Giorgia Meloni delivered a withering look to Emmanuel Macron as she welcomed him to a G7 dinner on Thursday night after the two leaders clashed over the issue of abortion.
The Italian prime minister gave her French counterpart a distinctly frosty reception during the encounter at the summit in the southern region of Puglia.
She did little to hide her displeasure with the French president after they sharply disagreed over women’s rights to abortion.
The Right-wing coalition led by Ms Meloni, which came to power in 2022, is accused by campaigners of making it more difficult for women to seek abortions as part of a pro-life agenda.
In April, the Italian government sparked controversy after passing legislation which allows pro-life groups into publicly run family planning clinics to persuade women to change their minds about terminating their pregnancies.
Italy objected to an explicit commitment to abortion rights in the final statement from the summit, which is being held in a luxury resort in the countryside of Puglia.
Last year, at a summit in Japan, G7 leaders committed to addressing “access to safe and legal abortion” – but that reference does not appear in the draft of this year’s statement.
Instead, it simply references the 2023 so-called Hiroshima statement.
Mr Macron publicly expressed regret at Italy’s position on abortion, noting the French parliament’s vote earlier this year to enshrine the right in the constitution.
Ms Meloni swiftly hit back by noting that the French leader is facing snap elections following a poor showing in the EU elections, saying it was “profoundly wrong” to use a G7 summit for “campaigning”.
According to the ANSA news agency, she said: “The controversy over the presence or absence of the word abortion in the conclusions is totally specious.”
She said the document would recall the language of the Hiroshima text, “in which we already approved last year the need to guarantee that abortion is ‘safe and legal’”.
The two leaders have clashed before over her hard-line migration policy and have starkly contrasting politics, as well as recent political fortune.