G7 leaders meet in Italy to avert domestic political crisis

CNN
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When the Group of Seven nations gather on Italy’s rocky Adriatic coast on Thursday for their annual family photo shoot, the images will not feature leaders at the height of their political power.

Instead, the leaders gathered in Puglia’s luxury resort find themselves nearly all weakened at home by elections, scandals and fading influence. The anti-incumbency sentiment sweeping the Western nation of olive trees and swimming pools creates enormous risks for global geopolitics.

This annual gathering of the world’s major economies has rarely been so overshadowed by political weakness in nearly every member state, raising questions about how effective the G7, which aides to U.S. President Joe Biden call the “steering committee of the free world,” can really be in the face of public anger and frustration at home.

The G7 summit comes less than a week after far-right parties dominated European elections and amid fears of a populist resurgence, with key votes coming up in France, Britain and the United States.

At a dinner in Biden’s honor at the Elysée Palace in Paris last week, French lawmakers mingling beneath crystal chandeliers openly spoke of their worries about a possible Donald Trump victory, according to one attendee. This was one day before French President Emmanuel Macron, stunned by a landslide victory for the far-right, dissolved the National Assembly and called early elections.

The shift to the right is fueled by concerns about migration and the burden of defending Ukraine, issues that have been central to the G7 since Biden joined the group in 2021 and are sure to be major topics again at this year’s summit.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is due to hold a joint news conference with Biden on Thursday, after Biden apologized to Zelenskyy last week for allowing Russia to take the lead while U.S. aid was delayed, leaving leaders under pressure to find a way to reverse the momentum on the battlefield.

“We had to pass the bill, but some conservative lawmakers blocked it and we had a hard time getting funding,” he said. “But we finally got it passed.”

Ahead of the summit, diplomats were finalizing a plan for tens of billions of dollars in loans to rebuild Ukraine’s dilapidated infrastructure, paid for with interest on frozen Russian assets. The somewhat complicated plan, which took Western allies years to reach, was still being finalized as Biden boarded the plane to Italy.

The president was also scheduled to present a new bilateral security agreement with Ukraine that would chart a course for the U.S.’s long-term security relationship with Kiev but which could be scrapped by a future U.S. administration.

Indeed, the specter of leadership transition in the United States and elsewhere is an uneasy backdrop for the G7 this year, lending a certain urgency to their efforts.

“This is not a normal G7,” said Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Geopolitical Center, pointing to a series of upcoming elections and the wide range of groups invited to this year’s summit. “When you talk to U.S. and European officials, whether it’s China or assets, you often hear that if they can’t get this done now, they may not have another chance. We don’t know what the world will look like in three months, six months, nine months.”

The G7 leader who appears most politically stable is the summit’s host, right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who emerged as the only European G7 leader buoyed by last week’s European Parliament elections.

Once a skeptic who openly expressed concern about Mr. Meloni’s right-wing populism, Mr. Biden has found an unlikely ally on Ukraine in the Italian, who has been a strong supporter of continued aid to Kiev and a standoff with far-right leaders in other countries.

Still, she and Biden disagree on a number of other topics. Ms. Meloni has been compared to Mr. Trump, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022. Her party, the Brothers of Italy, has post-fascist roots.

“I am proud that Italy appears in the G7, and in Europe, with the strongest government. This has never happened before, but it is happening today. It is a satisfaction but also a great responsibility,” Meloni said early Monday after the EU elections, according to Reuters.

The French and German leaders face very different political situations, with the rise of the far right and parliamentary elections just weeks away that threaten to deal a major blow to Macron’s ability to govern in the final three years of his term.

In the UK, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has called a general election in July, with his party expected to lose power for the first time in 14 years. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the longest-serving G7 leader but is unpopular and will need a general election within next year. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has been plagued by party corruption scandals and his approval ratings have plummeted.

And Biden, who began his term on a platform of restoring traditional alliances and defending the West, finds himself locked in a fierce battle with a rival who was convicted of a felony and whom Biden accuses of undermining democracy itself.

Whether Trump or Biden will have a seat at the G7 table next year is one of the great unknowns hanging over the gathering. Few leaders who lived through that era would welcome a return to the hostility that defined summits of that era: fights over climate on the cliffs of Sicily, trade negotiations in a Quebec forest or a debate over whether Russia should be readmitted to the United States at the lighthouse of Biarritz.

Towards the end of his term, Trump had grown weary of the unpleasant and unwelcoming experiences and had begun to question the utility of attending rallies altogether.