How Many Prime Ministers Has Italy Had?
Italy has had 31 prime ministers since its republic was founded in 1946 — but those 31 people have formed 68 separate governments, which is the real story. Italian governments last barely a year on average, the most volatile record in western Europe. Giorgia Meloni, in office since October 2022, is the 31st prime minister of the Republic and the first woman to hold the job.
Why "31" and "68" are both the answer
Italy counts its leaders by the person, like most countries, which gives 31 prime ministers since the Republic was founded in 1946. But that number hides the real character of Italian politics. Those 31 people have formed 68 separate governments — Meloni leads the 68th — because Italian cabinets collapse and re-form with startling regularity.
The arithmetic is stark: 68 governments in about 80 years means an average life of just over a year. Some prime ministers, like Giulio Andreotti, returned again and again — he held the office seven times. The title changes hands far less often than the government does, which is why "how many?" depends entirely on whether you count the people or the cabinets.
The most unstable seat in western Europe
No other large European democracy churns through governments like Italy. The cause is built into the system: governments rest on broad, often contradictory coalitions, and a single partner withdrawing is usually enough to bring the whole thing down — no election required. The president of the Republic then tries to assemble a new majority from the same parliament.
This is why Italy periodically turns to "technocrats" — unelected experts brought in to steady the ship. Mario Monti in 2011 and Mario Draghi in 2021 were both economists handed the premiership during financial emergencies, precisely because the politicians could not hold a coalition together. The instability is not a bug that keeps recurring; it is a feature of how the Republic was designed after the dictatorship.
The full list, in order
Listing all 31 republican prime ministers — many of them short-lived figures from the Christian Democrat decades — would bury the page, so here are the ones that shaped modern Italy, in order.
The Meloni exception
Against that backdrop, Giorgia Meloni stands out. The 60th person to hold the office and the first woman to do so, she took power in October 2022 at the head of Italy\u2019s first far-right-led government since the Second World War. What is most unusual is not her politics but her durability: her government has become one of the three longest-lasting in the history of the Republic.
In a country where the average prime minister is gone within a year or two, simply staying in office has become its own kind of achievement — and the clearest measure of how strange the Italian premiership really is.
How much power is in the job?
On paper an Italian prime minister is a standard parliamentary leader. In practice the job is the most precarious in western Europe, undone again and again not by voters but by coalition partners.
Think you know them? Prove it
A quick quiz. The counting questions catch most people.
- Quirinale / Government of Italy (governo.it) — Giorgia Meloni, President of the Council of Ministers
- Wikipedia — List of prime ministers of Italy (31 republican PMs; 68 governments; 60 people since 1861)
- Britannica and The Irish Times (2026) — Meloni among the longest-serving postwar Italian leaders
- Constitution of the Italian Republic (1948) — the Council of Ministers and votes of confidence
- Natural Earth public-domain country data (via world-atlas), used on the Leaders of the World map
Thirty-one prime ministers, sixty-eight governments, and a leader counted lucky just to last two years — in Italy, the hardest part of the job has always been keeping it.