At the G7 summit in France, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was caught on a hot mic in a lighthearted exchange about smoking and coffee that quickly became a talking point among world leaders. While they waited for U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to arrive, Meloni said she needed three cups of coffee to wake up. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz jokingly asked whether she also needed a cigarette, and Meloni replied that she had stopped smoking about a month earlier.
The confession prompted more banter. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer asked European Council President Antonio Costa when he had quit, and Costa said he had been cigarette-free for 21 years. The moment brought renewed attention to Meloni’s long-running public image as a smoker trying to quit.
The story also revived one of Meloni’s most notorious old remarks. After Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had urged her, in what the article describes as an odd way, to stop smoking, she said she could not imagine life without cigarettes and joked, “If I ever have to quit smoking, I will kill somebody.” The line later circulated widely online, with social media users joking that Erdogan might be the first target if she ever gave up tobacco.
Now that Meloni says she has actually done the “impossible” and quit, the old joke has taken on a new, more playful meaning. The article frames the episode as another example of her tough public persona, this time directed at her own habit rather than an opponent.
