Kyrgyzstan hosts pivotal SCO summit amid global geopolitical shifts

Giorgia Meloni's hard-right government has been in power for 1,413 days. She surpassed the record set by Silvio Berlusconi between 2001 and 2005, making her government Italy's longest serving uninterrupted government since World War II, after a period of intense instability. Italy has had 68 governments in the last 80 years. Giorgia Meloni and her party will celebrate the feat on Friday with a huge pre-election rally in the southern city of Bari. FRANCE 24's Seema Gupta tells more.

François Picard is pleased to welcome Anna Borshchevskaya, Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute. She interprets Russia’s reported missile support for Iran not as an isolated arms transaction, but as part of a broader geopolitical strategy in which Moscow treats Ukraine, Iran, NATO, and the United States as interconnected fronts. In her analysis, Vladimir Putin’s objective is less about pursuing direct military confrontation with Washington than about altering the strategic environment around it: strengthening actors hostile to the United States, increasing the costs of American and Israeli military action, and repeatedly probing Western thresholds for retaliation.

In Tunisia, the Court of Cassation is set to issue its final ruling in the “conspiracy against the state” case. In April 2025, 37 people – most of them prominent political figures opposed to President Kais Saied – were sentenced to prison in connection with the case. Several human rights organisations have condemned the trial as unjust and called for the release of all political detainees. The appeal represents the defendants’ last legal avenue to overturn their convictions, according to a press release from Amnesty International. But defence lawyers and the detainees’ families remain pessimistic, as FRANCE 24’s Lilia Blaise reports.