Giorgia Meloni and Emmanuel Macron have clashed over abortion at the G7 summit in Italy.

The French president rebuked Ms Meloni after she had insisted a reference to “abortion” was removed from the joint conclusions of the meeting.

The Italian prime minister shot back, accusing Mr Macron of point scoring before parliamentary elections in France later this month.

It risks undermining the show of Western unity over issues such as Ukraine and Gaza that was planned for the annual meeting of the Group of Seven counties.

Mr Macron said: “You know France’s position, which has enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution.

“France has a vision of equality between women and men, but it’s not a vision shared by all the political spectrum.”

“You don’t have the same sensibilities in your country,” he told an Italian reporter.

On Thursday, Ms Meloni said that there was no reason to kick up controversy over the issue.

“I think it is profoundly wrong, in difficult times like these, to campaign [for an election] using a precious forum like the G7,” she told reporters.

The two leaders have clashed before over her hard-line migration policy and have starkly contrasting politics, as well as recent political fortune.

The centrist and pro-EU Mr Macron was humiliated by the Eurosceptic National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s European Parliament elections.

Afterwards he called a snap parliamentary election in France in a bid to stop the French flirting with the hard-Right but risks losing control of the National Assembly and becoming a lame duck president.

Ms Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, which has its roots in a neo-fascist group, scored an overwhelming triumph in the European elections in Italy, vowing to end Brussels overreach.

The Eurosceptic Right-winger’s international stock has never been higher after that victory, which has been crowned by her hosting of the G7 summit.

The 2023 G7 communique released after last year’s leaders’ summit in Hiroshima, Japan, called for “access to safe and legal abortion and post-abortion care”.

French and Canadian diplomats proposed similar or tougher language for this year’s joint statement.

“All the other countries backed them, but it was a red line for Meloni, so it is absent from the final text,” one diplomat said.

Biden sides with Macron

A senior Italian diplomat said that the word “abortion” would not appear in the final communique, but it made clear the G7 still supported the aims of the declaration made in Hiroshima.

“This story has been whipped up and has no substance to it,” said the diplomat.

But a senior US official said that Joe Biden, the US president, had also not wanted the reference to abortion to disappear from the text.

“The president felt very strongly that we needed to have at the very least the language that references what we did in Hiroshima on women’s health and reproductive rights,” the official said.

Meloni is anti-abortion, revealing in a recent autobiography that her mother had come close to aborting her before deciding to keep her child.

The conservative’s ruling coalition sparked outrage in April after it passed controversial legislation in April allowing groups who “support motherhood” into abortion advice clinics to try to deter women from terminating pregnancies.

In March, France became the first country in the world to explicitly include the right to abortion in its constitution.

Abortion is hugely sensitive in the US. Mr Biden has vowed to create a right to abortion if he wins a second term in November’s election.

The Democrat has warned that his rival Donald Trump could ban abortion nationwide if he wins the race for the White House.