# Meloni Will Talk Cost of Living With Mayors, Just Not Only the Ones Who Asked > Nine left-wing mayors of Italy's metropolitan cities asked to meet the prime minister after two weeks of cost-of-living protests. Meloni told Anci's Gaetano Manfredi a petition from one political side carried no representative value, and proposed a broader forum instead. - Source: Italian Insider - Canonical URL: https://italianinsider.net/en/article/meloni-will-talk-cost-of-living-with-mayors-just-not-only-the-ones-who-asked - Author: Italian Insider Staff - Section: Politics - Other edition: https://italianinsider.net/article/meloni-will-talk-cost-of-living-with-mayors-just-not-only-the-ones-who-asked - Published: 2026-10-27T20:05:15.779Z - Updated: 2026-10-27T20:05:15.779Z - Tags: Giorgia Meloni, Cost of living, Anci, Gaetano Manfredi --- Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni says she is willing to discuss the cost of living with Italy's mayors as part of the government's budget negotiations, but not on the terms nine of them asked for. The nine, all left-wing mayors of Italy's largest metropolitan cities, had requested a direct meeting after two weeks of cost-of-living protests spread across the country, some of them violent. Meloni's answer went through Gaetano Manfredi, the mayor of Naples and head of Anci, the national association of Italian municipalities. She told him that a petition coming from only one political side carried no representative value, rejecting the idea of sitting down specifically with the group that had organized the request rather than with Italy's mayors as a whole. Her reasoning was blunt about why the distinction mattered to her. The cost of energy, rent and transport is not any different depending on who runs a city, she said, treating the mayors' shared party affiliation as irrelevant to a problem she framed as identical regardless of which coalition happens to control a given city hall. In place of the meeting the nine mayors had asked for, she proposed talking with mayors from both sides of the political spectrum through an existing forum the government already uses for dialogue with local authorities. The response fits a pattern that has run through Meloni's handling of the unrest since it began, treating the underlying economic grievance as real while resisting any format that could be read as negotiating with the opposition on the opposition's own terms. Whether Manfredi and the other eight mayors take up the broader forum instead of the direct meeting they wanted will say something about whether Meloni's counteroffer was a genuine opening or simply a way to look responsive without actually sitting across the table from the mayors who asked first. --- Originally published by Italian Insider. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://italianinsider.net/en/article/meloni-will-talk-cost-of-living-with-mayors-just-not-only-the-ones-who-asked.