No rips to mend, no diplomatic patch this time. Sergio Mattarella returns to Paris at a time when relations between Italy and France are certainly not idyllic, but what prevails is the awareness of both countries that they have a common destiny, as allies and not as rivals, both in Europe and on the international chessboard. In short, the Head of State’s trip is not meant to make peace – Antonio Tajani and his counterpart Catherine Colonna have already thought about it in recent days in Rome – but to “make it official”, to give a “sign of detachment”. The occasion is the exhibition «Naples à Paris. Le Louvre invites the Musée de Capodimonte» which is scheduled from today in the Denon wing and the Sully wing of the famous Parisian museum. It will be inaugurated by the French head of state and president Emmanuel Macron, also in the presence of the Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano. After the visit – around sixty works on display, including masterpieces by Titian, Caravaggio, Michelangelo and Raphael – there will be lunch at the Elysée between Macron and Mattarella, accompanied respectively by his wife Brigitte and daughter Laura. At the center of the face-to-face meeting – a strictly private meeting that demonstrates the excellent personal relationship between the two presidents – will be the most topical issues: from the conflict in Ukraine to the energy dossier, the possible practical implications of the Quirinal Treaty (signed by President French and then Prime Minister Mario Draghi in November 2021 and not yet fully implemented) to the migrant dossier. It is precisely on this front that the last clashes on the Rome-Paris axis took place. The first for Italy’s no, in November 2021, on the disembarkation of the 230 migrants rescued from the Ocean Viking ship, owned by the French NGO Sos Mediterranèe, and the second, more recent and clarified also thanks to the face-to-face assistance on the sidelines of the G7 Hiroshima between Giorgia Meloni and Macron, which broke out after the words of the head of President Macron’s Renaissance party, Stéphane Séjourné, according to which the Italian Prime Minister’s immigration policy, in addition to being “demagogic”, would be “unfair, inhumane and ineffective”. “Internal electoral campaign” Meloni downplayed at the time, given the approach of the 2024 European elections. the popular and conservatives sought by the FdI leader, who wants to have a majority in the EU Parliament.
However, Mattarella chooses to go beyond the contingencies, placing fundamental bets: relations between Italy and France are “solid” and “secular” and, he says, addressing the 50 young French and Italian diplomats, currently in Paris as part of a training exchange provided for in the Quirinale Treaty, have yet to be implemented. Together, the two countries contributed to the founding of the European Union in the post-war period “around a core of common values: democracy, tolerance, solidarity”, recalls the tenant of the Colle, who then turns to what the founding fathers did, starting from Robert Schumann’s Declaration of May 9, 1950 «gather, among the six founding countries, the energy of the time: coal and steel. In our days we have struggled a lot to agree on just a modest ceiling for the price of gas – he underlines – We have a lot to recover in confidence and faith in the future “.
Source: IL Tempo
Emma Fitzgerald is an accomplished political journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in political science and international relations, she has a deep understanding of the political landscape and the forces that shape it.
