A new rival is forcing Italy's Meloni back to her far-right roots

National Future's 7 percent

Vannacci's National Future party is polling above 7 percent, according to YouTrend's Lorenzo Pregliasco, who told POLITICO that "without Vannacci, the center-right could lose the upcoming election." That number has been climbing sharply over the past two months and has already pushed National Future past the League, Meloni's junior coalition partner, while narrowing the gap with Forza Italia, the other right-wing ally. For a coalition that won comfortably in 2022, the math is uncomfortably tight: a few percentage points siphoned off the right could be enough to flip the next parliament.

The strategic question for Meloni's Brothers of Italy is whether to absorb Vannacci into the coalition or to outflank him. Giovanni Orsina, who heads the political science department at Luiss Guido Carli University, framed the calculation bluntly: Meloni's priority is to make sure Brothers of Italy itself does not start losing votes. That points to a hardening of tone rather than a policy reset, with security, immigration, and identity framed in the most uncompromising register available.

The Ceuta precedent

The Ceuta migrant surge, in which tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave and nearly 100 died, gave Meloni an immediate pretext to demonstrate her hard-right credentials. Rome became the first EU government to publicly attack Madrid, suspending parts of the Schengen free-movement regime and forcing passengers from Spain into separate passport lines at Italian airports. The controls are to remain in place at least until August 15, and Spain has retaliated with its own checks on travelers from Italy.

For Meloni, this was not just a bilateral dispute but a domestic signal. The left-wing Democratic Party's Giorgio Gori called her response "purely the result of domestic political calculations," arguing she was reinforcing her brand on migration. Nicola Procaccini, who co-chairs the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament and serves as one of Meloni's closest lieutenants, insisted to POLITICO that she stands where she has always stood and "simply isn't the racist, xenophobic fascist she was made out to be when she first took office."

Vannacci's remigration proposal

Where Meloni and her rival genuinely diverge, according to Marco Tarchi of the University of Florence, is foreign policy and specifically Ukraine. Tarchi argued that on everything else, "the gap is artificially exaggerated in rhetoric and posturing for tactical reasons." Vannacci's signature migration idea, a still-undetailed "remigration" plan to push migrants back to their countries of origin, sits at the more radical end of a spectrum Meloni herself once occupied when she promised a naval blockade during her 2022 campaign.

That naval blockade never happened, but the Albania detention hubs did, and the gap between rhetorical maximalism and policy delivery is now the terrain both leaders are contesting. On Ukraine the contrast is sharper: Vannacci and the League both favor a softer line on Moscow and oppose higher defense spending, while Italy has contributed roughly €3 billion over four years — about €1 per Italian per month — and has not joined NATO's Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List. If Meloni brings Vannacci into a coalition, Tarchi and others suggest, that Ukraine question will be the real dealbreaker, not migration.