Twelve weeks of persistent rioting by the gilets-jaunes across France failed to crack the President’s resolve yet an onslaught of verbal pot-shots from Italy’s leaders have set him alight.
To such an extent that the French president has taken the sensational step of pulling his ambassador bad from Rome for ‘talks’, pushing the two countries into the worst diplomatic crisis since the second world war.
Macron’s government blamed what it called baseless and provocative attacks from the leaders of Italy’s two main coalition parties – the populist Five Star Movement and the far-right League – for its decision.
