The stage backdrop at Giorgia Meloni’s Bari speech read: “The most stable government, a stronger Italy.” On 4 September, her coalition government hit 1,413 days in office, surpassing every government in the history of the Italian Republic — a country that has cycled through more than 60 governments since 1946. Meloni, Italy’s prime minister and leader of Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), the national-conservative party she has led since 2014, framed the milestone carefully, pre-empting the obvious objection: the most stable government isn’t automatically the most capable one — it’s simply the one that has had the most time to be judged. That judgment, she told the crowd, was visible in the thousands gathered on the dockside in Bari, the southern Italian port city, and in the millions of Italians still backing her.
It was an hour-long address: part victory lap, part policy manifesto for the final stretch of the legislative term before Italy’s next general election, expected in 2027. But the real political story out of Bari isn’t only what Meloni said. It’s what she conspicuously did not.
The longest-serving government in Italian history: stability as the first reform
Stability, Meloni argued, is itself the first great reform — not a trophy to display, but the precondition for actually governing rather than merely managing crises. The claim holds up against the polling: according to YouTrend, an Italian polling and data analysis firm, Fratelli d’Italia now stands at 26.5%, above the 26.04% it won in the 2022 general election. Four years in government without bleeding support is a rarity in Italian political history — a country where coalition collapses and snap elections have historically been the norm, not the exception.
Meloni credited her coalition partners — Antonio Tajani, leader of Forza Italia and Italy’s foreign minister; Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega (League) and deputy prime minister; and Maurizio Lupi, leader of the smaller centrist party Noi Moderati — for making the run possible, noting that Italy’s most durable governments have all come from the centre-right. She then ran through the crises her government had weathered: the war in Ukraine, the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath, the Iran conflict and the threatened closure of the Strait of Hormuz, US tariffs, an energy price spike, and a string of floods and landslides. “We didn’t lack for anything,” she said. A country without steady leadership through years like these, she argued, would have paid a steep price.
The institutional message was consistent: any electoral reform must guarantee that whoever wins an election gets the numbers to govern for a full five-year term — no more backroom reshuffles, no more governments cobbled together in parliament without a popular mandate.
What Meloni announced in Bari: deportations, housing, prisons
The most applauded passage concerned migration. Policies Italy pushed — from migrant repatriation centres located outside EU borders to the so-called Albania model, under which asylum seekers rescued at sea are processed in Italian-run facilities on Albanian territory — were once dismissed by critics across Europe as unworkable and incompatible with European legal norms. Today, Meloni noted, they’ve become EU law. “They called us extremists for years, then copied everything.” It’s the most concrete deliverable of four years of Italian pressure on Brussels’ migration rulebook, and Meloni turned it into a political rallying cry: this, she said, is what it means to make the right count in Europe.
On the domestic front came the announcement of a national Housing Plan: 100,000 price-capped homes over ten years for young couples and working families, including the clearing of 60,000 public housing units currently occupied illegally. On justice, she pledged more prisons to guarantee that sentences are actually served, arguing that prison overcrowding — a chronic problem in the Italian penal system — shouldn’t be solved through pardons and amnesties. On fuel costs, after already cutting excise duties, she promised further but targeted relief: no subsidies for people who don’t need them, and none for drivers crossing from France simply to fill up on cheaper Italian fuel.
Then came the attack on the opposition. The Italian left, Meloni said, manufactures a fresh emergency every day — from claims that the Constitution is under threat, to Elon Musk, to Israel’s Mossad — and has used anti-fascism as a “weapon of mass distraction” for eighty years. The centre-left coalition, she added, doesn’t even know who its own candidate for prime minister would be. These were direct hits, naming names, aimed squarely at Elly Schlein, leader of the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party), and Giuseppe Conte, leader of the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) and a former prime minister himself.
Basilicata’s oil and a return to nuclear power: energy independence, made in Italy
The energy section of the speech marked the sharpest break from Italy’s previous political era. “It makes no sense to buy oil from Qatar when we have it in Basilicata,” Meloni said, referring to the southern Italian region that sits atop mainland Europe’s largest onshore oil reserves. She announced plans to raise the share of crude that can be extracted from Italian waters, arguing that the energy transition shouldn’t mean impoverishing families or shutting down factories, but rather achieving autonomy and technological neutrality — not tying Italy’s hand to any single energy source.
The Basilicata line deserves to be taken literally, not just as rhetoric. This publication has documented that Basilicata’s oil fields — Val d’Agri and Tempa Rossa — currently produce 65,000 barrels a day out of 160,000 authorised, less than half their licensed potential, hamstrung by stalled permits and billions in royalty revenue that has evaporated into general regional spending rather than infrastructure investment. If the government genuinely wants to substitute Gulf oil with Basilicata crude, the real battle isn’t only in Italy’s offshore waters — it’s in actually producing what has already been licensed onshore.
The same logic applies to nuclear power. Meloni claimed credit for breaking a forty-year taboo — Italy voted to phase out nuclear energy in a 1987 referendum following the Chernobyl disaster, and shut its last reactors in 1990. The reference here is to the enabling law on nuclear power passed by Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in June, which sets a path toward deploying small modular reactors between 2034 and 2035. It’s arguably the most significant sovereignty decision of this legislative term, and the fact that Meloni put it centre-stage at a public rally — rather than leaving it as a technical matter for ministries — signals how seriously she treats it.
She could have answered Vannacci. She didn’t.
Now for the political substance. In the forty-eight hours before Bari, Roberto Vannacci — a former army general turned member of the European Parliament, now leader of Futuro Nazionale (National Future), a movement that split from Salvini’s Lega — had described the governing coalition as a “faded alliance” for which his own party is the “natural interlocutor.” Rossano Sasso, a Futuro Nazionale member of parliament, marked the anniversary by publicly asking where “the real right” had gone. On stage in Bari, Marcello Gemmato, a Fratelli d’Italia MP and undersecretary for health, reminded the crowd that Vannacci’s party had voted against the government in more than one confidence vote. Back in August, Meloni herself, in an interview with the celebrity weekly Chi, had dismissed Vannacci’s movement as “an operation built to help the left.”
The opening for a response was there, in full view. Thousands of people. The day of the record. A speech that landed hard on every other adversary. Meloni went after Schlein, Conte, the broad centre-left coalition, and conspiracy theorists. On Vannacci: not a single word. Those who worked on the speech late into the night, according to reporting from the event, trimmed it specifically to avoid giving the general any airtime.
That silence carries a precise meaning. When a leader lists her enemies in front of her own supporters, and deliberately leaves one name off that list, she is signalling that the name in question isn’t actually an enemy. The scale of Meloni’s showing in Bari makes the omission even easier to read: this wasn’t the silence of someone afraid to engage — it was the silence of someone who doesn’t want to shut a door. With Futuro Nazionale now polling ahead of Forza Italia, as we noted in our analysis of why Vannacci reflects the coalition’s own weaknesses, ignoring him from a position of strength is a deliberate political choice, not an oversight.
A government strong enough to add, not subtract
Meloni’s Bari speech demonstrated one thing clearly: this government has results, popular support, and a coherent direction. It isn’t an administration merely surviving in office — it’s one setting the agenda, from repatriation policy that has become EU law to a nuclear revival. Precisely because of that strength, it can do something a weaker government could never risk: open the door to a party on its right without looking like it’s caving to pressure.
The conditions are there. Vannacci has said he’s waiting for a phone call, and this publication has already argued why Meloni would do well to make it. Futuro Nazionale’s platform, as we’ve shown, radicalises positions the government has already staked out more than it contradicts them. Real questions remain: who Vannacci truly is politically, whether his movement can survive beyond his own personal brand, whether it occupies genuinely distinct ground. But those are questions better answered inside a written pact than shouted from outside it.
Stability was the first reform. The strongest possible evolution for this government would be turning the silence in Bari into an actual alliance — arriving at the 2027 election with a right-wing coalition that adds up its strength rather than diluting it. Meloni has the political capital to make that move. Her silence in Bari suggests she knows it too.
