Macron and Meloni Meet, Searching for Unity in a World of Conflict

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.”

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.