Nadia Calviño is the technocrat par excellence, as competent as she is demanding, who after making her way in the second line of the European Commission, made the leap into politics with the help of Pedro Sánchez, in governments in which she has contributed the mantra of European orthodoxy to left-wing executives. Upon her landing in Madrid on the front line of politics, she was initially surprised by the virulence of attacks to which she was not accustomed, but she soon began to adapt to the new habitat, which was seen in her increasingly steely parliamentary and its best development in the dialectical arena.
Now, Nadia 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. She will now have to preside over the European Investment Bank (EIB), considered the investment arm of the European Union. From her time as a community official we remember the precision and quality of her briefings, in which she demonstrated her mastery of the issues and which in no way foreshadowed her leap onto the political scene. She was the perfect image of the Brussels bureaucrat, as competent as she was seemingly removed from the political noise.
But she made the leap, she did it with the help of a Sánchez who saw in her a formula to give economic respectability to Brussels. “He is one of us,” they thought in the European Commission. They speak the same language, they share the obsession with the community method and the translation of any project into milestones and objectives. Everything systematic, everything in Excel. See, if not, the structure for monitoring compliance with the recovery plan, agreed between the European Commission and the Ministry of Calviño, which also served to form the model that has been applied to the plans of the rest of the countries. A list of milestones and objectives to meet before agreeing to a new disbursement. A system that shines both for its exhaustiveness and suffers for its difficult application.
The landing in the Executive was gradual. She started as Minister of Economy and combined her ideas of supporting 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 from which she controls the economic area and also from which she has had loud clashes with the current second vice president, Yolanda Díaz. Two queens with radically different profiles and ideologies that do not coincide too much. A tension that lasts until the end, with the current confrontation regarding the reform of unemployment benefits.
With this appointment, the saying that the third time is the charm is fulfilled. Along the way, Calviño has made two frustrated attempts to occupy front-line international positions. The first was his candidacy for the presidency of the IMF in 2019, from which he withdrew after an unfavorable vote to choose the European candidate for the position. And the second, in 2020, when he did not win the presidency of the Eurogroup by a single vote, despite having the explicit support of the big two, Germany and France. On that occasion, he suffered the rebellion of the small countries and, in passing, it became clear that in the EU the big ones rule, but they are not all-powerful. On this occasion, Calviño has once again counted on the greats and has avoided significant opposition from the rest, despite facing a major rival, the Danish Margrethe Vestager, supposedly the inspiration for the Borgen series at the time.
“We have Nadia and they have… no one,” Sánchez said in the electoral campaign to discredit the PP’s economic policy. Now Nadia is leaving, with no scheduled date yet, and with a substitute in the air. She presents herself such as the occupation of an important position in Europe, which is true, but it also opens up a gap for Sánchez in his government that he will have to fill, although the president points out that it will not be immediate, but rather a process “of a few months.” It is true that his replacement is complex, because he loses someone that Brussels considered one of its own, who had gained respectability and influence in the international economic sphere, and who offset leftist tendencies of the Executive.
Meanwhile, in the last remodeling, Calviño has managed to turn his ministry into a kind of “Tecolandia”, by joining Commerce to the previous competencies, which causes the satisfaction of the very qualified Tecos, the commercial technicians and economists of the state, here another Calviño perhaps “is one of us”, and also his concern about the inevitable replacement.
