President Meloni’s closing press point during her visit to Saudi Arabia

Introduction by President Meloni

Good morning everyone, 

so, a brief recap of this visit to Saudi Arabia. As you know, the Italian Government has had a focus for more than two years now, centring particularly around the wider Mediterranean region. Gulf nations are obviously of key strategic importance in the wider Mediterranean and Saudi Arabia is a major player; this visit was therefore very important as part of this work.

However, as always, these are not simply courtesy visits; they are opportunities for us to work towards concrete results for Italy. More specifically, the choice here in Saudi Arabia was to elevate our cooperation to the level of strategic partnership: this means having a council that meets regularly to review the progress of joint work on the priority issues identified. The priority issues we have identified are, of course, cooperation with regard to energy, defence and boosting mutual investments as well as archaeology-related matters. The government agreements and agreements that have also been signed between public and private entities (as you saw, there was a high-level round table on economic production) are worth around EUR 10 billion. This is the beginning of what I consider to be a new phase in our strategic cooperation with this important player in the Gulf and in the wider Mediterranean; it also involves the joint work we can do in Africa for example, especially with regard to energy. This therefore forms part of the broader work Italy is doing.

Today we will be in Bahrain, largely following the same strategy. Bahrain currently holds the Presidency of the Arab League and in particular is very committed to the issue of interreligious dialogue – as you know, Pope Francis also visited in 2022 for precisely that reason. We are therefore concluding a process we started some time ago, and which I believe is producing significant results.