Vannacci launches far-right party, challenges Meloni's grip on Italy's right

Roberto Vannacci turned his break with Italy’s right into a direct challenge to Giorgia Meloni, launching Futuro Nazionale at a founding congress in Rome and pitching himself as the voice of voters who want a harder nationalist line. The former army general and paratrooper, greeted by chants of “Generale, Generale, Generale,” used the stage to press a movement that could split the right just as Meloni is trying to keep it together ahead of the next general election.

The 57-year-old has moved quickly from military officer to culture-war celebrity to elected politician. He first became a national figure with his self-published 2023 book Il mondo al contrario, whose anti-LGBTQ and anti-minority rhetoric made him a lightning rod and helped build his profile on the hard right. He then won more than 500,000 votes in Italy’s June 8-9, 2024 European Parliament election on Matteo Salvini’s League ticket, before later breaking with the party and, on February 3, 2026, quitting the League group to set up his own force.

That trajectory now poses the kind of stress test Meloni cannot ignore. Futuro Nazionale was already polling at around 5 percent, enough to complicate any effort to rebuild a governing majority after the next election. Vannacci is not simply trying to create another small party on the fringe. He is reaching for voters who may want a more aggressive, anti-EU and pro-Russia posture than the one offered by Brothers of Italy and its allies, while also tugging away support from Matteo Salvini’s League and from Forza Italia.

The political risk for Meloni is clear. A pact with Vannacci could help shore up the right-wing bloc but would also pull her government toward a more radical nationalist line and risk alienating more moderate voters who want stability and discipline. Refusing him, by contrast, could leave the governing camp more exposed to fragmentation and give Vannacci room to peel away disillusioned conservatives and lawmakers already drifting from Meloni’s coalition.

The launch in Rome showed how personalistic Italian politics remains. Vannacci was introduced by a party official as a modern-day Julius Caesar, a theatrical signal that he intends to stand not as a junior ally but as a rival tribune for the angry and the forgotten. With the next election increasingly framed as a 2026-27 test for Italy’s right, his new party has become more than a branding exercise. It is a challenge to whether Meloni can hold the coalition together while one of its former insiders tries to capture its most hardline voters.