N. Peter Kramer’s Weekly Column
The G7 wants to project strength, but the traditional group photo shows its weakness : an 81-year-old Biden trailing Trump in the polls; Macron and Scholz who have just been defeated by the far right; Sunak on his last G7 meeting before his election defeat and the only head of state who managed to strengthen her domestic and EU position, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni from a political party with roots in neo-fascism.
Anyhow, she was able to keep the word ‘abortion’ out of the G7 statement at the end of the summit. France President Macron said he was ‘sorry’ that references to abortion had not been included. Meloni’s commented on that Macron was ‘profoundly wrong’ to use the G7 summit to campaign for the upcoming French election. American officials told the New York Times that US President Joe Biden had pushed back after being told that Meloni did not want the word ‘abortion’ to be included in the statement. But maybe he didn’t want to be too angry about it, after the Italian PM saved him from a bit absent-minded walking in the wrong direction when his colleagues were waiting for him for the photo shoot.
The G7 decided to use the interest on some 280 billion euros of frozen Russian assets with Western financial institutions for a long-term loan of 50 billion euros to Ukraine. It has been warned on several occasions that this confiscation of that money would come at a high price. The entire non-Western world is in danger of losing confidence in Western financial institutions. But that is not the problem of Ukrainian President Zelensky who was, of course, invited to the G7 summit.
