“Here I am!”, announced this Saturday the Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, at the PSOE event in which she gave the starting signal for her career to run for mayor of the city where she was born in May 1965, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. “I want to start a very beautiful project. Here in the city everything began, here I was born, here I have lived throughout my life, here I raised my family and built my future as a public employee and began in politics. If I am anything, I owe it to this city and its people. It all started here and it all comes back here”, highlighted a very emotional Darias, in the presence of the Minister of Finance and Deputy Secretary General of the PSOE, María Jesús Montero, the President of the Canary Islands and leader of the Canarian Socialists, Ángel Víctor Torres, or the mayor of the town, Augusto Hidalgo.
“With all my responsibility, today I announce my candidacy for the mayoral primaries of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria”, Darias proclaimed to loud applause in the Alfredo Krauss auditorium. The minister has assured that she is thus at the service of her city. “To give the city everything the city has given me. Here I am, to do it ”, she pointed out.
Darias jumped in January 2020 from the Ministry of Economy of the Canary Islands government to the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Public Function, signed by Pedro Sánchez. And barely a year later, in January 2021, she replaced Salvador Illa as Minister of Health, a position in which she will remain, as planned, until shortly before the campaign for the municipal elections in May begins. “My gratitude to President Sánchez is infinite, I have already told him,” she acknowledged. “I feel great pride in being part of a government that moves towards the future, that stops at nothing, always with determination, commitment and courage”, she underlined. First in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the third wave of which she had to face as Minister of Health, and now in the face of the energy and inflationary crisis as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Carolina Darias thus becomes the second socialist minister of the Pedro Sánchez Executive who announces her leap into the electoral arena before the appointment with the municipal polls on May 28, 2023, after the head of Industry, Reyes Maroto, confirmed the last Monday that she will be the PSOE candidate for mayor of Madrid.
The expectations, however, are very different for both. Darias will choose to direct the Las Palmas City Council without major complications, which since 2015 has been governed by the socialist mayor Augusto Hidalgo, who will now be the candidate for the presidency of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria. Maroto, on the other hand, has much more difficult electoral prospects against Mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida, since the PSOE obtained with Pepu Hernández in 2019 its worst historical record in the municipality of Madrid, with only 13.7% of the votes, sinking to fourth position, behind Más Madrid, the Popular Party and Ciudadanos. Four years ago, the PSOE remained the leading force in Las Palmas, with 31.7% of the vote.
