PRESIDENT MELONI’S INTRODUCTION

Thank you all for being here. I apologise for the slight delay, it was another very busy morning.

I am of course very pleased to provide a concluding overview of the G7 Leaders’ Summit under the Italian Presidency. 

I must start by saying that, for me and for Italy as a whole, it was an honour to chair this Summit as indeed it is to hold the Presidency of the G7, as you know, for the whole of 2024.

I must also begin by expressing several thanks.
I must of course thank all the team who have followed the organisation of this extremely complex event in such an efficient way.

Likewise, I must also thank all those who have dealt with the diplomatic negotiations, starting with Ambassador Elisabetta Belloni and all her team. They were very complex negotiations. 

I also wish to thank my diplomatic advisor, Ambassador Fabrizio Saggio, and all those who have ensured the smooth running of such a fast paced, dense programme with so many delegations in attendance (as you know, there was a particularly large number of attendees at our Outreach session). So, my thanks go to all those who in general have helped organise all aspects of this event. 

I must of course thank all Italian State administrations: all the officials, at all levels and in all governmental bodies, who have contributed to the success of this initiative, because it undoubtedly has been a success.

A special word of thanks goes to the police and armed forces who have ensured maximum security for all proceedings. 

I would also like to thank you journalists and all media operators. Over the last few days, you’ve been going back and forth between Bari and Borgo Egnazia, following the working sessions and telling Italy and the rest of the world all about them. For us, this has obviously been very valuable indeed.

I am grateful to the people of Puglia and the local institutions here, who have welcomed us in such an extraordinary way. I hope that, thanks also to this Summit, this wonderful region will become even more famous, admired, well-known and loved around the world, as it deserves to be.

I’d say that overall it has been an excellent team effort, honouring Italy as a whole. Italy has once again proven its ability to deliver and organise events of such extraordinary importance. This should be a source of pride for all Italians. We often forget what we are capable of, but it is only right to highlight this today as I believe that, today, it is plain for all to see. 

As you know, the Leaders’ Summit came to a close yesterday with the formal adoption of the final communiqué which had already been defined the day before. I would like to underline this point as this does not happen very often, and I believe it shows the G7’s unity of intent.

The final communiqué is a very extensive and extremely significant document. It contains many commitments on the many global challenges we are being called upon to tackle at this difficult time. These are concrete commitments regarding issues that are critical for our present, as well as for our future, and I believe it was crucial to once again reaffirm our unity in the face of those challenges.

I must clearly therefore also thank all my colleagues – Joe, Emmanuel, Rishi, Olaf, Justin, Fumio, Ursula and Charles – and their teams and Sherpas, for their positive and fundamental contribution to the success of this Summit.

I also wish to thank the many leaders of the nations and international organisations who participated in yesterday’s Outreach session, which was one of the most well-attended and representative ever; I believe they made this Summit even more significant.

We hosted the heads of the UN, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, African Development Bank and OECD, as well as President Zelensky of course, who as you know attended the first day’s special session on Ukraine. Other speakers included the leader of Brazil, who also holds the G20 Presidency this year, the leader of India, the rotating Chair of the African Union, so Mauritania, and several African and Mediterranean nations – Algeria, Jordan, Kenya, Tunisia and Türkiye -, as well as the Gulf with the United Arab Emirates.

I believe this was another very important message to send: as we said during yesterday’s Outreach session, the G7 does not want to be some closed fortress and it is not a forum that has to defend itself from something or someone; it instead embodies values that it wants to open up to the world in order to seek out development-related solutions together. I think this was important in order to try and debunk the ‘West against the rest’ narrative. That is not the case, and I believe this approach has been confirmed during the Italian Presidency, under which I am proud there has been a completely different narrative.

Yesterday was an extraordinary day. I have no issue in defining it a historic moment, with the Pope in attendance. I will never be able to thank him enough for the huge gift he gave us yesterday, and not only by participating in the Summit. It was the first time in almost fifty years of the G7’s history that a Pontiff took part in a working session. I wish to thank him for this, and I of course wish to thank him for giving us his extremely valuable point of view on the issue of artificial intelligence, as well as for the respect he showed by staying for more than three hours to listen to all the Leaders’ addresses during what was a very long session. I found this to be an extraordinary message and I will truly be eternally grateful to the Holy Father for this very important gift he gave us and for the extraordinary message he sent.

Let’s move on to the content. In the final communiqué, the G7 clearly reiterates its firm commitment to defend the international system of rules based on the force of the law. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has challenged and jeopardised that system, and the results are plain to see, with crisis hotspots continuing to multiply around the world. Contrary to what some may have hoped for or predicted, we intend to keep supporting Ukraine and we have actually chosen to strengthen our commitment and various lines of action, with what remains a comprehensive approach to help the nation under attack look to the future.

The G7 has reaffirmed this commitment and has reached an agreement, which was far from being a given, to provide additional financial support worth approximately 50 billion dollars linked to the extra profits deriving from frozen Russian assets. This is a key political step, an extremely significant agreement, which of course must now be defined from a technical point of view over the coming weeks, taking into account the framework of reference already adopted at EU level. 

Confirming we will support Ukraine for as long as it takes also remains an essential condition for the launch of any diplomatic initiative to solve the crisis, and this is something else I want to underline; in other words, it is the precondition for any peace solution, and has been from the start. The peace conference organised by President Zelensky is kicking off in Switzerland today, which Italy is also attending (our Vice President of the Council of Ministers and Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, is already there), and this has been made possible by our strong and compact support over the last two years allowing Ukraine not to be invaded. That is always worth remembering.

There is also full alignment in the Communiqué on the issue of the conflict in the Middle East. We have confirmed our support for the valuable mediation proposal, put forward by the United States in particular, for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages and a significant increase in humanitarian aid to the civilian population of Gaza. I of course also talked about these issues during my bilateral meeting yesterday with the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and with various other leaders this morning too.

Speaking on behalf of Italy, I wish to say that I am particularly proud of the commitment Italy has shown over the last months with regard to the Middle East crisis, especially on the humanitarian front, and I want to underline this because our commitment is recognised by all our partners.

The G7 has also reiterated every effort to avert any possibility of escalation in the region and to find a lasting political solution to the crisis. This was a focus of our discussions, with the prospect of the two-state solution. This commitment was also reaffirmed by the nations invited to the Outreach session.

As you know, one of the focuses of the Italian Presidency regards relations with the African continent in particular. I am very proud that the G7 has shared Italy’s approach, in relation to which Italy has endeavoured to be a point of reference ever since this Government came to office. The G7 has decided to combine efforts to build a new development and cooperation model with African nations, based on a partnership of equals, so that these nations can grow and prosper with their own resources.

We have shared several initiatives on this front at a high level, working above all to strengthen synergies between different but perfectly compatible projects. On the one hand, there is of course Italy’s ‘Mattei Plan for Africa’ initiative, and on the other there is the European Union’s Global Gateway and then the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) that the G7 launched two years ago.

As you saw, we also organised a side event on the synergies between these three plans for investment in Africa, which also involved the private sector, with leading Italian and American companies, as well as international development banks. I believe this initiative was one of the highlights of this G7 Leaders’ Summit, as it gave that element of concreteness with which we intend to work on these issues.

Africa has been talked about a lot; it has been talked about at very many international initiatives and has been written about in plenty of documents. However, I believe that what makes the difference now is showing that it doesn’t end with the documents, but that those documents are followed by concrete facts.

This is precisely what we are doing. We have strengthened previous commitments regarding sustainable development, and above all we have launched a number of new, important and very concrete initiatives in the areas of food security, energy, digital technology and infrastructure. I believe this is what makes the difference.

I shall therefore quickly mention the Apulia Food Systems Initiative, the aim of which is to boost agricultural production in Africa and make food systems in those nations more sustainable and more resilient, and the Energy for Growth in Africa initiative, supporting infrastructure development for the production and distribution of green energy. This initiative has been adopted by the G7 and seven African nations have also joined, together with a number of other nations that were invited to yesterday’s Outreach session; we clearly intend to extend this further, in an open and transparent way. Then there is the G7 Hub on Sustainable Use of Land, the African Virtual Investment Platform, and the G7 platform for green investments to encourage investment in the continent, paying particular attention to clean technologies. Lastly, I would also like to mention the establishment of a centre to support the launch of digital ecosystems in Africa, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. We intend to develop these high-potential projects in a synergistic way, again by linking them to the Global Gateway and PGII, and of course to the Mattei Plan too. 

The G7’s commitment to increase the African economy’s participation in global value chains, with a view to fostering development and the distribution of wealth in those nations, is also very important.

As you can see, and as I was saying, this is not simply about documents: we have always tried to follow up on our commitments with concrete initiatives able to start from this Summit.

As you know, in my view, working on a new approach to cooperation with the African continent is also the best way to address another major global emergency, which is the management of migration flows. For the first time in its history, this G7 also discussed how to manage migration flows, which was again thanks to Italy’s impetus.

In fact, the final communiqué reiterates our common commitment to address the root causes of migration, in order to guarantee what we believe is the most important right to be safeguarded, and that is the right not to have to emigrate, not to be forced to leave your land and your home, being able to find the conditions to fulfil your potential there.

However, we have also undertaken commitments to deal with the flipside of this problem, which is the fight against human traffickers. We have agreed on the need to build coordination at international level, a global coalition against human traffickers, pooling our efforts to combat a plague that is fuelling illegal immigration flows, which for us actually represent a new form of slavery. I am particularly proud of the discussion and the results on this issue, as this had never before been dealt with at such a summit, and with such clarity. We have brought an all-Italian model, which came from two great Italians, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who said to “follow the money” in the fight against the mafia.

According to the United Nations, human trafficking has now become the most profitable activity in the world for criminal networks, surpassing the trafficking of arms and on a par with the drugs trade. I therefore believe that if we strike at the heart of these criminal organisations, by following the profits from their trafficking, then this can make the difference in terms of our ability to fight these slave traders of the third millennium.

As you know, an equally significant part of our work focused on artificial intelligence. The Italian Presidency chose artificial intelligence as another of its priorities, and, as we have stated in the documents and during the two days of this Summit, this is one of the most complex and impactful challenges we face.

Our objective is to ensure that, as we develop this new technology, it in any case remains human-controlled and human-centred. In this regard, the Holy Father gave an extraordinary and also moral contribution, while also giving substance to the concept promoted by the Holy See itself: the concept of ‘algorethics’, giving ethics to algorithms. We managed to get an initiative adopted in our conclusions regarding a mark that will allow citizens and consumers to recognise companies that implement a code of conduct.

As announced, we initiated a focus on the impact artificial intelligence may have on the labour market, being aware that this technological revolution will have consequences for all sectors and potentially for millions and millions of workers’ lives.

The Communiqué also covers many other issues, including the Indo-Pacific, economic security, supply chains, and the climate-energy nexus.   

We are clearly aware that the major challenges facing today’s world are fully interconnected, which is why we have built on the results of the Japanese Presidency last year and kept Indo-Pacific and economic security-related issues high on the agenda, with the aim of sending out a clear message, to China in particular. We are open to dialogue, but our companies must be able to compete on an equal footing, because the market can only be free if it is also fair. So, a free market but within a framework of fair competition.

We also paid particular attention to the Mediterranean, which is our sea and has become central once more. As we have said over the last few days, it is the ‘middle sea’ between the world’s two major maritime areas: the Atlantic on the one side and the Indo-Pacific on the other, passing via the Persian Gulf. If used well, this central importance can also provide Italy with an opportunity to become a hub for the rest of Europe, and not only with regard to energy; we have talked a lot about energy in recent months, but I am also thinking about data, which is the ‘energy’ of our digital societies, and will become more and more so.

There are projects, such as the Blue-Raman project for example, which will connect India to European economies via the Mediterranean, and I believe this is one of those strategic projects that can act as a model for others.

One of the matters addressed by the final communiqué is of course the issue of climate change, in relation to which we must keep being very ambitious in terms of the results to be achieved without, however, adopting ideological positions or preconceptions. For Italy, the challenge continues to be technological neutrality.

Also as the G7, we must work with a pragmatic approach that can enable us to deliver on the commitments we have undertaken at international level, most recently at the COP28 in Dubai, while always bearing in mind the needs of our production system and citizens. In other words, we cannot become caught in a paradox whereby, in order to protect the environment, we end up benefitting nations that are in competition with us and do not think twice about adopting very aggressive commercial practices, which are often actually detrimental to the environment. 

At G7 level, we have also agreed on a strong political commitment to a fairer and more stable international taxation system (the famous Global Minimum Tax). As you know, this issue is particularly close to my heart and I have worked on this as this Forum’s current President. Yesterday, we listened to the Secretary General of the OECD, who explained that the multilateral convention on the global minimum tax that was negotiated at OECD level in Paris is now ready for technical sign-off. The G7 and the OECD have worked in parallel also with the G20 on this issue. It is now up to States to express their political will to sign up. Italy’s is obviously there, and I hope this is done as soon as possible.

These are the main topics that have been covered by this very extensive Summit and final document. I am extremely satisfied with this work.

I also had many bilateral meetings during this Summit. I met with President Biden, with whom I above all discussed the main international crisis scenarios, as well as how to strengthen our bilateral cooperation with reference to investments in new technologies. I would like to recall that, over the last year or so, Italian exports to the United States have increased by almost 7 billion, showing how this cooperation, which is very valuable to us, is growing.

I also had meetings with Prime Minister Trudeau and President Lula, of course to ensure continuity between the work under this year’s Italian Presidency and the work of the Canadian Presidency next year, and between the work of the G7 and the work of the G20 which, as you know, is under Brazil’s Presidency this year. With Canada, we also adopted an action plan to boost bilateral cooperation, as indeed we did with Japan, with Prime Minister Kishida, with whom I also met.

With regard to my discussion with Prime Minister Modi, we explored ways to deepen the strategic partnership we launched in 2023. With President Tebboune of Algeria, we reviewed the progress particularly of pilot projects linked to the Mattei Plan for Africa.

The Mattei Plan for Africa was also the focus of my meetings with the President of the World Bank Group and with the President of the African Development Bank Group.
We have adopted a statement of intent with World Bank which will enable us to carry out joint development initiatives in African nations. With President of the African Development Bank Group Adesina, we have launched new financial instruments to implement the Mattei Plan, above all to encourage private investments in the continent. These are just some of the meetings I had during the Summit, although I obviously also talked with all the leaders who attended. I would therefore also like to mention the King of Jordan, President Milei, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, President Ruto of Kenya, and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In short, we have spoken with all the leaders over the past few days. I also had the opportunity to have an exchange of views with the rotating Chair of the African Union, the President of Mauritania, who, as you know, was our keynote speaker at the Outreach session, precisely on the subject of the African continent.

The Leaders’ Summit may have come to an end, but the Italian Presidency’s work continues. Over the coming weeks and months, other ministerial meetings will be held during which we will of course continue to delve deeper into our priorities. This commitment began on the first of January and, by the end of this year, Italy will have hosted 21 ministerial meetings and more than 130 technical working group meetings as well as the meetings of civil society engagement groups such as the Civil 7, Women 7, Youth 7, Labour 7 and Business 7. I would also like to remind you that the Italian Presidency has organised specific meetings this year on the topics of defence and disability for the first time ever. I consider this to be another highlight of the Italian Presidency, as a ministerial meeting at G7 level has never before been dedicated to this, nor to tourism.

I am very proud of the work we have done, I am very proud of this Summit’s success. Over the last few days, Italy has clearly been in the global spotlight, and the eyes of the world have been upon us. This was a great responsibility, and I am truly proud that our nation has once again managed to impress and to chart the course ahead. My thanks therefore obviously go to all those who have worked on this, because it has been an extraordinary example of teamwork. Thank you.

[Courtesy translation]