PREVIEW
Fine words but no new financial commitments emerged from Luanda meeting
Last week’s European Union-African Union summit in Luanda was a damp squib in monetary terms, after the European Commission made so many big money promises ahead of the previous weekend’s G20 meeting in Johannesburg that there was nothing left to announce (AC Vol 66 No 24, Johannesburg and Belém summits send defiant message to Trump).
The main success of the summit was that top European leaders including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk were in Angola’s capital.
In her opening speech on Monday, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen insisted that Europe was ‘your first trading partner by far’, outstripping China. ‘I see room to expand our trade relationship even further,’ she added. Yet apart from signing a Clean Trade and Investment Partnership with South Africa ahead of the G20, improved terms have not been offered to any other African country.
That African leaders want a more transactional relationship with the EU was made clear by the host, Angola’s president João Lourenço, whose opening remarks were that ‘Europe has the know-how and technology, Africa has the raw materials that are essential to the world's industries’.
The biggest surprise was the absence of any major new commitments related to the Lobito Corridor, the US$5 billion EU-US plan to build a rail network connecting Congo-Kinshasa and Zambia to Angola’s Lobito port. The Commission says that its Global Gateway infrastructure programme has already mobilised €120bn of a €150bn target for investment across Africa (AC Vol 66 No 23, Brussels pushes Global Gateway to rival US-China deal-making).
On other key policy issues, such as critical minerals, debt reform and green energy, the joint declaration signed by European and African leaders was almost identical to the texts agreed at COP30 and the G20.
The two sides agreed that Africa’s critical minerals should be used to drive value-addition rather than just as raw material exports, and endorsed nature-based debt swaps and reform of the international financial system, but without going into specifics.
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