Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni held talks Tuesday with French President Emmanuel Macron in Rome, against a backdrop of tensions between the two countries over migration.
The French leader was in the Italian capital to attend the state funeral of former President Giorgio Napolitano, who died on Friday aged 98.
After the ceremony, Macron and Meloni had a “long and friendly meeting”, the Italian premier’s office said in a statement.
They paid “particular attention to the management of the migration phenomenon and European economic priorities” ahead of forthcoming European meetings.
Macron and Meloni, who last met in Paris in June, are both due at the “Med 9” summit of southern EU nations in Malta on Friday, while there is an informal European Council meeting in Granada, in Spain, next week.
Macron’s office confirmed they discussed “the need to find a European solution to the migration question”, as well as economic issues.
A sharp rise in migrant landings on the Italian island of Lampedusa earlier this month reignited a bitter debate across the EU over who takes responsibility for asylum seekers.
There has been particularly heated rhetoric in France, where political parties in the country’s hung parliament are wrangling over a draft law governing new arrivals.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin declared that France would not welcome any migrants coming from Lampedusa, after 8,500 people landed on the island in just three days.
There was also a diplomatic spat last November, when Meloni’s newly-elected hard-right government refused to allow a migrant rescue ship to dock in Italy.
Paris eventually allowed the Ocean Viking ship into a French port, but denounced Rome’s “unacceptable” behaviour and suspended plans to receive 3,500 migrants from Italy.
In recent days, both Paris and Rome have sought to ease tensions.
“We cannot leave the Italians alone,” Macron said in a television interview on Sunday — an offer of help that Meloni immediately said she “welcomed with great interest”.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani was in Paris on Monday evening for talks with his French counterpart.
Migration “is a problem that should be dealt with on the European level”, Tajani said, and even called on the UN to intervene.
Meloni has also clashed over migration with Germany, whose president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was also among those at Napolitano’s funeral.
She wrote to Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the weekend to complain about Berlin’s funding of charity projects to help migrants either at sea or onshore in Italy.
Rome blames the NGO boats that conduct rescue missions in the central Mediterranean — the world’s deadliest sea crossing for migrants — for encouraging arrivals from North Africa.
Data shows they do not work as a so-called “pull factor”, with departures instead strongly linked to the weather, while the vast majority of migrants are rescued by the Italian coastguard, according to the interior ministry.
