Italy: the left criticizes Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Giorgia Meloni

Several left-wing personalities on Monday criticized President Emmanuel Macron, who met on Sunday night in Rome with the new far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who had just taken office.

The French president “was not necessarily obliged to be at the forefront of this”, declared the president of the socialist group in the National Assembly Boris Vallaud on South Radiorecalling that Emmanuel Macron was the first European leader to meet Giorgia Meloni, who took office on Sunday.

“You have to be without naivety, without complacency, with a government that is from the extreme right, with a prime minister who comes from a political family that admires Mussolini,” he said.

But, he clarified, “she is there. Yes, you have to talk to her but demandingly”.

“Not the slightest reservation?”

“Without nuances or reservations. The trivialization without borders of the extreme right,” tweeted the head of the Socialists Olivier Faure.

PS senator Laurence Rossignol was surprised: “not the slightest reservation? Not even a little ‘without ignoring what distinguishes us’ or ‘I remembered the humanist values ​​that founded the EU'”.

“The habituation to the leaders of the extreme right and its trivialization is dangerous”, she added in a tweet.

Italy, a “friendly people”

The EELV deputy for Paris, Sandrine Rousseau, for her part, lashed out at a “complacency with fascism and with the extreme right that continues to be incredible.” It would have been necessary, she estimated, on the set of France 2 “to mark (his) disapproval of her at first”.

“It’s a mistake,” he summed up.

Emmanuel Macron, who came to Rome for an international peace forum on Sunday and for an audience with Pope Francis on Monday, finally met the new Italian leader quietly and away from the cameras on Sunday night, for just over an hour.

Although he had not officially congratulated Ms. Meloni on her coming to power, he wished in a tweet “continue all the work undertaken” with Italy, “a friendly people”, and hoped “to succeed together, with dialogue and ambition”.