Instead, almost all of the leaders gathered at a luxury resort in Puglia are weakened at home due to elections, scandals, or dwindling authority. Anti-incumbent sentiments running through Western democracies are creating exceptionally high stakes for global geopolitics.
Rarely has the yearly gathering of the world’s major economies been overshadowed by the political vulnerabilities of virtually all of its participants. It calls into question how effective the “steering committee of the free world,” as US President Joe Biden’s advisers have dubbed the G7, can be in the face of rage and unhappiness from their own populations.
The G7 meeting will take place less than a week after far-right parties won European Parliamentary elections and before of crucial polls in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, amid growing concern about a populist comeback.
According to one eyewitness, French parliamentarians chatting beneath crystal chandeliers at a state banquet honoring Biden at the Élysée Palace in Paris last week freely discussed their anxieties of a hypothetical Donald Trump triumph. That was the day before France’s President Emmanuel Macron suffered significant losses to the extreme right, pushing him to dissolve the National Assembly and hold hasty elections.
“One of the great things about the G7 is that we’re all democracies, so the leaders here don’t get to pick and choose how things go politically in their country, day in, day out,” Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan said Thursday as the conference began.
According to Sullivan, leaders facing political headwinds, such as Biden and his European colleagues, would remain “focused on the task at hand.”
“(Biden’s) goal is going to be to do as much as possible to reinforce the idea that the United States is best served if we are closely aligned with our democratic allies and partners,” he continued.
Concerns about migration and the responsibility of protecting Ukraine are among the factors driving the rightward tilt. These have been significant challenges for the G7 since Biden arrived in 2021, and they are expected to be the main focus at this year’s meeting.
On Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will attend and lead a joint press conference with Biden. Leaders are under pressure to find methods to reverse the combat momentum after Russia took the initiative despite delays in American help, for which Biden apologized to Zelensky last week.
“We had trouble getting a bill that we had to pass that had the money in it from some of our very conservative members who were holding it up,” he stated. “But we got it done, finally.”
Diplomats were negotiating arrangements to lend Ukraine tens of billions of euros to repair its shattered infrastructure, with the money coming from interest on frozen Russian assets. The rather intricate proposal, which took years for Western allies to agree on, was still being worked out as Biden flew to Italy.
And the president intended to introduce a new bilateral security accord with Ukraine, a deal that lays the groundwork for the US’ long-term security alliance with Kyiv but may be reversed by future US administrations.
Indeed, the prospect of leadership transition in the United States and others provides an unsettling background to this year’s G7, adding urgency to their job.
“This is not a normal G7,” said Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, citing the forthcoming elections and the larger group invited to this year’s conference. “You hear this a lot when you speak with US and European officials: if we don’t get this done now, whether it’s on China or the assets, we might not have another chance. We don’t know how the world will look three, six, or nine months from now.
Among the G7 leaders, the summit’s host, right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, looks to have the most stable political situation. She emerged as the only European G7 leader who benefited from last week’s European Parliament elections.
Meloni invited the leaders of India, Brazil, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates to join the G7 discussions this week, a nod to non-Western economies that are gaining political clout as the G7 countries’ share of global influence dwindles.
Biden, a former skeptic who openly expressed worries about Meloni’s style of right-wing populism, has instead found an odd friend in his Italian colleague on Ukraine. She has defied far-right leaders worldwide in her unwavering support for sustained aid to Ukraine.
Still, she and Biden disagree on a number of other issues. Meloni has attracted similarities to Trump and will speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022. Her group, the Brothers of Italy, has post-fascist roots.
“I am delighted that Italy will show itself before the G7 and Europe as having the strongest government. This is something that has never occurred before but is occurring now; it is a source of satisfaction as well as a tremendous deal of responsibility,” Meloni told Reuters early on Monday after the EU elections.
The leaders of France and Germany face quite different political conditions. Following a rise from the extreme right, Macron now faces legislative elections in a few weeks, which may severely undermine his capacity to govern for the remaining three years of his tenure.
In Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called for elections in July, with his party poised to lose power for the first time in 14 years. Canada’s Justin Trudeau — the G7’s longest-serving leader — is unpopular, and a general election is scheduled for next year. Japan’s Fumio Kishida has been plagued by a party corruption scandal, causing his support ratings to fall.
And Biden, who has spent his presidency hailing a return of old alliances and defending the West, is neck-and-neck with a felonious adversary whom Biden accuses of destroying democracy.
Whether Trump or Biden will sit at the G7 table next year is one of the many unanswered issues hovering over the conference. Few leaders who lived through it would welcome the resumption of the enmity that distinguished the summits of that era, whether it was a war over climate on a cliffside in Sicily, a trade dispute in the forests of Quebec, or a debate about Russia’s readmission at a lighthouse in Biarritz.
By the conclusion of his time, Trump had come to doubt the point of attending the events at all, dissatisfied with what he perceived as an unpleasant and unwelcoming experience.
