Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares was confirmed as head of the Foreign Ministry by President Pedro Sánchez on November 20, but this does not mean that there is continuity at the helm of his ministry. As El Confidencial reports and diplomatic sources confirm, Albares intends to thoroughly renew the team leading Spanish diplomacy, which includes his four foreign ministers.
The first replacement occurred on December 5, when the Council of Ministers appointed Eva Granados Galiano as the new Secretary of State for International Cooperation, replacing Pilar Cancela Rodríguez. In the past, this position was reserved for a political leader of the ruling party and not a diplomat. On this occasion, a Catalan socialist – who was PSOE spokesman in the Senate and vice-president of Parliament – replaced a Galician socialist.
More complicated is the change of the remaining state secretariats, which are staffed by diplomats: Ángeles Moreno of the Department of Foreign and Global Affairs; Pascual Navarro for the European Union; and Juan Fernández Trigo for Latin America and the Caribbean and Spanish in the World. Albares has made reservations for all embassies at the highest level, but this requires the appropriate pácet (authorization) to be requested from the host country, so the process will continue well into the month of January, when the next day, the 31st, the Spanish EU Council Presidency begins.
The target of the current foreign ministers will be the embassies in the United States, Germany and Portugal, whose current owners – Santiago Cabanas (Washington), Ricardo Martínez Vázquez (Berlin) and Marta Betanzos (Lisbon) – were appointed between August and October 2018, as The current High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy of the EU, Josep Borrell, was Foreign Minister, so they have been in this position for more than five years. Rafael Dezcallar, ambassador to Beijing (China), has also been in office for more than five years, while Ricardo Díez-Hotchleitner breaks all records: he has been ambassador to Rabat (Morocco) for more than eight years and turned 70 last June , retirement age of civil servants. Albares asked him to continue in this position due to political uncertainty and the desire to seal a diplomatic reconciliation with Morocco.
Those who do not require authorization are the ambassadors of multilateral organizations. President Sánchez took the opportunity to send two former ministers, Héctor Gómez for Industry and Miquel Iceta for Culture, as permanent representatives to the United Nations and UNESCO. In diplomatic circles it is taken for granted that the former president of the Valencian Generalitat, Ximo Puig, will be the future ambassador to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), based in Paris.
Of the three foreign ministers to be replaced, Ángeles Moreno is the only one from the previous team. In February 2020, she was appointed Secretary of State for Cooperation by then Minister Arancha González Laya. When Albares replaced him, Moreno became Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs. She has a law degree and has been in the diplomatic career since 1994. She served in the Spanish embassies in Russia, Panama, Egypt, Sierra Leone, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
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Fernández Trigo was also appointed by Albares in July 2021. With a law degree, he began his diplomatic career in 1986, working in the Spanish representation to the European Union as well as in the embassies of Morocco, Vietnam, the United Nations and Venezuela's executive director. He was ambassador to Haiti, Paraguay and Cuba, where he was stationed when Albares called him.
The last person to take over the leadership of the ministry was the Secretary of State for the EU, Pascual Ignacio Navarro Ríos. He was appointed in December 2021 after his predecessor, Juan González-Barba, asked to be replaced due to his disagreements with the minister. After graduating in law, he has been a member of the diplomatic service since 1987. He worked at the Spanish embassies in Damascus, Copenhagen and Brasilia and as an advisor at the Permanent Mission of Spain to the European Union. Before his promotion to Foreign Minister, he was Ambassador to the Czech Republic and Secretary General of the European Union.
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