Nadia Calviño is the technocrat par excellence, as competent as she is demanding, who after working her way to the second line of the European Commission made the jump to politics with Pedro Sánchez, in governments in which she has contributed the mantra from European orthodoxy to left-wing executives. When she landed in Madrid at the front line of politics, she was surprised by the virulence of attacks she was not used to, but she adapted quickly, with increasingly sharp parliamentary replies.
Now Calviño will return to her European home, her second professional home, where she was already Deputy Director General of Competition, Financial Services and Director General of Budgets of the European Commission. From her time as a community official, we remember the precision and quality of the briefings in which she demonstrated her mastery of the subjects and which did not foreshadow her leap into politics at all. He was the perfect image of the Brussels bureaucrat, competent and seemingly removed from the political noise.
But she made the leap, she did it with a Sánchez who saw in her a formula to give economic respectability to Brussels. “He is one of ours”, thought the Commission. They speak the same language, share the obsession with the community method and the translation of any project into milestones and objectives. Everything systematic, everything in Excel.
The landing in the executive was gradual. She started as Minister of the Economy and combined her ideas of sustaining the business fabric with a progressive positioning in favor of approaches for social inclusion, environmental sustainability and gender equality, until taking her to the first vice-presidency of the Government. A position in which he controls the economic area and also from which he has been involved in loud clashes with the current second vice-president, Yolanda Díaz. Two queens with radically different profiles and ideologies that don’t quite coincide.
With this appointment, it is fulfilled that the third is the good. Along the way, Calviño has starred in two failed attempts to occupy top international positions. The first was his candidacy for the presidency of the IMF in 2019, and the second, in 2020, when he did not get the presidency of the Eurogroup by a single vote, although he had the explicit support of the two big , Germany and France. That time, it suffered from the rebellion of the small countries. This time they didn’t slow him down.
“We have Nadia Calviño and they have… no one”, said Sánchez in the electoral campaign to discredit the economic policy of the PP. Now Calviño is leaving, and his replacement is complex, because he is losing someone whom Brussels considered one of its own, who had gained respectability and influence in the international economic sphere and who compensated for the leftist tendencies of the executive
Meanwhile, in the latest remodeling, he has managed to turn his ministry into a kind of Tecolandia, because it combines Commerce with the previous powers, which causes the satisfaction of the very capable Tecos, the commercial technicians and economists of the State. Here again Calviño “is one of ours”, and also his restlessness in view of the inevitable relief.