One cut her political teeth on the streets of Rome as a teenage neo-fascist activist, rising to become Italy’s first female premier. The other is a former investment banker who became Britain’s wealthiest prime minister, and its first of colour.
Yet whatever their very different backgrounds, the ties between Giorgia Meloni and Rishi Sunak are likely to grow even closer on Saturday when he attends a rightwing political festival in Rome organised by her hardline Brothers of Italy party.
The visit is also a return favour on Sunak’s part – Meloni was the only other G7 leader to attend a UK summit on artificial intelligence last month. The biggest draw once again will be Elon Musk, who was publicly interviewed by Sunak at the UK event, while other guests at the Atreju summit include figures such as the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party.
Sunak and Meloni have bonded over a shared hardline approach towards immigration through policies that have sometimes pushed the limits of what is legal.
The issue will be central to a bilateral meeting between the two before the festival and then a “trilateral” involving the prime minister of Albania. A controversial deal struck between the Italian and Albanian governments is regarded as having been partly inspired by the UK government’s long-running attempts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
But the mutually beneficial relationship between Sunak and Meloni also reflects an increasing blurring of lines between politicians from Europe’s far right and more traditional conservative backgrounds.
Post-Brexit, Sunak has found an ally inside the EU with a shared interest in taking the increasingly hardline stance on immigration demanded by his party’s power base. For Meloni, an anglophile fond of quoting the British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton in speeches, the alliance helps make her extremist roots seem more distant.
“Your priorities are also mine,” she told Sunak on camera when they met in the UK in November. The previous month they had joined forces to force migration on to the agenda at a meeting of dozens of European leaders in Granada.
Their link – which first began when they met in November last year at Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh – is also one clearly built on a personal chemistry that can been seen in the photographs and footage of their meetings.
In private, Sunak has talked in particularly glowingly terms about Meloni. In public too he has described their “friendship” and one of the first things journalists heard the father of two do when greeting her at Downing Street in April was to ask after her daughter. Meloni will get a chance to return the hospitality on Saturday when Sunak first comes to her residence in the Italian capital.
Both also happen to be fantasy enthusiasts: Sunak a self-confessed “huge Star Wars fan”, Meloni a lover of JRR Tolkien, whose work she has quoted when pledging support for Ukraine. The genre also provides a link to the Atreju summit, named after a character in the dark fantasy epic The Neverending Story.
Yet for watchers in Italy and the UK, the image of Sunak rubbing shoulders with those of a far-right tradition is still stark.
Riccardo Magi, the president of the leftwing party Più Europa, said: “They come from different political traditions but they have found common ground on an issue that today characterises the conservative front – that is to attack the rule of law in regards to migrant rights – and they do this at a time when migration is rising and protection rights are being curtailed.”
Compared with Meloni’s other friends, such as Hungary’s far-right nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, she has found a more “presentable” ally in Sunak, Magi added.
“Having the prime minister of an important country on your side is something that helps her, even if it is no longer a member of the EU,” he said. “There is a chemistry between them and they are obviously trying to consolidate their rapport, especially for external communication reasons. But this is something all rightwing parties do.”
While Magi notes that the principal driver of the pair’s flourishing rapport is policy on immigration, others also emphasise areas of mutual cooperation on defence and supporting Ukraine.
On Ukraine, Meloni’s support marks a divergence from other European far-right figures, with whom she once shared an admiration of Vladimir Putin, and is an area British government sources say they are grateful for.
Francesco Galietti, the founder of Policy Sonar, a political consultancy in Rome, cites the treaty signed by the UK, Italy and Japan on Thursday to build the next generation of stealth fighter jets.
“Sunak going to Atreju, a party-specific event, is weird, but you have to consider this love-burst within the context of geopolitics,” Galietti said.
“UK-Italy bilateral relations are the best they have been in a long time. Now there is a love triangle between Italy, the UK and Japan. While there is a personal chemistry, there is deep cooperation in areas such as defence – this is the main reason behind everything.”
Away from Meloni and Sunak, a relationship has also been developing between their respective parties, reflected in the visit by members of the Brothers of Italy to the Houses of Parliament this week.
Paul Scully, a Conservative MP who hosted them, said: “There’s obviously a big Italian diaspora here and what they seem to be doing is attempting build something like Republicans Abroad [the overseas presence of the US party]. They’ve come to the UK first, which may well be off the back of that warm relationship between the two leaders.”
While Downing Street would not comment on whether Sunak would meet Musk, the presence of the unpredictable tech mogul at the event in Rome adds another layer of potential controversy.
Musk, whose endorsement of an antisemitic post on his X social media platform added to existing concern about his political instincts, also backed Meloni’s government in a row over Germany’s funding of charities that rescue refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.
For others in the UK however, Sunak’s presence at Atreju highlights concerns by anti-fascist campaigners and more centrist members of his own party about the increasingly rightwing drift of the Conservatives – not just on immigration but on so-called culture war issues such as trans rights.
“Rishi Sunak and Giorgia Meloni’s relationship has been getting closer as the Conservative party has shifted towards the radical right,” said Georgie Laming, the director of campaigns at the civil rights group Hope Not Hate.
“The fact that he and Meloni, a far-right politician, are taking notes from each other about immigration policy is very telling about where Sunak’s party is headed.”
