BERLIN—She has the track record for the most stable Italian government in a long time. Giorgia Meloni deserves credit for refusing a temptation to which too much of the European right has surrendered: confusing patriotism with admiration for somebody else’s empire. Her insistence on controlling Italy’s borders belongs alongside her support for Ukraine, because both begin with a nation’s right to govern its own territory. Before the Italian parliament on 14 October, she put the distinction plainly: “Surrender is not peace, it is conquest.”
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That is a conservative position worth defending, particularly when others have discovered that their enthusiasm for national sovereignty stops precisely where Vladimir Putin’s ambitions begin. And she does it against backlash, resistance and the tides of current populistic politics. She has resisted the lure of Moscow’s long reach and agents, who work in Italy as much as in many other western European nations.
Her border policy also has results to show. Italy registered 157,651 sea arrivals in 2023 and 66,617 in 2024. From January to 30 October this year, the figure was 26,366, roughly 55 per cent below the same period of 2025. These figures measure sea arrivals, not all irregular migration, but the decline is substantial. Meloni has treated border control as a legitimate responsibility of government, while recognizing that the destruction of another European nation’s borders cannot become an acceptable price for cheaper energy. The difficulty is that one of her own deputy prime ministers, Matteo Salvini, has spent years cultivating a very different relationship with Russia.
On 27 October, the League leader said he would take a proposal to stop weapons deliveries to Ukraine into discussions with his coalition partners. Yet Salvini’s position cannot be assessed as though his political circle had discovered Moscow yesterday. Behind the Putin T-shirts lies a network of relationships and organized cooperation whose political implications remain uncomfortable even where a criminal case did not proceed. A look at the elusive Gianluca Savoini sheds light on the strange friends Salvini keeps.
Dugin’s attraction for parts of the European and American right lies in his hostility to the West and his promise of an alternative order centred on Russian power.
Salvini’s former spokesman and longstanding associate, Savoini, stays mostly in the shadows. But he gets around much. A joint investigation by Bellingcat, BuzzFeed News and The Insider documented bookings for at least 38 trips to Russia between 2015 and March 2019, including 14 in 2018 alone. Savoini accompanied Salvini on several journeys and frequently travelled without him. In February 2014, the Lombardia-Russia cultural association became an institutional platform for cultivating Russian contacts, promoting business ties and carrying Moscow-friendly arguments into Italian politics, with Savoini as president. The question is what political purpose these relationships served.
One answer leads to Alexander Dugin, the ultranationalist advocate of a Eurasian imperial order or recently “Hordism” – the celebration of the rule of the savage Golden Mongol Horde as Russia’s true heritage. It is not slander, but actual ideology proposed by Dugin.
Savoini was photographed with him in Moscow on 17 October 2018, the day before the meeting that would become the Metropol scandal. Documents and correspondence described Savoini’s involvement in organising contacts between Dugin’s circle and European right-wing politicians. Dugin’s attraction for parts of the European and American right lies in his hostility to the West and his promise of an alternative order centred on Russian power. He considers all Europeans, especially white Europeans, to be debased, degenerate lowlifes who should be purged from history. He recently called for all of Europe to embrace “liberation” by Russia, which he considers to be a purging force of world history. This is the man, some European and American right-wingers aspire to work with.
