Subscribe here: https://bit.ly/eudebates This handout picture released by Meloni’s office shows Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni shooting a selfie with the press.
The Italian leader, hardline at home and moderate abroad, is in a powerful position after the European elections. When Giorgia Meloni met Joe Biden at the White House in March, he played Ray Charles’s Georgia on My Mind as she entered the room. “We have each other’s backs,” he later told reporters, before planting a tender kiss on her forehead as the meeting wrapped up.
The cosy get-together was the clearest sign yet that the Italian prime minister, a chameleon of a communicator, had been able to cultivate warm relations with the US president, who had previously expressed concerns about her Brothers of Italy party’s neofascist history.
As Europe reels from the far-right’s advances in the European parliamentary elections, the pair will reunite among the olive trees of a secluded resort in the southern Italian region of Puglia on Thursday, when Italy hosts the G7 summit. It is an event Meloni intends to use to burnish her image on the international scene, even as her government draws criticism at home for its hardline approach on numerous issues.
“This time, really, all eyes are on her,” said Francesco Galietti, the founder of Policy Sonar, a political consultancy in Rome. “Everyone assumes that [French president] Emmanuel Macron and [German chancellor] Olaf Scholz are kaput, or are at least doing some very heavy maintenance work. Meloni is the host … But there’ll be some very big demands.”
Freshly empowered by her success in Sunday’s European ballot, where Brothers of Italy won almost 29% of the vote, up from just more than 6% in 2019, Meloni has already travelled to the Borgo Egnazia resort, which is frequented by celebrities such as Madonna and David Beckham, with her seven-year-old daughter, armed with a dossier of talking points including global conflicts, Africa, the spread of AI, the climate crisis and immigration.
With its stone villas, replete with almond-filled baskets, and narrow, winding alleys, the resort, which opened in 2010, is modelled on an ancient Puglian village. “Entering Borgo Egnazia is like stepping back in time,” said Dario Iaia, a Brothers of Italy parliamentarian for the Puglia region. “It’s an environment that conserves the history of Puglia’s tradition.” However, one detail of history the brochures fail to mention is that the land on which the resort stands was razed during Benito Mussolini’s fascist rule to build an airbase.
Since taking power, Meloni has worked hard to curate a moderate, respectable image overseas, calming her doubters while wielding influence over key leaders, especially Biden and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. At the same time, she maintains close relations with global far-right allies, joining the chorus at Vox’s “great patriotic convention” in Spain in May to rail against socialism and “massive illegal immigration”.
While Meloni’s staunch support for Ukraine against Russia has warmed western allies to her, the G7 will be a litmus test for her Atlanticism, especially as Italy will be expected to facilitate a solution to the much-debated problem of how to leverage profits generated by confiscated Russian assets and use them for Kyiv’s benefit.
“When she was new to the job, she was a good girl, sticking to the agenda of [former PM] Mario Draghi and making the right noise,” said Galietti. “But now there’s war fatigue, and she was hesitant on the use of Italian ammunition to hit targets in Russia. She now has this big hot potato of Russian sanctions … we’ll see if she is true to her original claim of Atlanticism or whether it was a bluff all along.”
Behind the scenes, Meloni, who is president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a group mostly made up of European hard-right parties, is expected to use the G7 to plot her next moves in Brussels. There is speculation that she will wait to see how successful far-right leader Marine Le Pen is in the snap French parliamentary election before deciding whether to support von der Leyen’s hope of a second term as president of the commission. In the past, Meloni has been offended by comparisons to Le Pen, but the pair have drawn closer more recently, with reports in the Italian press this week insinuating that they are hatching a plan to tilt the EU further to the right.
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Clown 🤡😂😂😂😂
Hope she helps to stop the Great Reset,because all the western countrys are dead if they go with those psychopaths
Dünyadaki en babayiğit başbakan
Ki
Bnk
scema
clown
Qualcuno glielo dica che è una cessa