French elites are annoyed and perturbed that Italian elections have produced a new prime minister of the right, Giorgia Meloni, whom many within the Paris groupthink bubble consider to be practically a fascist.

Not welcome news for Emmanuel Macron, who is up to his neck in problems. His European Renaissance is flailing. Eurozone inflation is at 10 per cent. Macron’s failure to win control of the National Assembly after his own reelection this year has derailed his legislative program, including pension reform, its centrepiece. Germany has turned out to be a catastrophic best friend, Merkel disappearing in a puff of smoke leaving energy chaos behind her. And now the Italians have voted to install a popular conservative, a friend of Eric Zemmour no less, who has no illusions whatsoever about France.

‘I will not comment on the democratic choice of the Italian people,’ Macron’s prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, sniffed this week. Graciously congratulating the new Italian government on its election victory was apparently too difficult for her. The PM defended the role of Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, who warned the new Italian government to obey EU rules or face sanctions.

‘The subject is naturally a concern of President Macron,’ emphasised one counsellor. ‘The prospect of seeing a representative of the extreme right come to power is undoubtedly very worrying,’ Macron’s former European Affairs Minister Nathalie Loiseau told L’Express.

Meloni is a conservative but extreme right is a term with a flexible definition. Friends in Rome tell me she is serious, smart, and often likely to be the grownup in the room. She is Zemmourian in her respect for the values of families and Christianity. She’s incidentally resolute in her support for Ukraine, and while some might laugh at her for her working class accent, she can hardly be blamed for the degradation of Franco-Italian relations, which have been disastrous since Nicolas Sarkozy persuaded the US and the UK to join the hare-brained 2011 invasion of Libya, which has caused chaos in the Mediterranean basin ever since, with Italy picking up the pieces.

Videos are surfacing in which Meloni shows herself perfectly capable of standing up for Italy, and sticking the knife in France.

She’s also infuriated the French by questioning their lamentable record in francophone Africa where they control the currency, not necessarily to the benefit of their para-colonial dependencies, and about uranium mining in Niger, which fuels the French nuclear electricity grid, while the local population lives in abject poverty.

This is all fodder for political journalists but what it means might be less than meets the eye. Macron is a great seducer and his initial forays against Meloni might be regarded as flirtatious. Meloni knows she has to talk to Paris. She has made another video, less well publicised, in which, speaking French, she carefully explains her political project, and dismisses all suggestion that it is extremist.

Macron still talks to Orban, despite the noise. But the relationship with Italy will now not be as one-sided as the one to which the French were accustomed. Italy is not an ally that France can simply take for granted in a multi-polar EU under energy, security and economic stress. Macron has a suddenly startling absence of good friends in Europe, just as his difficulties at home are converging to produce a very tricky political season.