A Retired General Founded a Party Seven Months Ago, It Just Passed Forza Italia, and Meloni Has to Decide What That Means

Roberto Vannacci built Futuro Nazionale from nothing in February and has already pushed it past the League and, this week, past Forza Italia in the polls, running to the right of Meloni rather than against her from the left. Whether his party ends up inside her coalition or eating into it is the question Rome is now trying to answer before 2027.

By Marco FerrettiPublished September 5, 20263 min read

Roberto Vannacci is a retired Italian Army general turned member of the European Parliament, and the party he founded in February, Futuro Nazionale, has climbed to around 8 percent in national polls in seven months, a rise fast enough that it passed the League months ago and this week overtook Forza Italia, the other junior partner in Giorgia Meloni's coalition. That puts Vannacci ahead of two of the three parties currently propping up Meloni's government, using a version of nationalism positioned further right than her own.

What makes Vannacci's rise a genuine dilemma rather than a simple polling curiosity is where the pressure is coming from. Meloni has spent much of her time in office trying to hold together support for Ukraine, NATO and the European Union inside a coalition and an electorate that were never fully sold on any of the three, while an Italian left drifting toward more pacifist positions has opened space on the other flank as well. Vannacci's nationalism does not split the difference between those pressures, it offers a harder answer to them, and its rise suggests a real constituency exists for that harder answer inside Meloni's own voting base.

The practical question now is whether Futuro Nazionale ends up inside a second Meloni government or outside eating into the votes that keep the current one alive. A party polling at 8 percent and rising is difficult to fold into a coalition without ceding real influence, and just as difficult to ignore heading into the 2027 elections, when every point it takes from the League or Forza Italia weakens the coalition arithmetic Meloni depends on.

Analysts framing the Vannacci moment argue it points to something larger than one party's polling trajectory, that Europe's political mainstream can no longer treat containing the far right as a solved problem simply because a right wing government is already in power. Vannacci's rise happened inside that government's own coalition space, not outside it, which is precisely what makes it Meloni's problem to manage rather than her opposition's.