Berlusconi’s extraordinary endurance rested on his ability to survive electoral defeats, collapsed governments, criminal trials and repeated predictions of his political death. His wealth, television empire and a party constructed around himself gave him resources independent of his popularity at any particular moment.
Meloni lacks those tycoon-style advantages, but she is still only 49 years old, tops the polls and is planning an electoral reform that could make it easier for her to keep her grip on power. Nearly four years after taking office, she towers over her coalition partners without an obvious challenger on the right.
Italo Bocchino, a former conservative parliamentarian and prominent Meloni supporter, predicted her era “will last 30 years” — even if some of those years are in opposition.
Her appeal, he argued, lies in her unfiltered authenticity: She complains in dialect about high heels and needing the toilet at international summits and press conferences, embraces her “fishwife” nickname and is notorious for eye-rolls that betray what she is thinking.
“She is sincere, she is transparent as glass,” he said. Her image as a petite blonde woman, Bocchino argued, also made a leader from Italy’s post-fascist right appear less threatening to wary voters.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Laura Boldrini, a center-left Democratic Party MP and former speaker of the lower house, insisted Meloni had not yet earned the comparison with Berlusconi.
