The rise of Maria Jesus Montero to the first vice presidency of the Government ends for many with an anomaly that extended throughout the previous legislature, when the minister exercised an unrecognized responsibility in the cabinet of Pedro Sanchezbecoming one of the political weights more relevant and without holding a vice presidency. This was corrected in the last Council of Ministers and ended up being resolved in the last Government crisis, where the deputy general secretary of the PSOE goes from the fourth vice presidency to the first to become the main parapet in which the president can protect himself in a legislature. very hard.
The organic position as number two in the PSOE, in 2022, already empowered Montero to exercise that negotiating role which he has been performing in the last stage and his promotion to the first vice presidency rewards someone who has become one of the president’s most trusted people, entering his close circle of collaborators and assuming, together with Félix Bolaños, Minister of the Presidency, and the Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, a key role in the negotiations for the investiture with ERC and Junts.
The Minister of Finance has one of the most politically combative speeches within the Executive and since the first vice presidency She will become Pedro Sánchez’s main squire. The rise of Montero has that reading within the Government and the PSOE. The last legislature the president lacked that protection and his political figure suffered severe wear and tear. The stage that now opens will be even more angry and the PP has hardened its opposition after the agreement of the amnesty for those accused of the process or political movements such as support for Bildu to recover the mayor’s office of Pamplona. A period of high political tension is expected and Montero will act from the front line to accommodate, as far as possible, the blows that the opposition directs at Sánchez.
After a period in which the president paid for the absence of political weight, Sánchez has set up a Council of Ministers with hardly any technical profiles, except for the brand new Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, or José Luis Escrivá. The rise of Montero ends up determining the eminently political weight of a cabinet with which, according to the PP, the president “digs even more of a trench.” in a legislature of blocs and polarizationin which parliamentary arithmetic will force the measures to be negotiated to the point of exhaustion with the investiture partners.
As Minister of Finance, Montero already knows well what it is like to coordinate the different government portfolios, including those of Sumar. She has also negotiated the anti-crisis decrees with the rest of the parties in the Congress of Deputies and has carried out three budgets with support from outside the Government. His negotiating ability has been proven during a complicated parliamentary negotiation and will be put to the test again in the current legislature, in which it will be difficult for him to continue postponing the reform of the regional financing system, postponed since 2014. This time he will have to open that melon with the PP empowered at the regional level, governing 11 autonomies. Montero already tested this display of force by the main opposition party in the last Fiscal and Financial Policy Council, which approved the deficit and the spending ceiling, with the PP against it and the Treasury councilors of the majority of the communities in war footing against “favorable treatment” to Catalonia. The Sevillian will have to walk that wire, trying to reach agreements with the PP barons, on matters such as financing or debt relief, and complying with the pacts reached with the Catalan independentists, who are suspicious of ‘coffee for all’ as a political means. .
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Despite her absolutely political profile today, to the point that there are those who believe that Sánchez places her with the latest movement in the showcase as a possible successor to the president in the distant future, Montero took a while to join the PSOE of Seville. For years she was part of the Andalusian governments of Manuel Chaves, José Antonio Griñán and Susana Díaz as an independent, before making the leap in 2018 to the Council of Ministers led by Sánchez. Her first position was in the Ministry of Health, in 2004, as a doctor by profession and entering politics after managing an Andalusian public health hospital.
His relationship with Nadia Calvino It has been “very close”, they have been friends as well as colleagues in the Council of Ministers and Montero has helped, on more than one occasion, to grease relations with the other economic vice president, the Minister of Labor, Yolanda Diaz (Add). Now she will be the one to assume that role alone, also with the partners of the Council of Ministers, to untangle conflicts. Her name was heard as a replacement in the Andalusian PSOE in 2018, when the PP arrived at the Andalusian Government. She has never wanted to return to that role, although as a disciplined militant she puts the party on her back and “whatever I ask of her” the president, who wanted to reserve her to become her squire in Madrid.