Italy's rogue general now polls ahead of Salvini's League

A year before Italy's next general election, a political party founded by a disgraced army general is outpolling two established members of the governing coalition. National Future, launched in February by Roberto Vannacci, now places behind only Forza Italia among the coalition's right-wing parties, and sits ahead of Matteo Salvini's League. For Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy leads the coalition, Vannacci's rise poses a question with no comfortable answer: whether to bring a party that openly sympathises with Italy's fascist past into her electoral alliance, or to shun it and risk splitting the right.

From military discipline to political notoriety

Vannacci was a serving general in the Italian army when he published Il Mondo alla Rovescia (The World Turned Upside Down) in 2023. The book was a sustained attack on what he framed as the excesses of progressive culture: he railed against the "normalisation" of homosexuality and questioned whether Paola Egonu, a prominent Italian volleyball star born in Italy to Nigerian parents, could truly be considered Italian. A disciplinary inquiry followed. He was eventually suspended for bringing the armed forces into disrepute.

The controversy did what controversies often do in Italian public life: it made the book a bestseller. Vannacci turned his notoriety into a platform. Elected to the European Parliament, he used the visibility to found National Future in February 2026, with an explicit pitch that Meloni's government has sold out its right-wing base by not being extreme enough.

What National Future actually stands for

The party's programme is unambiguous. Vannacci describes the "true right" as pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine, anti-EU, and committed to restoring Italy's "cultural homogeneity" through the expulsion of immigrants and their descendants. He has also declared himself open to receiving funding from Moscow and Beijing, a position that places him outside the norms of European democratic politics even by the standards of the continent's far right.

His background gives these positions weight. Before entering politics, Vannacci served as a military attache in Moscow, a posting that gave him sustained exposure to Russian institutional circles. His willingness to entertain foreign funding from countries that are strategic adversaries of the European Union and NATO is not idle rhetoric. It echoes a pattern across Europe where far-right parties have cultivated ties with the Kremlin, from France's National Rally to Austria's Freedom Party, but Vannacci is unusual in making the invitation explicit rather than covert.

The polling that changes Meloni's calculus

National Future's poll numbers are what lift this from a fringe story to a governing dilemma. Placing behind Forza Italia, the second-largest party in Meloni's coalition, but ahead of the League, suggests a meaningful slice of Italy's right-leaning electorate wants something harder than what the current government offers. Forza Italia, founded by Silvio Berlusconi and now led by Antonio Tajani, has long positioned itself as the moderate face of the centre-right. The League, under Salvini, has oscillated between regionalist populism and hard-line anti-immigration posturing. That Vannacci's months-old formation can outpoll the League indicates the radicalisation of voters that existing parties have failed to retain.

Italy's mixed electoral system rewards broad coalitions. To win a parliamentary majority against a united left in 2027, Meloni needs the combined right to hold together. If National Future takes votes from her coalition partners, she may need to bring Vannacci into the tent. But doing so would demolish years of careful work to present Brothers of Italy as a mainstream conservative party, rather than what its origins and its logo, which retains a neo-fascist political symbol, suggest: a direct descendant of Italy's post-fascist tradition.

The Ceuta incident and the rightward pull

The dynamic was visible last week during the crisis in Ceuta, the Spanish exclave in North Africa. When irregular migrants breached the border, Meloni was among the first European leaders to call for action against Spain, a position that seemed driven less by diplomatic logic than by the need to appear tough on migration with Vannacci watching from the right. Vannacci used the same incident to amplify calls for a Europe-wide "remigration" strategy, a term that has migrated from the fringes of online far-right discourse into mainstream political vocabulary within months.

The Ceuta episode illustrated a broader pattern across Europe: the presence of a harder-right alternative pulls established parties rightwards, regardless of whether they formally ally with it. Meloni's government has already adopted some of the toughest migration policies in the EU, including a deal with Albania to process asylum claims outside Italian territory. That these policies are now deemed insufficient by a significant chunk of the electorate says something about how far the centre of gravity has moved.

A European pattern of radicalisation

Vannacci's rise is not an isolated phenomenon. Across the continent, established right-wing parties face pressure from harder alternatives that refuse to moderate. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland leads national polls and stands on the brink of a historic breakthrough in eastern state elections. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has so far ruled out any national coalition with the AfD, a line that contrasts with the dilemma facing Meloni but one that looks increasingly strained as the AfD's vote share grows.

In Poland, the nationalist and Eurosceptic Law and Justice party has been pulled rightwards by competition from two newer far-right formations. In Britain, Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain party exerts a similar gravitational pull on Reform UK. The pattern is consistent: the far right is not merely dragging mainstream politics towards more extreme positions on immigration. It is itself radicalising, with parties that would once have been considered the extreme edge now facing competition from formations further right still.

What distinguishes Vannacci is the speed of his ascent. From book controversy to disciplined soldier to European parliamentarian to party leader in under three years is fast even by the standards of populist politics. It also reflects a broader normalisation: when a serving general can question a black Italian's nationality on the pages of a bestselling book and then convert the resulting outrage into a viable political career, something has shifted in what Italian voters will tolerate.

The foreign funding question

Of all the elements in this story, the foreign funding question is the one that should concern European institutions most. Vannacci's openness to Russian and Chinese money places National Future in a different category from domestic populists who simply want to reshape national politics. A party funded by Moscow or Beijing inside the Italian parliament, or inside a governing coalition, would represent a direct instrument of foreign influence inside a NATO member state and an EU founder. Frontex data on migration pressures at Europe's southern borders already show how external actors exploit migration flows for strategic purposes; a party simultaneously advocating for those borders to be opened and for alignment with those same external actors would compound the problem.

Italy has laws governing foreign political funding, but enforcement is uneven, and the question of whether Russian or Chinese money would flow through opaque intermediaries makes detection difficult. The European Parliament has itself faced scandals over foreign influence, most notably the 2022 Qatar affair. Adding a party that openly invites such funding would test the institution's already strained integrity mechanisms.