Merz Drops Macron for Meloni — And This Site Was Called ‘Fascist’ for Supporting Her from Day One

Giorgia Meloni and Friedrich Merz looked more like an odd couple than a power couple when they met in the Roman sunshine to sign a partnership pact.

Balding and bespectacled, the 6ft 6in Mr Merz, 70, towered over his 5ft 2in blonde host, who is 49. “Italy and Germany are closer than ever before,” he said.

Ms Meloni, the “post-fascist” single mother from a working-class Rome neighbourhood is an unlikely partner for the former BlackRock executive and grandfather of six, who has two private jets.

But they have seized the steering wheel of Europe from Emmanuel Macron at a turning point in history.

Paris and Berlin have always been the EU’s “engine” of policymaking. But the French president is a lame duck and nearing the end of his final term.

An EU diplomat said: “Berlin needs partners it can work with. Can they work with Macron at the moment? Not really. He is leaving office soon and France is unstable. Germans hate instability.”

Instead, Mr Merz has turned to the fiery Italian prime minister to help him remake the new Europe in their conservative image.

The EU knows it has to change in the new age of world powers dominated by an unreliable US, aggressive Russia and belligerent China.

This budding alliance could be its answer. Ms Meloni, feared as a Eurosceptic populist when she took office three years ago, has proved an arch-pragmatist and emerged as one of the most influential leaders in Europe.

Privately, Italian officials said the accord, focused on Italy and Germany’s co-operation on defence, migration and trade, was evidence of a “new centre of gravity inside the EU”.

“Meloni is so good. She is fantastic at making the person she speaks to feel like they are the most important person in the room,” said the EU diplomat.

“They may be one credit crisis away from disaster, but they are cleaning up the balance sheet and Milan is doing really great. They’ve always been at the EU kiddie table. She’s bringing Italy back to where it should be in the first place.”

Ms Meloni will shed no tears over easing out Mr Macron. She has clashed with him over immigration but resisted the temptation to gloat when asked by reporters whether she was “replacing” the French president.

“Italy is today showing on the international stage and in Europe, its stability, its strength, its courage in raising the right questions about the future of the continent,” she said alongside Mr Merz.

“I try to do my part. I am not interested in replacing anyone. I am interested in the great nations of Europe having a dialogue on the great challenges that we face.”

With its high debt, hung parliament and collapsing governments, France resembles the old stereotype of Italy that Ms Meloni has set about busting.

The unknown quantity of Marine Le Pen’s Eurosceptic National Rally is waiting in the wings to take power for the first time and Mr Macron cannot fight the 2027 presidential election.

Italy, a fellow manufacturing, exporting, founder member of the EU, looks like a safer bet for Mr Merz – especially with Ms Meloni, Italy’s longest-serving leader since Silvio Berlusconi at the helm.

A senior French source admitted that Paris was seen as less reliable after backtracking on pension reforms that Germany implemented long ago.

France’s economic mismanagement matters because of shared membership of the euro, and Germany does not want to have to pay for another bailout.

“Merz respected tradition by reserving his first foreign trip to Paris,” said the source, who has in-depth knowledge of Franco-German relations.

“But he is not going to explain to his fellow citizens that it’s a great idea to share debt with the French, who have been unable to balance their books for 50 years. Meloni, on the other hand, has done the job on the budget. She has cleaned up her accounts.”

Germany and Italy were founding members of the European Economic Community, the EU’s forerunner, after emerging from the Second World War and the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini.

As the EU’s richest state and biggest economy, Germany was an exemplar of prosperity, stability and fiscal rectitude, while debt-laden Italy was a byword for short-lived governments and economic turmoil.

It was one of the “Pigs” in the financial crisis – Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain – eurozone members who risked collapsing the single currency.

Germany, which provided the money behind the bailout, did not always hide its disapproval of what it saw as the work-shy, undisciplined and profligate south. Relations were not helped when Berlusconi called Angela Merkel an “un—-able lard-arse”.

Berlusconi was replaced by Mario Monti, an EU technocrat, in 2011. An appalled Ms Meloni, then a youth minister, saw the hand of Berlin and Brussels, as well as the markets, at work.

She has steadied the ship since coming to power, while France finds itself being called the “new Italy”. French GDP growth is expected to be 0.9 per cent this year and its public debt is forecast to increase to 120 per cent of GDP by 2027, while Italian growth is set to increase by 0.8 per cent this year.

Italy’s public debt is expected to be 137.2 per cent of GDP by 2027 but progress is being made in cutting the deficit.

Germany is not the powerhouse it once was – 1.2 per cent GDP growth is expected this year and next. Public debt is expected to rise to 67 per cent of GDP in 2027.

“Under Meloni and Merz, Italy and Germany increasingly engage eye-to-eye, not as debtor and creditor, but as two industrial powers confronting similar challenges,” said Giorgio Rutelli, of the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

The Italian and German economies are increasingly intertwined and they are each other’s most important industrial partners in the EU. In 2024, bilateral trade between Italy and Germany was worth €153bn (£128bn). German investment in Italy and Italian investment in Germany is now more than €100bn.

“It comes at the right moment that these two find each other. Merz really wanted to find that partnership with Macron, but it went sour,” said one EU diplomat.

“Meloni sticks to Europe, she’s a transatlanticist, she’s trying for economic reforms, and she’s conservative on family values. There’s the identity politics with Meloni but that’s more of an accent than a substantive difference. She is not that different from the CDU.”

Bild, Germany’s best-selling tabloid, was on board with the new alliance, writing: “Merz knows that, for Europe to have a say internationally, it needs strong partners by its side. Unlike France, Italy is now a country with a stable government and a successful economy. How times change!”

With 59 million people, Italy’s population is about 10 million less than that of France. It is still hefty enough to make an impact in crucial votes on EU laws, especially in coalition with 84 million-strong Germany, the most populous member state.

Ms Meloni’s critics make much of her party’s roots in a movement founded by supporters of Mussolini, branding her a “post-fascist”.

She maintains links with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a bogeyman for Europhiles, and Vox, the hard-Right Spanish party, but pro-EU conservatives now see her as mainstream.

In the European Parliament, Mr Merz’s centre-Right European People’s Party (EPP) has frequently voted with Ms Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists group on legislation. “Meloni is clearly in the centre-Right political approach,” Manfred Weber, the Bavarian leader of the EPP, said.

That did not apply to other nationalists such as Mr Orbán or Ms Le Pen, he added.

Ursula von der Leyen, the German European Commission president, is on the left of Mr Merz’s CDU, but has a working relationship with the chancellor.

His influence has been felt in the Brussels rollback of some net zero rules. She has also done business with Ms Meloni on migration.

During the migrant crisis, northern capitals such as Berlin believed southern states like Italy were simply waving asylum seekers through their territory to the richer countries. Rome and Athens argued they were left to shoulder the burden of the bloc’s arrivals alone.

Mrs Merkel’s Germany took in more than a million Syrian refugees, which de-escalated the crisis.

In 2024, Germany received 237,000 asylum applications, the most in the EU. Italy had 159,000, making it the third-highest in the bloc after Spain.

Migration remains a hugely divisive issue in the EU, but Ms Meloni and Mr Merz will now speak on it with one voice and demand lower arrivals and faster deportations.

The Italian premier has spearheaded a successful push to toughen EU asylum policy, working closely with Mrs von der Leyen to strike return deals with North African countries.

Her Rwanda-style deal with Albania for migrant processing was hailed as a model for Europe, which has moved to allow offshore detention camps for failed asylum seekers.

She leads a group of EU leaders intent on building “Fortress Europe”, which meets before European Council summits in Brussels.

Mr Merz has joined them. He has repudiated Mrs Merkel’s open-border policy and during last year’s victorious election campaign claimed that migrants were gang-raping Germans on a daily basis.

He is intent on neutralising the threat of the hard-Right Alternative For Germany, which is the main opposition in the Bundestag after posting record results last year before the next federal election.

Italy and Germany are both pro-Ukraine and agree that the EU must be able to defend itself. They want the bloc to ramp up the European defence industry as they seek to rearm.

Both need to build up their armies. Italy has 165,500 active duty personnel, much more than Germany’s 64,000.

The Italian military budget is rising, but has consistently failed to hit Nato’s 2 per cent of GDP spending target. Ms Meloni is constrained by tight budgets but also by her pro-Putin coalition partner Matteo Salvini of The League.

Mr Merz has plans to turn the long-neglected Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest fighting force and wants the return of conscription. Defence spending should hit 3.5 per cent of GDP annually by 2029, with up to €152bn being spent this year.

The duo agree that the EU has to become more independent but are far too clear-eyed to indulge in French-style anti-Americanism when continental security is at stake

Ms Meloni, known as a “Trump whisperer”, was the only EU leader invited to his inauguration, thanks to her Maga connections with figures such as Elon Musk.

Mr Merz is a convinced transatlantacist committed to Nato, who worked for a US firm. Germany is more open to continuing buying US weapons than France, which wants bloc members to buy European.

“Despite all the frustration and anger of recent months, let us not be too quick to write off the transatlantic partnership,” the chancellor said in Davos.

“Should we attack McDonald’s?”, Ms Meloni said in early January as she dismissed calls for Italy to distance itself from the US.

Cracks in the Franco-German axis were exposed during the Greenland crisis, when Mr Trump threatened European nations with tariffs unless Denmark sold him the territory.

Before the stand-off was defused, Mr Macron donned his mirrored shades in Davos.

He threatened Mr Trump with the EU’s powerful anti-coercion instrument. This “trade bazooka” would shut US firms out of the single market but risk an all-out tariff war.

Ms Meloni and Mr Merz called for negotiations, de-escalation and restraint. The new accord was signed in Rome in the very week of Mr Macron’s warning.

Washington imposed a 15 per cent tariff on EU cars before it made threats over Greenland. Mr Trump’s tariffs are particularly unwelcome for the Italian and German car industries, which were already under pressure from cheaper Chinese competition.

Germany is by far the EU’s top exporter to the US, sending goods such as vehicles, pharmaceuticals, machinery and chemicals worth a total value of €161bn in 2024.

Italy is the third-largest exporter by value after pharma-hub Ireland, with goods worth €65bn sent to the US in 2024, including cars, vehicle parts, appliances, machinery, fashion and food items.

France’s exports were worth a smaller €45bn, but it has a more ingrained culture of protectionism, particularly when it comes to agriculture.

That came to the fore as the European Commission moved to finalise a long-delayed trade deal with the Mercosur bloc of South American countries this month. France opposed the deal because its farmers fear being undercut by the new competition.

Germany and Italy, as well as Mrs von der Leyen, backed the pact, which opens up new and alternative markets to the US. France was outvoted. Their accord calls for a more assertive EU trade policy, and last week Brussels signed a deal with India, slashing tariffs on cars.

Neither the irascible Mr Merz or tempestuous Ms Meloni have much time for wokery. Last July, Mr Merz grumbled that the “Bundestag is not a circus tent” as he backed a CDU decision to stop flying the LGBT flag over the parliament building during Berlin Pride.

He rejects the concept of gender-balanced government cabinets, while Ms Meloni is also against quotas on gender or sexual orientation. “A man may feel like a woman and a woman may feel like a man but you cannot expect a country’s laws to indulge such feelings,” she writes in her memoir.

They both believe the EU’s single market is being strangled by red tape from Brussels.

The accord demands “legislative self-restraint” from the EU. Mr Merz has said there are Italian-German plans for an “emergency brake for the bureaucracy” of the bloc.

Both leaders believe hitting net zero cannot be allowed to harm the economy, and worked together to water down the EU’s 2035 ban on petrol cars last year.