2023-12-29 18:07:53
The departure of Nadia Calviño from the Government on the way to the European Investment Bank has opened the way for María Jesús Montero (Seville, 1966) to be promoted to Pedro Sánchez’s number two. The Minister of Finance will be first vice president, although with different powers than her predecessor. Montero’s main mission will no longer be to negotiate with European organizations or coordinate economic policy, but rather the Budgets and address the reform of regional financing, one of the main challenges of the legislature.
Pedro Sánchez reinforces the powers of Escrivá with the powers of Public Function
The new first vice president knows about the matter. Not only because she has been responsible for Pedro Sánchez’s Budgets since 2018, but because before that she was an Andalusian councilor for a decade and a half under the presidencies of Manuel Chaves, José Antonio Griñán and Susana Díaz.
A doctor by profession, she entered the Andalusian Government with the aura of independence in 2002, as Deputy Minister of Health after having been medical director of the Virgen del Rocío Hospital in Seville. Two years later she was already a counselor.
Montero spent sixteen years on the Board, during which he headed the Health Department, first, and then the Treasury, and where he applied the harsh cuts imposed by Brussels and the Government of Mariano Rajoy after the outbreak of the financial crisis and Europe’s commitment to austericidal policies.
When Sánchez called her to his Government, she was one of the most important women in the Government of Susana Díaz, who just a few months later would lose control of the Board in favor of Juan Manuel Moreno’s PP. Montero’s name had been raised a year earlier as a possible replacement for Díaz when the Andalusian socialists thought that the then president Díaz would defeat Pedro Sánchez in the May 2017 primaries, which would force her to leave the regional government in the hands of one person. of trust before leaving for Madrid. She was the one who ended up making the big leap into national politics. Díaz also ended up in the capital, but as a senator.
From Treasury to vice president
This Friday, Montero took a new step in her climb up the pyramid of power in Spain after five years as one of Pedro Sánchez’s main collaborators. Five years in which she has been gaining importance in both the Executive and the PSOE, of which she has been deputy general secretary since 2022, a position in which she replaced Adriana Lastra.
The new first vice president entered the Government in June 2018 after the motion of censure that removed Mariano Rajoy from Moncloa. With a past of budget containment in Andalusia, Pedro Sánchez placed her in charge of the Treasury for her first Government, still alone.
With an even smaller public role, Montero was one of the negotiators of the first programmatic agreements with Unidos Podemos once the PSOE assumed the Government. Like the 2019 Budget, which did not see the light of day due to ERC’s veto. Sánchez dissolved the Cortes and called general elections.
That document went beyond public accounts, and laid the programmatic foundations of the first coalition government in almost a century. After the double electoral date of 2019, PSOE and Unidas Podemos closed a joint Executive. Also then, Montero was the one who spent hours at the negotiating table for the programmatic and ministerial architecture.
In that Government, Montero gained political weight by assuming the Speakership left by Isabel Celaá. The Minister of Finance became the face of the Council of Ministers after fighting in Parliament with the opposition, and even with some of her allies. Montero demonstrated discursive and communicative skills that Sanchez wanted to exploit in a very complex political context: a joint government with a very combative left within, parliamentary alliances with independentists, and a right that sought the overthrow of the Executive even before he took office. By any method.
The main objectives agreed upon by the parties of the legislature were to recover economic resources that had almost disappeared during the PP’s mandates, as well as to address political normalization in Catalonia. But the coronavirus pandemic blew everything up. Or almost everything.
In those first months of 2020, the coalition Government experienced a tough and intense internal debate that initially marked how Spain was going to react to the economic shock derived from confinement and other measures aimed at reducing the economic impact of the virus.
There were two positions, as sources familiar with the development of those days in which the tension was maximum remind elDiario.es: one side was committed to making a minimal intervention against those who asked for a waste of Keynesian stimuli. In the first group were Nadia Calviño and Montero. In the second, Unidas Podemos en bloc supported by the Minister of Social Security, José Luis Escrivá.
“Before answering the phone he has already told you no, it is his negotiating strategy,” point out those who have had to do it in these 16 years in an executive position. His attitude, others say, is that of an “accountant.” That is to say, he has an aversion, they maintain, to imbalances in accounts.
But Montero is also recognized for a political skill that Calviño did not fully demonstrate: adaptability. The brand new first vice president went from cuts to accounting balance and, faced with the breaking of the austerity dam in the fight against the pandemic, first, and against the crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, later, she has thrown herself into the arms of the budget expansion.
A few days ago, the Council of Ministers approved the spending ceiling for 2024: 199.12 billion. The highest in history. Thanks, in part, to the European funds negotiated by Calviño and the new head of the Economy, Carlos Body.
The distribution of tasks that Sánchez has devised for the new Government does not give more functions to Montero, who gains political weight, but not powers. “The coordination of economic policy and the presidency of the Delegate Commission for Economic Affairs (Cdgae) remains in Economy,” Moncloa explains to elDiario.es. This commission is the one that brings together the economic ministers and where a good part of the Executive’s policies are negotiated, and it has been the scene of very strong confrontations between the two parts of the coalition since 2020.
Montero also loses a leg usually associated with the Treasury, the Public Service, which becomes dependent on the Minister of Digital Transformation, José Luis Escrivá.
From the PP they influence the redistribution of tasks that leave the department that Montero wins to attack one of his toughest rivals in the Government. “Sánchez shows how much he cares about the economy by removing the Vice Presidency from the Ministry,” said the Deputy Secretary of Economy, Juan Bravo, on social networks. “That the ‘number two’ of the PSOE is the ‘number two’ of the Government, while the spokesperson for the Executive is also the spokesperson for Ferraz, is the demonstration that Sánchez wants a trench government and is more concerned about going into a clash with the PP that dignifies public management,” they add from the party led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
“Politically it gains a lot of weight,” defend the Moncloa sources consulted. The reason, not only that managing Budgets gives great power to the person who must do it. But because this legislature is called to review regional financing. A matter of great economic, political and, of course, media relevance.
On the table is the debt relief for Catalonia, which will be accompanied by a transfer of taxes that has not yet been finalized. Two measures that allowed the investiture of Pedro Sánchez with the votes of ERC and Junts that the Government, through the mouth of Montero, has committed to extend to the rest of the autonomous communities of the common regime: all except the Basque Country and Navarra.
Montero will pilot this negotiation on several sides, bilateral and multilateral at the same time, and which occupy and worry parties and administrations with conflicting interests, sometimes even among those who share ideas. An opportunity to confirm those negotiating skills that they say he has, or to crash and sink where others have done before. If he triumphs, his name will win a lot in a future and not yet open succession race in the PSOE.
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