In recent months, a recurring narrative has established itself in the Italian political debate: Giorgia Meloni would be ‘Trump’s friend’, the American president’s main European interlocutor. This is not just a polemical frame of the opposition. The political relationship between the leader of Fratelli d’Italia and Donald Trump really exists and is part of the network of relations linking a part of European conservatism to the American Republican world.

Yet recent news reports paint a more curious picture. Donald Trump’s special envoy for global partnerships, Paolo Zampolli, called Giuseppe Conte – leader of a party that has made anti-Americanism a flag – ‘a nice and kind friend of President Trump’. The two met for lunch in Rome, at a restaurant in the centre.

The scene confirms an already well-known political story. During his first term as Prime Minister, Conte had built a personal and cordial relationship with the head of the White House, so much so that Trump went so far as to publicly call him ‘Giuseppi’. A relationship that today, in parliamentary tones and social rhetoric, would seem to belong to another era, almost as if it had been erased by the electorate. Yet it continues to resurface in the facts.

It is the litmus test of a typical and, at the same time, singular phenomenology: transformism as a historical trait of Italian politics and giravoltism as the figure of Giuseppe Conte’s political parabola. The former belongs to the long tradition of the Italian political system since the time of Agostino Depretis; the latter seems instead to describe a more recent specialisation: the ability to cross different positions with surprising rapidity, adapting languages and postures to the public of the moment.

The figure of the‘kind friend of Trump’ thus becomes more than just a diplomatic curiosity. It is precisely from here that the idea of a phenomenology of the ‘kind friend of Trump’ originates: observing Conte’s political parabola, a particular skill emerges, that of performing elegant turns, moving with ease between different stages and audiences, even when the allies who host him support positions very different from his own.

And it is perhaps also the sign of a more general transformation: an Italian politics that is friendly to everyone, but less and less friendly to itself.

Power wears down those who do not change

The Roman lunch with Trump’s special envoy is not an isolated episode. Rather, it is yet another stage in a political trajectory that has shown a certain regularity over the years: the ability to change positioning without ever losing control of one’s public narrative.

During his first term as Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte had built a personal and cordial relationship with Donald Trump. It was not just a matter of institutional diplomacy. The American president went so far as to publicly call him ‘Giuseppi’, a sign of a direct and personal relationship that, at the time, was claimed without particular embarrassment. Today, in the rhetorical space of the opposition, Trump has instead become the symbol of the aggressive and imperialist America. Yet the political fact remains: that relationship continues to re-emerge in the facts, as the Roman lunch with the US president’s special envoy demonstrates.

The same elasticity can also be found in other passages of Conte’s political parabola. In domestic politics, for example, his history of government is in itself a small manual of political adaptation. First the experience with the League, within a government that had built much of its identity on opposition to the European establishment. Then, after the crisis of summer 2019, the birth of a new executive with the Democratic Party, the very party with which the 5 Star Movement had repeated the slogan ‘never with the PD’ for years .

A shift that, in Italian political history, would not even be that surprising. Transformism, after all, belongs to the tradition of the national political system. But in the case of Conte, what is striking is not just the change of alliance. It is the speed with which the political narrative is reformulated.

The same dynamic can be found on the terrain of international politics. For months, the leader of the 5 Star Movement maintained a very critical position with respect to the Western line on the war in Ukraine. Then, speaking before pro-European audiences, the register suddenly changed: acknowledgement of Russian aggression, defence of the Ukrainian people and a rhetorical formula that some have ironically summarised as a premature supercazzola with an escapism to the right.

A similar mechanism was seen on justice reform. Conte sided with the NO vote in the referendum, only to acknowledge immediately afterwards that a justice reform is nonetheless necessary, promising that it is his political camp that will carry it out.

The same pattern can be found in other dossiers: from trade tariffs, where the negotiating prudence of the years of government gives way to trade war rhetoric, to the Strait Bridge, first considered a work to be evaluated and then become the symbol of useless expenditure.

Observed individually, these fluctuations might appear to be simple shifts in policy. But observed as a whole, they tell a different story.

It is not just a question of changing one’s mind. It is the method that is interesting. If transformism belongs to the long tradition of Italian politics, what emerges in the parable of the former Prime Minister is something more specific: a true Conti turnabout, the ability to cross different positions without the passage being perceived as a contradiction, but as a natural evolution of political discourse.

And it is precisely this ability – the ability to transform spin into coherent narrative – that makes the figure of Conte a politically interesting case study.

A wide field with variable geometry

If, in the political trajectory of Giuseppe Conte, the twists and turns tell of a method, it is by observing the current phase of the broad camp that that method seems to take on the features of a real strategy.

It is therefore also worth trying to read it in this key: not just as a sequence of position changes, but as a form of political imbroglio capable of simultaneously addressing different audiences. To voters, certainly. But also to the protagonists of the so-called variable-geometry broad field themselves.

Within this rather fluid political space, Conte manages to move with a certain freedom. And often with surprising results.

The paradox emerged clearly in the words of Filippo Sensi, Senator of the Democratic Party, who on X defined the 5 Star Movement as ‘a right-wing movement’. A rather stark judgement, especially if one considers that it is precisely the Democratic Party that has been working for some time to build with the Five Stars the lintel of the alternative to the governing Right.

In theory, such a definition should produce an immediate political rift. In practice, nothing happens. The wide field continues to move as if that contradiction did not exist.

And this is where Conte’s communication strategy becomes interesting. The former Prime Minister manages to frequent very different political stages, often belonging to political cultures distant from the 5 Star Movement, without this producing any real tension within the coalition.

The episode of theconvention organised by Più Europa, the party led by Riccardo Magi and historically among the most convinced supporters of the western line on the war in Ukraine, is perhaps the most emblematic case.

On the one hand, Conte, who in recent years has built a significant part of his political identity on positions that are very critical of the Western line on the war in Ukraine, with tones that are often judged to be lenient towards Moscow and with a party – the 5 Star Movement – that recently declared that an end to military aid to Kyiv would be among the first acts of any return to government.

On the other, an audience that has made support for Ukraine and the pro-European line one of its most explicit political battles.

In the middle is a pulpit from which a discourse whose genius, let’s call it, lies not so much in the rhetoric of balance, but the ability to construct intricate phrases that at the same time affirm one thing and immediately afterwards downplay it, without the contradiction really appearing as such.

One example is the position on the European rearmament plan: ‘We must strengthen the common European defence. But the rearmament plan is not the common European defence: it is money thrown to the tune of Germany, which has become a world military superpower‘. A statement that means absolutely nothing. And the same pattern can be found on the war in Ukraine: defence of the Ukrainian people on the one hand, but at the same time insistence on the idea that the solution must first and foremost come through a diplomatic initiative.

But it is precisely this kind of rhetorical construction that makes the scene possible. Conte speaks, the audience listens, and the wide field continues to function as if that political distance did not represent a problem.

Why? It is difficult to give a clear-cut answer. Most probably one of the reasons lies in his ability to make even his own contradictions acceptable. Or, more simply, in his ability to communicate them better than others, starting with Elly Schlein.

It is not an assessment that circulates only among observers. It is a perception that apparently also snakes through the Democratic Party itself, where quite a few are looking at Conte as a potentially more competitive candidate for Palazzo Chigi.

If this perception were to be consolidated, Conti’s giravoltism would cease to be merely a personal trait and become a true leadership strategy within the broad field.

Beyond the politics of ‘friends of

The phenomenology of Trump’s ‘kind friend’ tells more than the political parable of a single leader. It tells something of the way Italian politics is being transformed.

In recent years, the public debate seems to have progressively shifted from strategic choices to personal relationships. Friend of Trump, friend of Merkel, friend of Washington, friend of this or that international leader. Foreign policy categories are often replaced by diplomatic labels that serve more for domestic polemics than for understanding global power relations.

It is a mechanism that simplifies the political narrative but, at the same time, empties the debate of strategic content.

Italy does not need to establish who is more or less friendly to this or that foreign leader. It needs, rather, to return to a serious discussion of the great issues that define its position in the world.

First of all, Europe, which remains the natural horizon of Italian politics and the main space within which the country’s economic and strategic choices are played out.

Then the economy and industry, because the competitiveness of the European and Italian production system will be one of the real political games of the coming years.

And finally foreign policy, which should once again become coherent, recognisable and anchored in the European integration project, instead of oscillating between tactical positioning and narratives constructed for domestic consumption.

If Italian politics wants to get out of the season of labels and personal relationships, it will have to return to grappling with these issues. Otherwise, the risk is the one that emerges from observing the phenomenology of Trump’s ‘kind friend’: a policy capable of being friends with everyone, but less and less friends with itself.