The Weight of this Medal

The order itself has a particular history. Established by presidential decree in 2011 as the successor to the 1947 Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity, it was reconceived to honour those who advance Italy's standing and cooperation with the world in politics, diplomacy, science, culture, trade, and the arts. Candidates are proposed by Italy's foreign minister, reviewed by a five-member honours council, and confirmed, finally, by the president himself. It is not an award handed out casually.

President Nechirvan Barzani now sits among a striking assortment of past recipients: the former Argentine president Mauricio Macri, Bulgaria's former prime minister Boyko Borissov, Hawaii's Governor Josh Green, Princess Charlene of Monaco, the football manager Carlo Ancelotti, the Formula One champion Fernando Alonso, and, in an earlier era, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly. The company is eclectic by design, a proof that the honour recognizes influence wherever it happens to be found, not a particular kind of career.

Fontana, addressing the gathering, called Barzani "the most distinguished interpreter and the most steadfast advocate" of the relationship between Kurdish and Italian institutions, and relayed Mattarella's own description of a "pragmatic leadership" built on "decades of institutional engagement of the highest level." Barzani, in turn, stated in his speech that he was "pleased and honoured to receive this medal," thanking President Mattarella and the Italian people and government, and reserving particular gratitude for Italy's role in training the Peshmerga and helping preserve Kurdistan's cultural heritage.

A Relationship Built Slowly, and On Purpose

None of this happened overnight. The relationship traces back to at least two decades ago. In 2015, Barzani, then Prime Minister, met Italy's premier at the time, Matteo Renzi, a meeting that prompted Rome to upgrade its diplomatic presence in Erbil to a full Consulate General. It continued in April 2023, when Barzani travelled to Rome and met Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who called Kurdistan's stability essential to peace in the wider Middle East. And it was reaffirmed as recently as May 2026, when he returned to the Italian capital for talks with Defense Minister Guido Crosetto, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, and Mattarella himself. Furthermore, his meetings with the Pope in recent years both in Rome and in Erbil significantly marked the close contacts as constructive relations.

That support has never been purely rhetorical. Italian forces, deployed under the Prima Parthica mission at Camp Singara, have spent years training and equipping Peshmerga units. Crosetto, for his part, has described Kurdistan as "a key and fundamental actor" in regional stability, a phrase that, judging by Wednesday's ceremony, has since hardened into something closer to settled policy.

A Legacy Older than the Individual

Barzani's standing in Kurdish politics rests on a long history of struggle. He is the grandson of the legendary Kurdish leader, Mustafa Barzani, who founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party more than eight decades ago and remains, to this day, a defining figure in the modern Kurdish national movement, a lineage that still carries real weight in a region where political memory runs long. Deputy to President Masoud Barzani, who leads Iraq’s Number One political party in recent parliamentary elections, the KDP, Nechirvan Barzani has a profound background of political position spanning nearly four decades. Elected to the KDP's central committee in 1989 and re-elected in 1993, he took part in negotiations with Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf War and was named Deputy Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region in 1996, a long apprenticeship in the practical work of governance, well before he became Prime Minister for the first time of the unified cabinet of KRG in 2006. It goes some way toward explaining both the trust he commands across Kurdistan's fractured political landscape and the patience that has come to define how he governs.

From Developing KRI to Building Diplomatic Bridges

To grasp what this moment means, it helps to remember what Kurdistan looked like three decades ago: scant infrastructure, fragile institutions, a landscape still marked by war. It was under Barzani's stewardship as Prime Minister that the region began, in earnest, to change. Erbil today, with its glass towers and foreign consulates, owes much of its shape to that period, an era his own supporters once nicknamed the "Development Cabinet."

That work did not stop when he became President in 2019. It simply changed shape, moving from roads and budgets to something closer to statecraft. Along the way, he steered the region through some of its gravest tests: the 2014 war against the Islamic State, the arrival of nearly two million people displaced by that conflict, and an economic crisis brought on by collapsing oil prices and disrupted budget transfers from Baghdad. Each was met, in large part, through sustained engagement with the federal capital rather than confrontation with it.

A Method Built on Dialogue

Politically, Barzani has long paired a stated commitment to Iraq's constitution with a preference for negotiation over confrontation, both within Kurdistan's often fractious party system and in its dealings with Baghdad. That instinct has travelled well beyond Iraq's borders. He is widely credited with a constructive role in reconciliation efforts between the PKK and the Turkish state, and with helping keep Iranian Kurdish parties clear of the recent flare-up between Iran, Israel, and the United States. More recently, he has also played a mediating role in the delicate negotiations between Kurdish authorities in Rojava, northeast Syria, and the government in Damascus, talks that produced an internationally brokered agreement earlier this year to integrate the region's civil and military institutions under Syria's central government, a process still fragile enough to need the kind of quiet, patient diplomacy Nechirvan Barzani has made his signature.

A Diplomat the World Turns to

Few Kurdish political figures have built as wide a network of relationships as Nechirvan Barzani has, spanning the Arab world, Europe, the United States, East Asia, Iran, and Turkey. In Italy's case, that network has matured into something concrete: cooperation on security, energy, and cultural preservation. Today's honour reads, in that light, less like recognition of a single achievement than acknowledgment of a partnership built patiently over years.

The Guardian of KRI’s Various Communities

At home, Barzani's presidency, like his premiership before it, has been closely tied to protecting the Kurdistan Region's diversity of peoples and faiths. Ethnically, the region is home to Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs, and Assyrians; in matters of faith, to Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, and Kaka'is. His efforts in rescuing the Yezidi women from ISIS notably demonstrated his serious concerns about both humanitarian aspects and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. His administration has consistently maintained that none of these communities should be pushed to the margins of the region's political life, a position that stands in deliberate contrast to the sectarian fractures and rising fundamentalism recently observed almost elsewhere in the Middle East, and an effort to preserve a coexistence that has, at times, come under real strain in recent years.

The Patience behind the Power

If one trait stands above all others in Barzani's public life, it is a wariness of the dramatic gesture, a habit of choosing slow negotiation over open confrontation, even when confrontation might have been the easier path. That instinct has occasionally been read as timidity, a reluctance to act decisively when decisiveness was called for. And yet it is precisely this caution that has kept the lines open among Kurdish parties, between Erbil and Baghdad, and between Kurdistan and the countries around it, at junctures when a harder line might have shut them for good.

A Reputation Crossing Party Lines

Barzani's standing extends well beyond his own party's base. Across a wide spectrum of Iraqi and Kurdish political actors, he is regarded as someone prepared to do the harder, slower work of building consensus, an instinct visible in his repeated attempts to restart negotiations that have stalled since the 2024 elections. Even figures from rival parties have, at various points, treated the Italian honour as recognition of an approach they consider necessary for the region's stability, whatever else divides them. More generally, the Kurdish people from other political parties of KRI, neighboring countries, and diaspora take pride in the awarding of this considerably priceless Order to a Kurdish high rank stateman.

A Timely Signal amid a Political Stalemate

The timing here is not incidental. The award arrives at a genuinely delicate moment for Kurdistan's internal politics: months after the 2024 parliamentary elections, talks between the region's two largest parties, the KDP and the PUK, remain unresolved, and no new KRG cabinet has yet been formed. Against that backdrop, Italy's decision to glorify Barzani carries a meaning that extends past the ceremony itself. It is considered as a signal that at least one influential European government still regards the Kurdistan Region as a stable, credible partner, whatever its internal negotiations have yet to settle.

Whether the honour will move those talks forward is, of course, a separate question, one that belongs to Erbil's parliament, not to Rome's protocol. However, for a political class looking for good news, Barzani's track record of resolving disputes through patience offers at least a measure of cautious optimism as the region works toward forming its next government.

What Outlives the Occasion

Strip away the ceremony, and what remains is something more durable: a relationship built, deliberately, over years between two governments that had little obvious reason for such close alignment, and a demonstration of what patient, unglamorous diplomacy can accumulate into, given enough time. For Kurdistan, the recognition offers a genuine moment of pride amid considerable uncertainty at home. For Italy, it is confirmation of a partnership it has spent two decades constructing, one visit and one agreement at a time.

By: Bakhtiar Sadjadi, University Professor and Socio-cultural Commentator