Meloni Made Italy a Force. Now She Wants to Cement Her Own Power

Giorgia Meloni has made a career out of confounding the skeptics. Having emerged as a force beyond Italy, the country’s first female prime minister now confronts two stubborn domestic obstacles standing between her and a potentially historic tenure: stagnant living standards and a political system that tends toward deadlock.

Advances on only one of those fronts would probably be enough to give the right-wing leader a second term – and extend a run that could make her the longest-serving postwar leader; should she succeed on both, she’d have permanently altered the architecture of power in Italy.