Rishi Sunak denies he is being snubbed after awkward start to G7 summit
Sunak and Meloni are both hardliners on illegal migration
LONDON (Web Deskl) - 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”.
