Rishi Sunak has insisted he was not being snubbed by other leaders after his first day at the G7 summit ended without any bilateral meetings with his counterparts and he had an awkward encounter with Giorgia Meloni.
Meloni, the Italian prime minister who is one of Sunak’s closest international allies, appeared to recoil from him after they embraced on his arrival in Puglia for the G7 leaders’ summit on Thursday.
Sunak and Meloni are both hardliners on illegal migration and have tried to set up schemes to send asylum seekers abroad for processing. Meloni was one of a few major leaders to attend Sunak’s AI summit last year, and he addressed a political festival in Rome organised by her Brothers of Italy party.
In video of their encounter on Thursday, she appeared to ask him sympathetically: “Are you OK?” Sunak’s Conservative party is languishing 20 points behind Labour in opinion polls and is widely expected to lose the general election in three weeks’ time.
By contrast, the Brothers of Italy won almost 29% of the Italian vote in the European parliament elections last weekend, up from 6.4% in 2019. Its success has turned the G7 summit into a victory lap for Meloni. On Monday she said: “Italy will present itself at the G7 and in Europe with the strongest government of all.”
In a sign of their continued closeness, Meloni and Sunak published a shared Instagram post on Thursday afternoon with the caption: “Freedom. Control of our borders. Defence of national sovereignty. That is what unites our politics. That is what unites our two countries.”
Sunak concluded his first day without any formal bilateral meetings with any other G7 leaders. He held a 10-minute conversation with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. On Sunak’s request, the pair took a walk through the grounds of the golf club hosting the summit and spoke at length about Ukraine. They embraced at the end and Zelensky wished Sunak “all the best”.
The prime minister is expected to meet the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi. Asked whether he was being snubbed by G7 leaders because he was seen as likely to lose the UK election, Sunak said: “At meetings like this, you can do lots of meetings with people in the margins of things and that’s exactly what I have been doing.
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“We’ve been here half a day already and I sat down with a bunch of people I need to in the margins. That’s kind of how these things work. So I’ve already sat down with Emmanuel [Macron], spoken to Olaf [Scholz] about a bunch of things.” Sunak met the French president and the German chancellor informally.
The prime minister is far from the only G7 leader facing domestic political woes. Macron has called a snap parliamentary election after his party performed poorly in the EU elections in France, which saw a surge in support for the far-right National Rally party. Similarly, in Germany the EU elections resulted in a strong showing for the far-right Alternative for Germany party.
Meanwhile, the US president, Joe Biden, faces a tough re-election battle in November, with polls suggesting he is neck-and-neck with Donald Trump, and the personal ratings of the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, are languishing.