Los renovados 'maitines' de Sánchez restonizan a la Moncloa con Ferraz

To start the week, the appointment with Pedro Sánchez is on Mondays, at 9 a.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
06 November 2022 Sunday 16:32
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Los renovados 'maitines' de Sánchez restonizan a la Moncloa con Ferraz

To start the week, the appointment with Pedro Sánchez is on Mondays, at 9 a.m., at the Moncloa Palace. The matins meetings barely last an hour, because the agenda is always tight, with the renewed objective of greasing the coordination between the president's cabinet and the leadership of the Government and the PSOE, analyzing the current political situation, defining strategies and lines of attack and defense, in addition to avoiding cacophonies and dysfunctions. In the opinion of those summoned to these new meetings, with an efficiency already demonstrated: "The connection is now better than ever", they highlight La Vanguardia.

In order for Moncloa and Ferraz to get back on the same wavelength, they say in the leadership of the PSOE, the signing of veteran leader Óscar López as director of Sánchez's cabinet was essential - who, among other positions, was secretary of organization of the party during the mandate of Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba–, already in July of last year. "Before there was no way," they allege. And the replacements undertaken in the direction of the PSOE, already in July of this year, ensure that they successfully completed the operation of retuning Moncloa with Ferraz. A matter of vital importance, as they consider, to face the final stretch of the legislature and the electoral cycle of the next course.

After the socialist electoral hecatombs in Madrid and Andalusia, and the successive replacements in the leadership of Moncloa, the Government and Ferraz, culminated last July – and therefore without Carmen Calvo, Iván Redondo, José Luis Ábalos or Adriana Lastra, but neither with ministers or leaders of United We Can, as was the case during the time of Pablo Iglesias in the Executive, Pedro Sánchez recovered these Monday morning meetings with a completely renewed lineup of members.

Twelve men and women thus make up the new hard core that Sánchez cites at matins, in a summoning formula that José María Aznar already inherited from Manuel Fraga in the Popular Party in 1990, and that led them to Moncloa, where José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero or Mariano Rajoy kept them in turn with different intermittence and compositions.

The Monday analysis and coordination appointments with the Prime Minister are now attended by five ministers, all of them members of the Ferraz executive. Specifically, they are the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños; the person in charge of the Treasury and now also the deputy general secretary of the PSOE, María Jesús Montero; the Minister for Territorial Policy and Government spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez; the head of the Education portfolio and spokesperson for the Ferraz executive, Pilar Alegría; and the Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta.

Sánchez's chief of staff at Moncloa, Óscar López, also sits at these matins with the PSOE's secretary of organization, Santos Cerdán, and Ferraz's secretary of strategy and electoral action, Javier Izquierdo. Also attending these meetings are the new spokesperson for the socialist group in Congress, Patxi López, and the spokeswoman for the Senate, Eva Granados.

And the organization chart of this new hard core of Sánchez is completed by the Secretary of State for Communication, Francesc Vallès, and the director of communication of the PSOE, Ion Antolín.

Despite the fact that in Ferraz they admit that now the connection with the Government is already "perfectly greased" - together with the matins in Moncloa, and the meeting of the federal executive of the PSOE, also on Mondays, during the week another endless number of appointments– they also assume, however, that there may still be some coordination gaps through which thorny issues escape that end up exploding in public debate, as happened with the recent internal dispute over the Trans law. "It got out of hand," they acknowledge. Every rule has its exception.