Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi tendered his resignation after losing the support of the populist Five Star movement on a key bill, only to have it rejected by President Sergio Mattarella, who was unwilling to risk the chaos of Draghi’s departure.
What we are watching: Can Draghi pull the coalition back together or find another avenue to keep his government in power by the time he is scheduled to address parliament next week?
Against all odds and expectations, Draghi has held his misfit governing alliance together for 17 months, giving Italians a welcome respite from the factional rivalry that had caused chaos in the government of former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. For months, he was among the most popular leaders in Europe — regularly around 60% approval — before the economic effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine began to be widely felt in Italy in March.
He’s now in a much weaker public position at 47% approval, opening the opportunity for his rivals to make a play for power. The question other candidates for Prime Minister might want to ask themselves, though, is whether they really want to attach their name to the economic hardships and geopolitical tensions that sunk Draghi’s ratings and are all but sure to continue. It might just be better to let “Super Mario” take it on the chin for a few more months. Who said Machiavelli was ancient history?
The race to replace British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is heating up, with an increasing focus on the dark horse candidate Penny Mordaunt, who is currently serving as trade minister and beats every other candidate in head-to-head matchups according to a recent YouGov poll.
What we are watching: As it whittles down the contenders to a final two, will members of the Conservative Party’s parliamentary caucus coalesce around a relatively unknown candidate in Mordaunt, or elevate another leader with more public standing, warts and all? Leadership debates scheduled for tonight and Tuesday may help answer that question.
Few ministers are coming out of the Johnson government with sterling images, with even the reputation of the charismatic and famously clean-cut former chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, having been tainted by the scandals that brought down Boris. Mordaunt’s relative obscurity seems to be working in her favor, but her relatively short terms in cabinet-level office invite questions about her executive experience.
It’s still too early to tell where the votes will go, but the Tories are beginning to make something of a habit of elevating women to the premiership at moments of crisis for the party. After all, Theresa May took power after the unexpected passage of Brexit referendum caused David Cameron to leave office, while Margaret Thatcher took over from Edward Heath after the 1973 oil crisis collapsed public confidence in his government and resulted in the first hung parliament since 1929. We’ll see if they cement the tradition with a third go-around.
Clashes with armed paramilitaries in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are continuing, and tensions with Rwanda remain high despite both sides agreeing to de-escalate at a recent conference in Angola.
What we are watching: Will the Biden administration appoint a well-resourced special envoy to the Great Lakes region of Africa?
The post in the State Department has been open since 2020 and filling it would be crucial to helping the U.S. bring its resources and political weight to bear in improving the human rights situation and addressing some of the root causes of conflict in the Congo, but the White House has yet to announce a candidate.
The administration has a lot on its geopolitical plate right now, but I happened to catch a sparsely-attended hearing of the House’s Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission that laid out the economic, political and moral stakes of dropping the ball in Central Africa. I called up one of the witnesses, Sasha Lezhnev, a policy consultant at The Sentry who has worked on conflict prevention and resource issues in Central Africa for nearly two decades, to dig deeper.
Below is an abridged excerpt of our conversation.
Matthew Kendrick: Could you help us understand the nexus between human rights abuse and corruption in Congo’s mineral sector and the current paramilitary violence?
Sasha Lezhnev: For the past 20 years or so, minerals have been an important driver of conflict. There are over 120 armed groups in eastern DRC at the moment, many of which, according to the United Nations group of experts, are getting most of their money from minerals. There’s been progress made in the last few years on the tin, tantalum and tungsten trade, as a result of U.S. legislation, Dodd-Frank, as well as private company actions, which have cleaned up a lot of those supply chains, making it harder for armed groups to make as much money from those trades.
However, gold has been an important driver of conflict. It’s a lot easier to smuggle gold in much higher value amounts. And so there’s some $300 to $600 million, according to the U.N., of gold that goes out of Congo every year illicitly. As far as the latest M23 incursion allegedly backed by Rwanda, we’re waiting on some more evidence from the United Nations and Human Rights Watch to see exactly what they’re doing, but certainly in the past the Rwandan backed incursions have had some level of involvement in minerals.
I think one reason for the short nature of the last M23 conflict was the fact that they couldn’t really make a lot of money from minerals.
MK: You highlighted cobalt supply chains in your testimony, which are crucial for battery technology for companies like Tesla, and the supply of which is nearly all in the D.R.C., usually either under the control of artisanal miners or Chinese companies. Is there any way to improve the human rights situation on the supply side given the realities on the ground?
SL: Absolutely. There have been significant improvements in the artisanal mining industries of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold — the conflict minerals of Eastern Congo — over the last dozen years. At one point, the U.N. said that almost every mine was controlled by an armed unit, but just a couple of years ago, the latest independent survey said that some two-thirds of mines were going to civilian use as opposed to armed groups.
Certainly, safety and working conditions need to improve, but there’s a framework for doing that. And that’s in an environment where almost all the mining is not done by large industrial companies and there are hundreds of small mines working independently. If there can be progress on that, certainly there can be progress on the much smaller number of cobalt mines, many of which are large industrial ones, and there’s lots of visibility.
There just needs to be more attention and pressure from the end users. Several of these end user companies now say they know precisely all the sources of the cobalt that they procure, so they can apply more pressure and scrutiny. Just like you can buy a bag of coffee and know the name of the farmer and the cooperative, etc., we should be able to do that as consumers of cobalt.
There’s no reason why that can’t happen and there are really not that many cobalt mines out there. And I don’t think it actually costs that much money. The wages are not high in Congo and if you improve them a bit and apply some pressure to get some of the corrupt actors out, it’s really not all that expensive. It’s just a question of attention and will.
MK: Give me your best pitch on why politicians and companies should devote attention and resources to this issue.
SL: Cobalt isn’t going away as a mineral. It is the thing that makes electric cars drive much longer. The alternatives are promising, but not yet to that same standard. It’s in everyone’s interest to make the supply chain more stable and more secure.
