“We are not going to stop, we are going to go all out,” Pedro Sánchez announced last week in a debate on the state of the nation with which he wanted to give the government and the legislature a boost. And now he also executes a notable boost to the PSOE, to face the new electoral cycle, with a profound remodeling of the socialist organization chart. As socialist sources have confirmed to La Vanguardia, the Minister of Finance and Public Administration, María Jesús Montero, will be the new deputy general secretary of the PSOE, and therefore number two in the party's command ladder, replacing Adriana Lastra, who resigned last Monday from his post and precipitated the replacement of the Ferraz leadership.
Another of the great changes that have been confirmed today is that of the new PSOE speakers, with Patxi López as the new spokesperson for the socialist group in Congress and Minister Pilar Alegría as the new spokesperson for the Ferraz executive, who will appear every Monday to account for the debates and agreements that occur within the party. The Catalan minister Miquel Iceta also joins the leadership of the PSOE, in his case as the new secretary of Democratic Memory and Secularism, which was the position held by the Basque Patxi López in the executive. All these appointments will be ratified next Saturday, in the meeting of the federal committee of the PSOE.
Sánchez will also incorporate María Jesús Montero into a new hard core in Ferraz, a kind of socialist sanhedrin, in which other ministers such as Félix Bolaños, Pilar Alegría, Isabel Rodríguez or Miquel Iceta will also have a seat, along with the chief of staff of the president of the Government in Moncloa, Óscar López, who therefore takes command in the square although he is not part of the executive. The parliamentary spokespersons, Patxi López and Eva Granados, will also have a seat on this new steering committee, as well as the secretary of organization of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, who has been confirmed in the position. In this way, the connection and coordination between Moncloa, the Government, the leadership of the PSOE and the parliamentary groups is intended to be total and absolute.
Montero (Seville, 1966) will combine her new organic responsibility as deputy general secretary of the PSOE with the Treasury portfolio, which she assumed in June 2018 in the first Sánchez Executive. She was also a spokesperson for the Government from January 2020, a position in which she, however, was replaced by Isabel Rodríguez in July 2021.
Montero's credit highlights, above all, the approval of two consecutive general state budgets, those for the years 2021 and 2022, with a large parliamentary majority, despite the minority that adds the government coalition between the PSOE and United We Can . Montero's political career is extensive, and he was also part of the governments of the Andalusian Government of José Antonio Griñán and Susana Díaz.
A Man and a Woman. A veteran and an emerging figure. Pedro Sánchez has already communicated to those elected his proposals to assume the new singing voice of the PSOE, beyond his own. These are the exlehendakari Patxi López (Barakaldo, 1959), who will be the new spokesperson for the socialist group in Congress, and the Minister of Education and Vocational Training, Pilar Alegría (Zaragoza, 1977), who will be the new spokesperson for the federal executive of the PSOE.
The Basque Patxi López will thus replace the Canarian Héctor Gómez as spokesperson in Congress, who has held this position since, in September of last year, he relieved Adriana Lastra, who last Monday announced her resignation as deputy secretary general of the PSOE.
“It is an honor and an exciting challenge”, Patxi López pointed out before his new responsibility. “From the dialogue I will work to reach agreements that protect the middle and working class of this country”, he has promised.
Pilar Alegría, from Aragon, will take over as spokesperson for the socialist federal executive from Andalusian Felipe Sicilia, a leader very close to Lastra who took office at the last PSOE congress, held in Valencia last October.
The Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta, will join the federal executive of the PSOE as Secretary of Democratic Memory and Secularism, a position in which he will relieve Patxi López, who in turn will be the new spokesperson for the socialist group in Congress. This has been advanced by socialist sources to La Vanguardia. With the arrival of Iceta, the Ferraz executive gains more political weight to face the new electoral cycle in Spain, according to Pedro Sánchez's claim.
Iceta will thus be the seventh minister of the Government of Sánchez to take a seat in the federal executive of the PSOE, where the head of the Education portfolio, Pilar Alegría, who will now be the new spokesperson for Ferraz, in addition to Félix Bolaños, Isabel Rodríguez, María José Montero, Carolina Darias and Diana Morant.
Previously Minister of Territorial Policy, and of Culture since July 2021, the veteran Iceta (Barcelona, 1960) has already accumulated a long political career. He is currently the president of the PSC, a formation of which he was the first secretary between 2014 and 2021, and to his credit is the recomposition of Catalan socialism in the face of the development of the independence process in Catalonia.
Socialist sources have also confirmed to La Vanguardia that the socialist spokesperson in the Senate, the Catalan Eva Granados, will remain in her position in the new organization chart of the PSOE that Pedro Sánchez is designing and that it will be ratified in the federal committee of the party that will be held this Saturday in Ferraz. Granados (Barcelona, 1975) was deputy first secretary of the PSC and spokesperson for the Catalan socialists in Parliament.
