From Keir Starmer to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, every European leader seems keen to have their picture taken with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Yet she is the country’s first far right prime minister since the second world war and when she was elected she was talked of as a danger to Europe.

Alexander Stille, a former editor of Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper and now a professor of journalism at Columbia University, has been watching her rise. He looks at the influences that have shaped her – from her romance novelist mother to her time in the government of a previous controversial Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. And, most surprisingly of all, JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings books.

Michael Safi hears how Meloni’s support for Ukraine and Nato, and her pragmatic approach to politics, seem to have won over European leaders. But what does she really want, and if the rise of the far right in Europe continues, could she be more extreme than she seems?

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