By late 2026 the contrast between Rome and Paris is no longer subtle. Giorgia Meloni, who took office in October 2022 as Italy's first female prime minister, has just completed nearly four years in power, the longest continuous government in the postwar Italian Republic. Emmanuel Macron, elected in 2017 on a promise to transform France, is finishing his second term as a lame-duck president with approval ratings around 15 percent, a fractured parliament, and streets that have recently seen some of the worst unrest in years.
The difference is not merely one of personal style. It is the difference between a government that has used its majority to act on the issues voters ranked highest and a presidency that, after a self-inflicted parliamentary dissolution in 2024, has spent its remaining time managing paralysis.
Meloni's clearest results have come on migration, the issue that defined her campaign. Sea arrivals in the first seven months of 2026 stood at roughly 16,000, down 55 percent from the same period in 2025, 60 percent from 2022, and 80 percent from the peak year of 2023. Returns have increased. Italy's protocol with Albania for external processing, while legally contested and only partially operational, provided a template that other European governments have studied. The broader Mattei Plan has directed investment toward African countries of origin and transit. These measures have not eliminated irregular migration, and critics correctly note that legal labour visas have continued; the point is that the volume of uncontrolled arrivals has been driven down while the government retained the capacity to govern.
On the economy the picture is more mixed but still directional. Employment has risen by more than one million since November 2022, reaching a record employment rate of 63.2 percent, with unemployment falling from 7.8 percent to 5.8 percent and permanent contracts increasing. The budget deficit has been reduced from over 8 percent of GDP in 2022 to around 3.1 percent. Italy's borrowing costs have improved relative to France's. Growth remains modest, forecasts for 2025–26 hover near or below 1 percent, and industrial production has lagged, partly because of the legacy of earlier fiscal expansions and the structure of the Italian economy. Yet the government has avoided the cycle of emergency budgets and constitutional crises that has characterised Paris. Credit-rating agencies have upgraded Italy while downgrading France.
Macron's final stretch looks different. After the 2024 snap election produced no stable majority, French governments have operated as minorities, repeatedly threatened by no-confidence motions. The pension reform that was the centrepiece of his second-term economic program has been suspended. Public finances remain under pressure, with the deficit still well above the EU's 3 percent threshold. Recent waves of protest and looting have drawn criticism even from former allies, who describe the presidency as effectively powerless and the 2024 dissolution as a historic error. Macron's response to the latest unrest has been largely rhetorical; with little fiscal room and no parliamentary majority, the levers available to him are limited. Polls show him at or near the lowest approval of his entire time in office.
The structural contrast is instructive. Meloni entered office with a clear parliamentary majority and has largely kept her coalition together while moderating the more radical edges of her party's rhetoric in practice. She has cooperated with the European Commission on migration rules and fiscal targets rather than treating Brussels as an enemy to be defied for domestic applause. Macron, by contrast, began with ambitions to modernise French labour markets and public finances but spent political capital on institutional manoeuvres that ultimately left him without the power to finish the job. The result in Italy has been continuity of policy; in France it has been serial improvisation and deferred decisions.
None of this means Meloni has solved Italy's deeper problems, low productivity growth, regional disparities, demographic decline, or that every initiative has worked as advertised. The Albania centres have faced court setbacks, and some promised naval measures never materialised. Nor does it mean Macron's earlier reforms were without merit; France's pre-2024 labour-market changes improved employment numbers before the political system seized up. The observable difference in 2026 is simply that one government has continued to pass and implement measures on the issues it campaigned on, while the other has spent its closing months constrained by a parliament it itself disordered and by a public that has largely tuned it out.
Voters in both countries will render their own judgments. The record so far shows that Meloni has not treated high office as a holding pattern. Macron's presidency, by the evidence of its final year, has increasingly done exactly that.