Premier Giorgia Meloni meets Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Rome on Monday as part of a mini-tour also taking in Paris and Berlin by the latter ahead of his country's duty presidency of the EU.
The meeting comes before this week's EU summit, which is set to be important in relation to the EU top jobs following this month's European elections.
Meloni and Orban have good ties and see eye-to-eye on issues such as combatting illegal immigration and declining birth rates and setting limits on shared EU sovereignty.
Orban, however, does not share the Italian government's staunch support of Ukraine as it fights the Russian forces of invasion.
At the EU level, Meloni is the president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR), which her right-wing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party belongs to, while Orban's Fidesz is not in a European group after pulling out of the centre-right European People's Party (EPP) EPP three years ago.
Meloni, whose FdI maintained its position as Italy's strongest party in the EU elections, winning close to 29% of the vote here, is set to demand a top Commission post for Italy.
There is talk the Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's EPP could bring the ECR into the ruling majority in the European Parliament at the expense of the Greens.
Orban's role in the negotiations over the EU top jobs is widely expected to be less central, in part due to his stance on Ukraine.
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