From time to time, politics presents once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. The sort that arise only once in a generation and that distinguish leaders destined to leave their mark from those who merely manage the present. For Giorgia Meloni, Roberto Vannacci could represent precisely this: not an opponent to be fought, let alone a potential ally to be courted, but a train to be deliberately missed.

It may seem like a paradox, but it isn’t.

The emergence of Futuro Nazionale and the support that the general appears to be able to garner amongst the most radical section of the right probably represent the second major historic opportunity to have presented itself to the Italian right in the last thirty years.

The first one had a first name and a surname: Silvio Berlusconi.

It was he who, in 1994, carried out the Second Republic’s most daring political manoeuvre: bringing the Italian Social Movement into the mainstream, thereby enabling Gianfranco Fini to embark on the path that would lead to the Fiuggi turning point and to the attempt – perhaps unfulfilled but unquestionably historic – to transform a post-Neo-Fascist right into a European conservative right.

Today, that opportunity has arisen once again, but in a completely different form.

If Berlusconi made the normalisation of the right possible back then, it could well be Vannacci who completes it today.

On one condition, however: that Giorgia Meloni has the courage to let him go.

Because Vannacci is not simply a rival to Fratelli d’Italia and the Italian centre-right: he is a political magnet. He attracts everything that, in recent years, has come to represent the most instinctive, vociferous and identity-driven side of the Italian right. He attracts racism disguised as common sense, homophobia passed off as freedom of opinion, nationalism that mistakes the complexity of the world for a perpetual conspiracy, and nostalgia elevated to the status of a political programme. It attracts that political culture which thrives on slogans – ‘gender’, ‘woke’, ‘remigration’, ‘ethnic replacement’ – rather than ideas, and which turns every issue into a culture war.

It is a right-wing movement that does exist – it would be naive to deny it – but that does not necessarily mean it has to remain within a centre-right government coalition. Indeed, for Meloni, it is now more of a liability than an asset.

Every time a local councillor fantasises about deportations, every time a local government official indulges in nostalgia for the twenty-year Fascist era, every time a Member of Parliament hands the opposition yet another media sensation, the Prime Minister’s painstaking efforts to gain international recognition suffer a setback. Not because such outbursts are politically decisive, but because they fuel the suspicion that beneath the institutional façade, a spirit continues to survive which Meloni has sought, with mixed success, to relegate to the margins.

So why hold them back? Why prevent them from finding a home within the General’s movement?

Let Vannacci build his identity-based party. Let him gather together those nostalgic for the fasces tattooed on their forearms, the apostles of ‘remigration’, and the professionals of perpetual indignation. Let him become the figurehead of that section of the right that prefers slogans to governance and provocation to responsibility.

A centre-right government no longer needs any of this.

If Meloni truly wants to transform her party into a home for a conservative, pro-European, pro-Atlantic and government-oriented right, she must stop tolerating a vocal minority which, rather than strengthening the party, is holding it back.

The real challenge is not to win further support. It is to decide which support is worth retaining.

For this reason, when the Prime Minister envisages a future Head of State representing the Italian right, she should also clarify exactly what conception of the right she has in mind. A right that can identify with the path taken by Gianfranco Fini, or a right that continues to identify with the symbolism and imagery embodied by Ignazio La Russa, whose long-standing political loyalty has already been recognised at the highest institutional level through his presidency of the Senate.

These are two profoundly different right-wing camps. Sooner or later, a choice will inevitably have to be made. The bitter irony is that, whilst the centre-right is perhaps missing out on the most important political opportunity of the last twenty years, not even a single station is in sight at Campo Largo. The progressive forces seem more concerned with defining the boundaries of their mutual vetoes than with broadening their appeal to the liberal, pro-European and reformist world. Thus, once again, the true crucible of Italian politics remains the right. It is there that it will be decided whether Italian conservatism will definitively become a European governing force or continue to grapple with the temptation to periodically chase the ghosts of its own past.