Italy's Meloni breaks with Trump over the Iran war and Pope Leo XIV: the Sigonella veto, the energy shock and why 80% of Italians now want distance

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has, over the past month, broken publicly with US President Donald Trump over two intertwined issues: Trump's verbal attacks on Pope Leo XIV and Italy's refusal to support the US-Israeli war on Iran. The result is the most direct rupture between an Italian centre-right or right-wing premier and a sitting Republican White House since at least the 2003 Iraq invasion, and a structural rerouting of how Rome thinks about its place in the NATO alliance, the transatlantic relationship and the EU's emerging position on the Iran conflict.

By Friday, May 8, 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had flown into Rome for two days of damage-control meetings with Meloni, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and the Vatican—and was leaving with no Italian commitment to provide military support against Iran, no reversal of the Sigonella air-base veto, and no Italian withdrawal of public criticism of Trump's attacks on the pope. By Sunday, May 10, Italian commentators were openly describing Meloni's pivot as the end of her "bridge to Trump" posture and the start of a recalculation toward Berlin, Paris and Brussels.

What actually triggered the break

The proximate trigger was a sequence of three statements over roughly 48 hours in early-to-mid April 2026. First, Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pontiff, who has emerged since his election as a sharp critic of the US-Israeli war against Iran, said the world was "being ravaged by a handful of tyrants," and called for an immediate ceasefire and a return to negotiation. Second, Trump responded with a social-media tirade calling Leo "weak," later accompanied by an AI-generated image depicting Trump himself as Jesus—a post that landed with particular force in overwhelmingly Catholic Italy, where more than half the population identifies as Catholic.

Third, on the following Monday, Meloni told Italian reporters she found Trump's comments about Pope Leo "unacceptable," adding that as head of the Catholic Church, it was "right and normal for the pope to call for peace and to condemn every form of war." That was the first time the Brothers of Italy leader had directly characterised a Trump statement as unacceptable in public—not as misjudged, ill-advised or unhelpful, but unacceptable.

How Trump responded

Trump's counter-attack arrived in the same news cycle, delivered through outlets pitched directly at Italian and American audiences. To Italy's leading daily Corriere della Sera, Trump said: "I thought she had courage. I was wrong. She's the one who's unacceptable" and that Meloni was "no longer the same person." Asked when he had last spoken to her, Trump answered: "No, not in a long time." On Fox News, he extended the frame: "She's been negative. Anybody that turned us down to helping with this Iran situation, we do not have the same relationship."

Trump subsequently raised the stakes further by threatening to withdraw US troops from Italy—home to Aviano air base, Camp Darby, Sigonella, NSA Naples and the US Sixth Fleet headquarters. Rubio publicly declined to discuss specific bases during his May 8 Rome visit, calling those decisions Trump's to make, but warned more broadly that "one of the main attractions of NATO for the US was to have forces in Europe that could be swiftly deployed elsewhere. Now that's no longer the case, at least when it comes to some NATO members—that's a problem and has to be examined." The phrasing made clear that Italy and Spain, both of which refused to authorise the use of their bases or airspace for Iran strikes, are the implicit targets.

The Sigonella veto

The single most consequential operational decision behind the break is Italy's refusal, in April 2026, to authorise US aircraft to use Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily for combat operations linked to the Iran war. Sigonella is one of the most important US Navy facilities in the Mediterranean, hosting MQ-4C Triton surveillance drones, P-8A Poseidon maritime-patrol aircraft and a regular rotation of F/A-18 and other tactical aviation transiting through the central Mediterranean. Italian officials confirmed to reporters that Washington had not formally sought prior authorisation from Rome for combat use against Iran in this case, and that when the request did come, Italy declined.

Italy is not isolated on this point. Spain, under Pedro Sánchez's government, similarly refused to allow its bases or airspace to be used to attack Iran. Several other European NATO members have publicly conditioned support on a ceasefire and a diplomatic track rather than direct kinetic action against Iranian targets. Italy and other European allies have said they would be willing to help keep the Strait of Hormuz open once there is a lasting ceasefire or the conflict ends. They have refused, however, to be drawn into direct confrontation with Iran.

Why the politics in Italy made this inevitable

The Italian public opinion data left Meloni almost no room to publicly support the war. A March 2026 YouGov poll found that 80% of Italians had an unfavourable opinion of Trump. A more recent survey by Italian research institute SWG found that nine in 10 Italians were "quite worried" about the impact of the Iran war on energy prices, and six in 10 were directly opposed to the war. The energy specifics matter: diesel at Italian pumps is currently above €2 per litre (roughly $2.30), a politically toxic price point in a country where small-business logistics, agriculture and household budgets are unusually exposed to road-fuel costs.

Italy's structural energy dependence amplifies the politics. Before the war, Italy imported around 10% of its natural gas from Qatar and was Europe's largest importer of energy from the Gulf country. Iran's counter-attacks on Qatar's largest gas refinery and the de facto Strait of Hormuz disruption have forced Italy to scramble for alternatives. "People associate the higher bills and gasoline prices with Trump," Roberto D'Alimonte, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Florence and LUISS, told DW. "There are elections in Italy next year and, in Italy too, the price at the pump will decide who wins or loses. Defending the pope was a smart thing to do, because the pope is a popular figure with her voters."

The referendum that changed Meloni's calculus

The other domestic factor analysts cite is the March 2026 referendum on Meloni's judicial reform, which 54% of voters rejected. The vote was widely treated as a de facto confidence test of her right-wing government and her personal popularity. Leo Goretti, head of the Italian foreign policy program at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) in Rome, said the referendum result, layered on top of the Iran-war energy shock, "compelled Meloni to see Trump as a liability." "Diesel price in Italy is more than €2 per liter," Goretti said. "That has a massive impact on a number of social groups which are likely conservative and pro-Meloni."

Nathalie Tocci, professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe and director of the International Affairs Institute in Rome, put the political reading bluntly: "I actually think this is a godsend for her. Trump has become completely toxic across Europe, across much of the world, including Italy." "It's been building up over time, not so much because she is moving away from him but because he has become increasingly unhinged." From that frame, the pope-defence statement is read as both sincere Catholic-cultural politics and a convenient off-ramp from a Trump alignment that had, in any case, stopped paying domestic political dividends.

The Israel defence-pact suspension and the Lebanon convoy

The break with Washington has dovetailed with a parallel cooling toward Israel. Meloni announced that Italy would not automatically renew a defence agreement with Israel after warning shots struck an Italian convoy taking part in the UN peacekeeping mission UNIFIL in southern Lebanon. Analysts call the suspension "substantively rather meaningless," in Tocci's phrase, because "there is not much in this agreement." But "symbolically," Tocci added, "it helps because Israel has become just so unpopular in Italian public opinion." It also lines up with thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters marching through Venice on May 8 demanding Israel be excluded from the Venice Biennale, and with the broader European public-opinion shift against the Gaza war that has reshaped political risk for centre-right and far-right leaders alike.

Italian Cabinet Minister Adolfo Urso, a senior member of Brothers of Italy, has tried to manage the structural alarm: "Italy and the United States are allied countries and maintain their relationship and alliance within international institutions, starting obviously with the Atlantic Alliance." The church's moral teachings, Urso told Italian radio, "cannot crack relationships consecrated in alliances signed a few decades ago." That is a textbook reaffirmation of NATO—and a tacit signal that even within Brothers of Italy, the leadership is trying to keep the rupture rhetorical, not institutional.

What Rubio's May 8 Rome visit actually did

Marco Rubio's two-day Rome trip on May 7-8 was designed to address two tracks: ease tensions with Pope Leo XIV after Trump's attacks, and confront Italy's refusal to support the Iran war. Rubio met Pope Leo at the Vatican, met Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, and then sat down with Meloni for 90 minutes. Meloni described the conversation to reporters in Milan as "certainly frank," language that in Italian diplomatic register signals a substantive disagreement rather than a successful realignment.

Rubio came out of the meeting publicly questioning why allies including Italy were not backing Washington. "I don't understand why anybody would not be supportive," he told reporters, adding that countries needed "something more than just strongly worded statements" if they opposed Iran's actions. He framed the Hormuz question as a precedent: "the fundamental question every country, not just Italy, needs to ask themselves is, are you going to normalise a country claiming to control an international waterway? Because if you normalise that, you've set a precedent that's going to get repeated in a dozen other places." Tajani's counter-frame, delivered as Rubio left, was: "I am convinced Europe needs America, Italy needs America, but also that the United States needs Europe and Italy."

Where Meloni now sits inside Europe

One of the more under-noticed consequences of the Trump break is what it does to Meloni's EU positioning. Viktor Orbán's defeat in the Hungarian elections on April 12 removed her closest sovereigntist, anti-immigration ally on the European Council. "She lost a like-minded politician in Europe, a sovereigntist, an anti-immigration leader," D'Alimonte told DW. "Gradually I think she has to get closer to Merz, Macron and others." That means working inside the centre-right European People's Party (EPP) orbit—Friedrich Merz's CDU/CSU in Germany, the Spanish PP, the centre-right Polish opposition—rather than building a Trump-aligned bloc that has, in any case, weakened after Hungary, the Slovak political turbulence and the strain over Iran.

Julien Hoez, editor of The French Dispatch and a political analyst, summarised the strategic logic: "There are various reasons she has decided to take on Trump—because he is unpopular in Italy, because Italians are reeling under high energy prices, because she wants to recover from the loss she faced in the referendum, and because GDP growth appears to be stagnating. However, with the controversy between Trump and the pope, she has an opening for a great win by defending the Catholic leader who resides within Italy." Mariangela Zappia, president of the ISPI think tank and former Italian ambassador to Washington, framed Trump's reaction itself as a wider European problem rather than a strictly Italian one: "Europe absolutely considers the United States its historic ally, but in some way wants to be involved in the decisions that are taken."

What Rome did not get out of the Trump relationship

There is also a quieter accounting in play: the balance sheet of two years of Meloni-Trump alignment. Meloni was the only EU leader invited to Trump's second inauguration. She made an early Oval Office visit, presented herself as Europe's "bridge to Trump", and tried to position Italy as the interlocutor for tariffs and trade. The country was not spared Trump's tariffs. "That a mediating role between the EU and Trump could help Italy, that was wishful thinking," Goretti told DW. The Iran war's energy shock, the Israel-Gaza fallout, the threats to annex Greenland in January 2026 (which Meloni publicly opposed), the Orbán defeat, and now the Pope Leo attacks have together turned that bridge from political asset to liability.

D'Alimonte's summary line is now circulating in Italian commentary: "Meloni is no longer Trump's darling." For the prime minister, the political payoff is real but bounded. Italian elections are due in 2027. Until then, Meloni has to manage a domestic energy crisis, a public-opinion environment in which 80% dislike Trump and 60% oppose the Iran war, a referendum loss, a stagnating economy, and a NATO alliance whose American head is openly questioning whether Italy is still a reliable host for US power-projection.

What to watch in the coming weeks

Three concrete signals will tell readers whether the break holds and how far it travels. First, whether Italy quietly walks back the Sigonella refusal in any form—whether through low-key authorisations for non-combat support, intelligence cooperation, or refuelling—or whether the veto becomes a fixed feature of Italian policy until a ceasefire. Second, whether Trump follows through on his US-troops-withdrawal threat or whether Pentagon planners and the Republican Senate quietly contain it. The 5,000-soldier draw-down from Germany already in motion will be the most visible test of whether Italy is next.

Third, whether Meloni's drift away from Trump translates into a more cooperative posture toward Friedrich Merz in Berlin, Emmanuel Macron in Paris, and EU Council President António Costa on Russia-Ukraine, Iran diplomacy, defence-industrial policy and the next EU multiannual budget. If Brothers of Italy moves operationally—not just rhetorically—into the EPP/centre-right consensus, that would mark the most substantive reshaping of Italian foreign policy under Meloni since she took office in October 2022.

Bottom line

Meloni did not so much pivot as get pivoted by an aligned set of pressures: a deeply unpopular war with Iran sending diesel prices past €2 a litre, a referendum loss that wiped out her political margin, an American-born pope whose criticism of the war landed inside a country that is more than half Catholic, the Hungarian election that removed her closest right-wing ally, and a US president who responded to her public defence of the pope by calling her "no longer the same person." What looked, in early 2025, like Italy's most strategic asset—a working channel to Trump's Washington—has become, in May 2026, one of her bigger liabilities. The remainder of her 2027 mandate will be spent managing that fact, in Rome, in Brussels, and across the Atlantic.