Recalled French ambassador set to return to Rome

France’s ambassador to Italy is set to return to Rome on Friday after being recalled for a week as a protest, but analysts warn that relations between the two neighbours are likely to remain rocky.

France announced on February 7 that it was recalling its ambassador to protest “unfounded attacks and outlandish claims” by Italy’s populist coalition government, as well as an unannounced visit to France by Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio.

“He will return today to Rome,” European Affairs Minister Nathalie Loiseau told RTL radio on Friday.

“I am very happy that the ambassador is on his way back to Italy,” Luigi Di Maio told reporters in Rome.

“I shall meet him, I want to ask him for a meeting. In the meantime I wish him a good trip back,” he said.

Relations between the two countries are at their lowest level since the end of World War II due to repeated clashes between Di Maio and Matteo Salvini and France’s centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

Paris was incensed when Di Maio made a surprise visit to France on February 5 to meet a group of radical “yellow vest” protesters who have led demonstrations against Macron.

“The wind of change has crossed the Alps,” Di Maio wrote afterwards of the three months of protests against Macron, adding that he was preparing a common front ahead of European Parliament elections in May.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said a “line was crossed” with the visit, which was organised without French authorities being informed.

The last time Paris recalled its ambassador to Rome was during the World War II when Italy under leader Benito Mussolini invaded France in 1940.

– Tunnel tensions –

The current icy ties between two founding members of the European Union has many analysts wondering about the consequences for the bloc, given that French-Italian ties have been a generally stable axis in a bloc.

It risks complicating a major infrastructure project between the countries that would result in a tunnel being bored under the Alps to link the important regional cities of Lyon and Turin.

Work on the 57.5-kilometre (36-mile) tunnel, set to cost an estimated 8.6 billion euros (9.7 billion dollars), is suspended pending a green light from the Italian government.

Di Maio’s party, the Five Star Movement, is opposed to the project, while his coalition partner the far-right Ligue party, headed by Salvini, is in favour.

“France clearly respects the time that our Italian partners wanted to take. But today we are saying clearly to the Italians that this decision needs to come,” French Transport Minister Elizabeth Borne told the Public Senat channel on Friday.

– Post-election compromise? –

Analysts and diplomats say that relations have been affected by the fundamentally different outlooks of Macron, a pro-European centrist, and the eurosceptic government in Rome, which includes the far right.

There are also deep-running economic tensions, competition for influence in Libya, and a sense in Italy that France has done little to help its neighbour cope with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants in recent years.

Posturing ahead of the elections for the European parliament have exacerbated these tensions, observers say.

A French diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Di Maio and Salvini’s recent criticism of Macron and France was driven by competition between the two men.

“Di Maio and Salvini are in competition against each other. Their vision is that at some point there will be only one of them,” the diplomat said, saying that the European elections in May would be vital.

“At the moment there’s a sort of feverish election campaigning,” he said.

Dominique Moisi, a foreign affairs analyst at the Montaigne Institute think-tank in Paris, told AFP recently that there was a “greater chance of compromise” after the elections.

“I can’t see them (both sides) being reconciled, that’s not possible,” he said. “But limiting the tensions, there’s room for manouevre,” he said.

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