Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was briefly wrongfooted by a surprise question about ants on Thursday when she faced a grilling by Italian and foreign reporters lasting more than two hours.
After covering major domestic and international issues, such as Italy’s dealings with Elon Musk’s Starlink, the war in Ukaine and Donald Trump’s return to the White House, proceedings took a slightly surreal turn.
Meloni flew to Florida last weekend for unannounced talks with Trump, winning praise from the incoming president, who called her “a fantastic woman”.
“I’d like to ask you a very simple question. I hope a far-reaching one, too…prime minister: do you step on ants? Do you pay attention when you walk?”, Meloni was asked by a video journalist, originally from Bulgaria.
He said the question was connected to a folk saying about treading on ants leading to rainfall.
Looking visibly taken aback, Meloni laughed nervously.
“Do I walk on ants? Well, if I see them no, I confess. But I don’t see them all the time. Is that the right answer? I don’t know, what can I say? I’m at a loss, guys,” she said, before moving on to the next question – which was about Musk’s contested political views.
Away from ants, Meloni used Thursday’s two-hour news conference to allay concerns that Trump might break with Washington’s traditional European allies as he pursued a Make-America-Great-Again agenda.
Trump alarmed many Western capitals this week when he refused to rule out using military or economic action to pursue an acquisition of the Panama Canal and Greenland, and also floated the idea of turning Canada into a U.S. state.
“Regarding the Greenland-Panama issue, I feel confident in excluding the possibility that the USA will attempt to annex territories of interest to them by force in the coming years,” Meloni said.
She said Trump was simply flagging that he would not let key strategic concerns close to the United States fall under the sway of foreign competitors, such as China.
“My thinking is that these statements are … a vigorous way to say the United States will not stand by while other major global players move into areas that are of strategic interest to the United States and, I would add, to the West,” Meloni said.
