Longevity and Its Costs

This week the world's press has marked a singular fact of Italian political life: the government led by Giorgia Meloni has become the longest-serving in the country's postwar history, surpassing the record set by Silvio Berlusconi. France 24 reports the milestone was celebrated with a party in Bari, while Euronews notes the durability of the coalition has been a rarity in a nation where governments have often fallen before the end of their mandates. The achievement is real, and it deserves a sober acknowledgment rather than irony.

Yet the foreign coverage invites a harder question: what has longevity actually purchased? The Local Italy quotes critics who argue the government has endured mainly by doing very little with its time. Political analysts interviewed by France 24 offer a more charitable formula — roughly half savvy tactical management, half extraordinary good fortune. Neither explanation suggests a programme of deep reform or a transforming vision for the country. Stability, in other words, has been achieved partly by declining to disturb the settled order of things.

There is something characteristically Italian in this paradox, and the world notices it. A country long caricatured for governmental chaos now offers the opposite spectacle: a government so careful, so attuned to the arts of survival, that it has made inertia a kind of virtue. The international press frames this as a puzzle — how did the least stable of European democracies produce its most durable leader? The answer may be that the two conditions are not opposites but companions. Where governments fall often, the ones that remain learn to move slowly, to avoid the misstep that ends careers.

But the record will be judged by what follows. The same reports remind us that considerable challenges remain ahead of the 2027 vote, and that the opposition's fragmentation — as one analyst told France 24, there is no alternative leader — is as much a gift to the government as any of its own achievements. Longevity is a measure of time, not of accomplishment. When the history of this period is written from abroad, it may record not what the government did, but how skilfully it avoided having to do anything at all.

For our pages, the milestone is an occasion to reflect on what the world expects of Italy and what Italy expects of itself. The foreign press sees a government that has mastered the politics of survival; Italians may wonder whether survival is enough. The record is set, the celebrations are over, and the real test — the one that no amount of tactical caution can postpone — lies in the years ahead, when the costs of doing little may finally come due.