manner and proficiency in English, French and Spanish.
So could Farage pull off a similar trick? In one sense he already has, also dragging a hard-right party from support once measured in the few percent to mainstream popularity.
There are some ways in which Farage’s ideology has remained fairly consistent, not least – and this is one very clear difference from Meloni – his consistent refusal to ally with openly far-right groups, all the way from shunning the British National party in the early days of Ukip to his more recent distancing from Elon Musk and the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson.
“I don’t see Nigel’s principles as having changed one little jot,” said Gawain Towler, who was Farage’s press chief for years and is closely involved with Reform UK.
This has not meant a never-changing worldview, Towler argued, saying the “blood and thunder Thatcherism” acquired by Farage during his period as a metals trader in the City during the 1980s was tempered by “25 years going around the poor parts of our country and realising that Thatcherism didn’t work well for everybody”.
In a closer parallel to Meloni, Farage does very clearly shape his message to his audience. One example is the repeated airing of tropes and conspiracy theories associated with the far right and antisemitism in US interviews over several years, rhetoric now firmly abandoned and – Farage hopes – largely forgotten.
He has also shown himself happy to junk policies which could hamper Reform’s rise, notably the recent move to drop £90bn in planned annual tax cuts, promised only last year.
There is, however, much more to running a government than ideological flexibility. It is also a question of personality and experience. And this is where the differences between Farage and Meloni become more stark.
For all that she is still a relative newcomer to the world stage, Meloni has been a member of Italy’s parliament for nearly 20 years and first served as a minister in a Silvio Berlusconi-led coalition government in 2008.
In contrast, while Farage is undoubtedly a political veteran – he was a founding member of Ukip more than three decades ago – almost all his experience, even in the European parliament, involved being the undisputed head of a relatively small group of outsiders.
Some former colleagues question how well he may adapt to the endless compromises and delegation involved in running a national government.
“Nigel was not at all collegiate back in the day,” said someone who saw him operate as an MEP. “It was his way or the highway, and he’d consider genuine disagreement to be treachery. The question is, has he changed?”
According to Robert Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, any comparison with Meloni “falls down if you actually look into her biography, because she had done time in government before she headed her own party”.
He went on: “It’s important to remember that the question of how much Farage is willing to compromise to get into power is different from the question of whether or not he’ll be good at the compromises necessary.
“She has been in parliament for years and years. He has been in parliament for all of one year and has already managed to lose two of his MPs.
“The problem that Farage has long had organisationally is the only kind of organisation he has ever been very effective at running is one where he basically is a sort of autocracy, where his word is holy writ.
“Whenever his parties have had any kind of a more differentiated internal structure, he has ended up getting into massive arguments with everybody and marginalising people, and splits have happened. The Brexit party and Reform were explicitly set up with a goal of, essentially, if anyone disagrees with Nigel, Nigel wins. In government that model doesn’t work.”
Meloni, Ford noted, “has had a lot of experience at bargaining, compromise, negotiation – the more subtle arts of manoeuvring yourself into a position where you win and get what you want. None of this is necessarily familiar political terrain for Farage.”
