Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has accused French President Emmanuel Macron of electioneering at the G7 summit in southern Italy, weeks before a snap vote in France that he called in a bid to stave off the rise of the far right.
“I believe it is profoundly wrong, in difficult times like these, to campaign using a precious forum like the G7,” Meloni said as opinion polls show that Macron’s centrist alliance faces a potential wipeout as it could be squeezed out of the second round of the vote by the far-right party of Marine Le Pen and a leftist bloc.
The French president has shocked allies with his decision to dissolve the national assembly and hold snap elections, triggering a sell-off of French bonds and stocks.
One European diplomat present at the summit said Macron seemed “a bit lost”, adding that Meloni’s barbs at him underscored the sense that his domestic woes had left him seemingly adrift. “It’s a pity,” they added.
But a person involved in the summit discussions said they believed other leaders would not see the G7 as “an appropriate place” to raise their concerns with Macron’s move, given their own domestic problems.
“If you look around the table and at elections coming . . . a huge majority have issues at home so they are respectful,” the person said. “I think they’ll abstain from commenting.”
The Italian leader, who was the only one at the G7 table to have been bolstered by last week’s European parliament elections, took issue with Macron’s comments concerning her successful push to remove references to “access to safe and legal abortion” in the final G7 communique, which had been included at the previous summit in Japan.
“You don’t have the same sensibilities in your country,” Macron told Italian journalists, after saying it was “unfortunate” that the reference to abortion had been removed. “France has a vision of equality between women and men but it’s not a vision shared across the political spectrum.”
Italian officials said that the final communique reaffirmed all the commitments to women’s health made at the previous G7 summit in Japan. “There is no reason to argue about issues on which we have already agreed for some time,” Meloni said.
Meloni is staunchly opposed to abortion, but she has vowed to uphold a 1978 bill which legalised the procedure in Italy. However, women’s rights activists say Meloni’s rightwing Brothers of Italy party is stigmatising women who seek to terminate unwanted pregnancies by allowing anti-abortion activists to set up counselling offices inside hospitals.
The spat between Meloni and Macron — who have had rocky relations in the past — comes amid growing concern that the French president’s impulsive bid last week to call snap elections could backfire — with consequences for the entire continent.
Macron’s move came in response to the landslide victory of Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National in the European parliamentary elections, which secured double as many votes as his party.
Meloni, who cut her political teeth in a post-fascist movement, has said the continent needed to veer right and congratulated Le Pen for her success. However, the Italian leader has so far steered clear of merging her and Le Pen’s groups in the European parliament.
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