When Giorgia Meloni met Joe Biden at the White House in March, he played Ray Charles’s Georgia on My Mind as she entered the room. “We have each other’s backs,” he later told reporters, before planting a tender kiss on her forehead as the meeting wrapped up.
The cosy get-together was the clearest sign yet that the Italian prime minister, a chameleon of a communicator, had been able to cultivate warm relations with the US president, who had previously expressed concerns about her Brothers of Italy party’s neofascist history.
