When Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy entered the Élysée Palace for a late-night dinner with French and German friends last week, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni was furious.
Just eight months earlier, Meloni’s predecessor Mario Draghi had shared a train compartment to Kyiv with France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz, a trio showing European solidarity with Ukraine.
But at the Paris soirée last week, Italy’s new leader was absent, and it seemed unlikely. Meloni couldn’t hide her irritation.
Arriving at the EU council meeting with Zelenskyy this morning, he called the dinner “inappropriate”, a threat to EU unity in Ukraine, and led by Macron’s desire to deflect from his own domestic political woes.
This episode is more than a spat over diplomatic protocol. Meloni’s “non-invitation” reflects his difficulty in building a solid working relationship with France, and keeping Italy at the forefront of EU policymaking, as it has been in the short leadership of Draghi.
These issues affect all governments. Italian finance minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said he was not informed or invited to join his French and German counterparts on a recent trip to Washington to raise concerns about US green subsidies.
“To be the third leg of the Franco-German machine for the EU, it is not enough to show that you will abide by the rules,” said Nicoletta Pirozzi, an expert on EU politics and governance at the Rome Institute of International Affairs. “You also need to be a proactive member of the EU and show some political initiative. So far, this is still lacking.
Known for his fiery anti-Brussels rants over the years as a right-wing rabble rouser, Meloni has since taken power seeking to reassure the EU establishment that he is not the feared bully.
He has maintained fiscal prudence, reduced EU bashing, and kept his commitments to Ukraine, despite his coalition partners still harboring pro-Russian sympathies. Italy and France jointly agreed this month to deliver Kyiv the SAMP-T air defense system in the spring.
“In relations with the EU, they have done well,” said Stefano Stefanini, Italy’s former ambassador to NATO. “He has made it clear that he will not play the anti-EU card, and although it will be difficult for him to solve certain problems, he is sure that Brussels will not make a boat.”
But Meloni has had a tough start with France. During the year in opposition, Paris rivaled Brussels as the favored punching bag. Despite this, Macron made a point of visiting Meloni on the weekend of his swearing-in, taking time out from a planned trip to the Vatican.
Any tentative goodness generated by the encounter quickly evaporates. The two leaders exchanged barbs when Italy refused docking permits to the charity-operated migrant rescue ship Ocean Viking, which resulted in 300 migrants being rescued to France.
Nearly three months on, the broken relationship with Macron has still not been mended. Meloni has not yet made an official visit to Paris.
“For me, the inability of patching up with France after the Viking Ocean has been Meloni’s main sore point in foreign policy,” said Stefanini. “Relations with Italy and France are now tense.”
Carlo Calenda, leader of Italy’s centrist Azione party, said Meloni’s public expression of anger at Macron’s dinner party would not help. “He’s a beginner and it’s a rookie mistake,” he said. The two leaders, he added, should “start from scratch”.
But Fabrizio Tassinari, a political scientist at the European University Institute, said Meloni may not be motivated to mend fences. A “low-pressure spat” with Paris could help settle the right-wing political base.
“This type of confrontational behavior plays very well with certain constituencies in Italy,” he said.
There are risks to that approach. Squabbling with France can backfire, weakening Meloni’s image at home, where concerns about Italy’s international status are something of a national obsession.
“The ‘non-invitation’ is something that really creates angst in Italy,” said Stefanini. “It really gives ammunition to all the domestic critics to say, ‘You see, Italy is at the top internationally with Draghi and now we have entered the junior league’.”