The Council of Ministers approved this Tuesday the dismissal of Amanda Meyer as chief of staff of the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, a position in which she had been holding since the formation of the coalition government, in January 2020. Meyer is a member of the PCE and IU, and relations between the minister and her chief of staff suffered from the conflict between the Podemos leadership and those of IU and the PCE, due to the tumultuous development of Por Andalucía’s candidacy for 19-J.
According to ministry sources, who distance the political motive, “it is a change of stage in terms of the cabinet leadership, after the approval of the Sexual Freedom Law in Congress, for this last year and a half of the legislature.” The same sources indicate that Meyer “has been fundamental and essential in the Equality team and in all the legislative projects that the ministry has promoted.”
Amanda Meyer (Sanlúcar de Barrameda, 1977), a Law graduate from the University of Granada and a Master’s in International Law, worked as a lawyer for the Association of Victims of 11M for seven years and was Secretary General of Housing, Rehabilitation and Architecture at the Ministry of Development and Housing of the Andalusian government between 2012 and 2015 —coalition government between PSOE and IU—, and is a member of the federal executive of IU.
This cessation, the result of the tensions unleashed by the new political phase of the space, while waiting for the second vice president and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, Yolanda Díaz, to start her listening process, could not be the last change in the ministries of United We Can, since in several of them members of Podemos, IU and the PCE meet, whose relations are deteriorated by the Andalusian process and the alignment of the last two with the Diaz leadership.
This is the case of the Ministry of Social Rights, which is headed by the Secretary General of Podemos, Ione Belarra, and where the Secretary General of the Communist Party, Enrique Santiago, acts as Secretary of State for Agenda 2030.
As La Vanguardia already explained, the actions of Enrique Santiago and the Andalusian Communist Party during the final hours of negotiating the Andalusian candidacy caused great anger in the Podemos executive, who felt betrayed by the PCE leader.
