Only a fortunate coincidence brought the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to Rome precisely during the hours of the political break between the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and Donald Trump. Who from the White House returns to say: “With Giorgia Meloni we no longer have the same relationship.”
The visit thus became the symbolic seal not of an institutional farewell between two countries, Italy and America, with too many interests, values, economies, and citizens in common, but of the change of course by the political leader who until yesterday for ideological reasons was the European closest to the overseas Republican Party. Even in the Trumpian version.
Next to Zelensky, already mistreated on world television by Trump, who was the only Westerner to have welcomed last year in Alaska with all honors the aggressor of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister reaffirms “the moral duty and strategic necessity” to still and always stand on the side of the attacked.
Shortly after, the Ukrainian president goes up to the Quirinale, where Sergio Mattarella, looking at the interlocutor and the camera, quotes “the Prime Minister who certainly confirmed to him the full support of Italy and the firmness of this position, which I fully share.”
Never with such deliberate clarity and emphasized harmony have the presidency of the Republic and the government reiterated to the world Italy’s choice for the benefit of Ukraine and European allies.
It is not the only “side effect” of the rift with Trump.
With his double and ragged attack on Leo XIV – as if for a Pope begging for peace were a fault -, and on the Prime Minister “guilty” of not wanting to involve Italy in the war against Iran triggered by the American-Israelis, Trump achieved a political miracle: inducing Elly Schlein, leader of the PD, the main party of harsh opposition to the government, to affirm important words in Parliament.
“No foreign head of state can allow themselves to attack, threaten or disrespect our country and our government,” she warned.
Paradoxically, thanks to Trump and his accusations Meloni and Schlein discovered that, at the crucial hour, one is no longer Guelfs or Ghibellines, but only Italians aware of what is at stake.
And there is an Atlantic appendix. Without the just rejected by voters, Viktor Orbán, the former Hungarian prime minister close to Putin who vetoed every EU initiative for Ukraine, without having to politically displease the friend and powerful American president anymore, Giorgia Meloni can now more decisively take the European path. The only one capable of giving a future to NATO’s continental defense, which sooner or later risks being abandoned by Trump, the isolationist.
Also in this sense, the meeting with Zelensky, who knocks to enter at least the EU if the times are not yet ripe for NATO, sounds like the viaticum of an ongoing Italian change.
Accompanied by institutions and political protagonists.
