I spent two months in Italy this summer, one of my longest visits since leaving the country of my birth for America sixteen years ago. I had stops in Ferrara, Rome, the Alps, and Palermo. And I can confirm that Tancredi’s observation in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard holds more and more true for Italy every day: “If you want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.” Tancredi was speaking to his aging uncle, Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, who was struggling with the social and political changes brought about by the Risorgimento in the 1860s. The clever and ambitious Tancredi has a real-life successor today in the person of Giorgia Meloni, the first female prime minister in Italian history and a youthful forty-seven-year old.

Two years ago, Italy elected its most far-right parliament in the post–World War II era, bringing Meloni to power in the process. Like Tancredi, Meloni has a supporting cast of characters who share both ideological and familial connections—including former allies of Silvio Berlusconi (after whom Milan’s international airport has embarrassingly just been renamed) as well as members of the Brothers of Italy party, some of whom exhibit nostalgia for Mussolini. She controls the party in part through the appointment of family members to various government and administrative positions, which helps keep the Duce enthusiasts in line and burnishes the party’s moderate image. When commemorating the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti carried out by Mussolini’s henchmen a hundred years ago—a grim landmark of Italian history—Meloni’s party behaved with institutional decorum. But there was no public acknowledgment of, or reflection on, the party’s ideological roots in that era. The Meloni government’s control of state-owned television outlets (a network opponents refer to as “TeleMeloni”) probably helped quash talk of this. And as in other countries, readership of mainstream newspapers in Italy continues to fall drastically, standing, according to some estimates, at half the number it did just ten years ago. Deculturation aids populist political entrepreneurs, even in Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance.

Meloni’s right-wing populism has a touch of American culture-war attitude on gender and LGBT issues, just enough to help in election campaigns. It doesn’t hurt Meloni that her main opponent—Elly Schlein,  the leader of the Democratic Party—started out in politics as a volunteer in the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns and came out as bisexual in 2020. But the conservatism of Meloni’s party embodies a “cultural Christianity” that can’t credibly lead moral crusades, and, at any rate, Italy does not have a militant religious culture. There is no appetite for upsetting the balance established in the 1970s with Law 194, which, with some limits, legalized abortion. Italians in general are reluctant to change, which says something about Meloni’s ability to push through bills that Christian-Democrats and the Left had tried to pass multiple times since the 1980s: on self-government of the justice system (which is now allegedly less independent), greater regional autonomy (which means more disparities between rich and poor regions), and a stronger role for the prime minister vis-à-vis the president of the republic (a significant change from the existing balance of powers in the Italian Constitution).

Meloni and her government have no interest in reforming Italy’s migration policies, unless perhaps it’s to make them harsher. The media continues to depict immigrants and refugees as an invasive force, while the business community benefits from employing immigrants illegally. The Catholic Church is the loudest advocate for migrants, and among the faithful there is little division on this issue—at least in public. The truth is that Italy needs immigration. Italy is still the destination for many migrants, but less favored and less attractive compared to previous years and to other European countries. Despite declining mortality and a slight increase in the resident foreign population (now almost 5.5 million), the country is rapidly depopulating due to falling birth rates and a high number of Italians leaving every year. In the past ten years, almost 1.5 million Italians, especially young people, have left the country. Italy is projected to lose five million more residents in the next twenty-five years (from 59 to 54 million). In his annual state-of-the-economy speech on May 31, Fabio Panetta, chairman of Italy’s central bank, stressed the key role of legal migrants for Italy’s economic future. Meanwhile, Italy is graduating far fewer university students than other European countries. Prestigious universities that have played an important role in Western culture (Bologna, Milan, Padua) are being joined by startup-like online universities subject only to lax regulatory oversight and bearing suspect credentials. The brain-drain as young people leave the country only stands to be compounded by a faltering education system—which in turn does little to attract new immigrants.

As to where Italy stands internationally, the last two years have been a test for Meloni and her government. In some ways its turn away from radical populism resembles what happened in countries like Poland, Greece, and Spain. But polarization between Left and Right has grown, with little space for reformist and moderate forces in the center. Meloni’s choice to keep Italy’s commitments with the United States and the West—including support for Ukraine, despite her own previously expressed sympathies for Vladimir Putin—has in some ways helped mainstream Italy’s populist Right. The country’s ties to the United States and NATO could become more complicated if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election; Italy has no alternative to NATO, given the relative size and weakness of its armed forces.

But Italy’s weapons exports to Israel have risen steeply since October 7, 2023; it’s now the third-largest arms exporter to Israel. At the same time, there has been widespread student support (including brief campus occupations) for Palestine, though the protests are largely tolerated. Meloni’s support for Israel stems from international alliances, Berlusconi’s success in leading his coalition to join the Western consensus in support for the Jewish state, and her own ideological affinities with Benjamin Netanyahu. This dynamic holds despite signs of resurgent antisemitism from both the Right and the radical Left.

But after June’s European Parliament elections, Meloni finds herself marginalized from continental political alliances—not only from the centrist majority, but also from other conservatives and from nationalist forces, especially Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who holds the EU presidency this term and is the real leader of the European Right. The June elections also confirmed the growing disconnect between practicing Catholic voters in many countries and Pope Francis on the topics of immigration and solidarity with the poor. The dividing issues for Catholic voters are security, national identity and culture, and the relationship with Islam. The number of practicing European Catholics continues to shrink, but they participate in elections more than the average population, and they are more likely than before to vote for the hard Right—including in Italy.

Yet Meloni maintains a cordial relationship with Pope Francis, which in turn has led to wider acceptance of her party. Though the Vatican has largely kept it quiet, they see in Meloni an ally on certain key social concerns, including abortion, pro-birth and pro-family policies, and gender issues. At least when it comes to Meloni herself, Francis has downplayed the issue of immigration. The Italian bishops are far more outspoken on the topic. They also are more critical of the recent constitutional reforms. Meloni’s response to the criticism was typical of a populist: she confused the Holy See with the Italian bishops’ conference and accused the Vatican of not being “a parliamentary democracy.”

Among the leaders of Italian Catholicism, there is a fundamental sense of unity on the direction of Italy’s politics. True, there are slight differences on issues like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with Cardinal Matteo Zuppi (a close advisor to Francis) staking out a more pacifist position and President Sergio Mattarella articulating a just-war case for responding to Russia. But there is no big difference between them when it comes to populist attacks on the constitution or the despair that many Italians feel. This unity was on display in Trieste at the beginning of July, during the “social weeks of Italian Catholics,” with the telling theme “At the Heart of Democracy.” The social weeks, organized by the bishops’ conference with experts from academia and social work, have been celebrated every few years since 1907, and they are one of the key manifestations of the attachment of Italian Catholics to the social doctrine of the Church. Zuppi, Mattarella, and Pope Francis were all there, and they spoke with one voice on the value of democracy, constitutionalism, and the Catholic view of migrants and refugees. It was a rare sign of hope and of unity in what the Church thinks and believes about the role of Catholics in this moment. In Italy, there is nothing like the resurgence of traditionalist Catholicism seen in the United States, and few if any bishops advocate anything like it. There was only a two-week gap between Trieste and the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, but it felt like a difference of centuries.

Vatican II Catholicism all’italiana (sloppy liturgical music included) remains the backbone of the Church in Italy. Still, the bishops feel the pinch of secularization and Italians’ growing distrust of the Church. For the first time since its inception, the overall amount of funding from taxpayers who choose the Catholic Church as recipient of their donation (the so-called “eight-per-thousand,” thanks to the Concordat) has fallen below the threshold of one billion euros. And judging from the more-chaotic-than-usual state of the city of Rome—now engulfed by a number of massive construction sites connected to the arrival of millions of pilgrims for the Jubilee year of 2025—the collaboration between the Vatican, the municipal administration, and the national government is not working well.

So what to make of Meloni’s government after two years? The country is more divided, both geographically and ideologically, with a constitutional system now up for grabs. There are no strong international alliances, not even with other countries led by right-wing strongmen. Italian society is increasingly defenseless against populism because the traditional institutions for the formation and transmission of values, worldviews, and collective interests—parties, unions, associations, churches, the public school system—have been weakened in the long stretch that began in the 1990s with Berlusconi and has since brought us Meloni. There are two political fronts, and there is no political or cultural center anymore. This in turn is a factor in the slow disappearance of social Catholicism from the public square, which now has no viable political home.

Catholicism remains, relatively speaking, the strongest collective identity for Italians, but it’s now getting older. It’s also having to make space for other forms of Christianity and other religious traditions that have arrived with migrants from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Pope Francis has not used his moral authority against a right-wing, anti-immigrant, and populist government. He can’t substitute the opposition in Parliament and the fading voice of Catholics in politics. And the Vatican’s immediate concerns and long-term vision both now are turned very far from Italy.

One of the things about the Italian Risorgimento that worried the Prince of Salina in the 1860s was the unification of the country, potentially bridging the gap between the rich and developed north and the poor and underdeveloped south. It never quite happened. And now the gap could actually grow wider, thanks to Meloni’s reforms—quite the paradoxical achievement for the leader of a nationalist party.