Few European leaders are as inherently distant as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy and President Emmanuel Macron of France. Her political roots are in the nationalist right; his are in the globalist, technocratic center. They have regularly tilted at each other, and people in Ms. Meloni’s entourage concede the two leaders do not share great chemistry.
Yet on Tuesday Ms. Meloni and Mr. Macron held a bilateral meeting in Rome, the French leader’s first official trip to Italy specifically to meet the Italian prime minister since she took office in 2022.
Coming on the heels of public sniping between them last month, the visit highlighted the acute pressure European leaders are under to seek to come together in pursuit of their shared goals. Despite their differences, both Mr. Macron and Ms. Meloni want to end a shooting war in Ukraine, avert a trade war with the United States and steady relations with a mercurial President Trump.
“At some point, the international situation made this dysfunction unworkable,” said Jean-Pierre Darnis, a professor of Italian politics and contemporary history at the Université Côte d’Azur in Nice.
Still it remains to be seen whether a tête-à-tête and a dinner on Tuesday took the chill out of relations between two leaders who, Claudio Cerasa, the editor of Italy’s newspaper Il Foglio, wrote this week “are made to misunderstand each other.”
In a statement on Tuesday night, the two said Italy and France “intend to strengthen their common commitment to a more sovereign Europe,” and “coordinate their positions on transatlantic relations, as well as on the economic and commercial security of the European Union.”
Ms. Meloni forged her political identity as an outsider, vigorously opposing the kind of liberal internationalism and perceived elitism embodied by Mr. Macron, who attended the right schools and worked as an investment banker. She grew up in a working-class neighborhood and came to lead a nationalist, anti-immigrant party with roots in Italy’s fascist past.
Mr. Macron has spent much of his political career battling Marine Le Pen, France’s top far-right nationalist figure, who was his leading opponent in the last two presidential elections. He sees in Ms. Meloni “a powdered copy of Marine Le Pen and sees in her legitimization the risk of legitimizing Le Pen,” Mr. Cerasa said.
For nationalist Italians like many of Ms. Meloni’s supporters, France is often seen as an overweening historical rival that has meddled in Italian politics, said Mr. Darnis.
“Put those two things together, it more or less explains why they didn’t really want to have a nice photo together,” Mr. Darnis said.
The two leaders have profoundly different visions for Europe, too.
Even as Ms. Meloni has tempered her most inflammatory anti European Union rhetoric, she still criticizes what she calls overreach by the E.U. Mr. Macron has made an unwavering commitment to a stronger, more integrated Europe a core part of his political identity.
Mr. Macron has long called for European “strategic autonomy,” with reduced reliance on American power, and France spends more than Italy on its military.
He and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain have suggested deploying European troops to Ukraine as a peacekeeping force after a cease-fire. Ms. Meloni opposes that idea, which would be deeply unpopular in Italy, where anti-military sentiment runs deep.
She also faces the challenge of balancing her own stance with that of her Deputy Prime Minister and coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right League Party, who has consistently leveraged Italy’s antiwar sentiment and spoken forcefully against European rearmament efforts.
Ms. Meloni did not join the so-called “coalition of the willing,” a group of European nations mustered by Britain and France to back Ukraine. Last month, when European leaders huddled around a speakerphone in a conference room in Tirana, Albania, to discuss peace in Ukraine with President Trump, Ms. Meloni was absent.
She explained that the group had the goal of deploying European troops to Ukraine, and she was not available to do that.
Mr. Macron rebutted her claim as “fake news.”
Shortly after, Ms. Meloni, in a veiled barb at the French president, said at a news conference that it was necessary “to set aside personal ambitions that risk undermining the unity of the West.”
Italian and French officials insist that the countries’ ministers and diplomats work well together, and Ms. Meloni said that news reports about a crisis between Italy and France were overblown.
Even so, government officials and independent observers have called the bickering between Rome and Paris an annoyance, even embarrassing.
“We can’t do this soap opera anymore,” read a headline on Italian newspaper Domani last week as it pleaded with leaders to “get over” the rivalry.
The Tuesday meeting, experts say, will partly serve as a public show of unity.
“It’s symbolic,” said Marc Lazar, a professor of Italian-French relations at Rome’s Luiss Guido Carli university. “It’s a move to say ‘the two are talking.’”
“There is an infinite amount of issues to talk about,” Ms. Meloni told reporters on Friday. “I am very happy that Emmanuel Macron is coming to Rome.”
Catherine Porter contributed reporting from Paris.
Emma Bubola is a Times reporter based in Rome.
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