Italy’s next prime minister, Mario Draghi, unveils his cabinet

MARIO DRAGHI, the former president of the European Central Bank, is due to be sworn in as Italy’s prime minister on February 13th. He will head a cabinet that gives all but one of his country’s main parties a stake in his new government. Announcing his line-up on the evening of February 12th, Mr Draghi allotted 15 of the 24 seats around his cabinet table to politicians from a governing majority of prodigious breadth that will range from the nativist right to the radical left.The remaining nine jobs went to independents. In one of his most striking appointments, he called in the former boss of Vodafone, Vittorio Colao, to head a new ministry of technological innovation and digital transition. Mr Draghi’s government will come into office with the task of allocating around €200bn ($240bn) from the EU’s recovery funds and Mr Colao’s nomination chimes with Brussels’s emphasis on using the cash to shape a “smarter” Europe. The European Commission also wants to see significant investment in environmental projects. To that end, Mr Draghi created a second new ministry—of ecological transition—and named another independent, a physicist, Roberto Cingolani, to head it. As his finance minister, he chose a long-standing associate, Daniele Franco, the deputy governor of the Bank of Italy.