The PSOE has appointed a commission of seven people to negotiate the investiture of Pedro Sánchez with the groups. They are prominent members of the party such as María Jesús Montero, Félix Bolaños, Santos Cerdán and Pilar Alegría, and the deputies Óscar Puente -former mayor of Valladolid- and José Ramón Gómez Besteiro and the secretary of International Policy and Cooperation of the PSOE, Hana Jalloul.
Furthermore, for issues that affect Catalonia, an issue that will be key for the investiture since it will depend on the support of two pro-independence parties, Junts and ERC, the acting president of the Government and candidate will coordinate closely with the first secretary of the PSC. , Salvador Illa, with whom he has maintained a close relationship since he was Minister of Health during the covid pandemic.
With a degree in Medicine, Montero began her political career linked to health management in various hospitals until Manuel Chaves appointed her Deputy Minister of Health of the Junta de Andalucía and later as a counselor. Together with José Antonio Griñán she assumed the Treasury and Public Administration portfolio until 2018 with Susana Díaz. After the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy, Pedro Sánchez already had her for the Ministry of Finance, where he replaced the popular Cristóbal Montoro. After Sánchez’s inauguration in 2020, she also assumed the position of spokesperson for the Government, but in 2021 the PSOE leader remodeled the party and the Executive by giving her public service powers and removing her as spokesperson. In 2022 she became deputy general secretary of the PSOE, replacing Adriana Lastra.
She has a diploma in Teaching from the University of Zaragoza. Between 2008 and 2015 she was a deputy in the Congress of Deputies, in the IX and of the Parliament of Aragon from 2015 to 2019. In 2019 she was the PSOE candidate in the Zaragoza municipal elections and was the candidate with the most votes. In addition, she was a delegate of the central government in Aragon from February 2020 to July 2021, when she assumed her portfolio in Pedro Sánchez’s cabinet. In 2022 she assumed the spokesperson for the PSOE and replaced Felipe Sicilia.
A lawyer by profession, he started working at the Bank of Spain in 2005 (he is on leave). Since 2008 he has held various organic positions in the regional and federal PSOE. In 2018, Pedro Sánchez appointed him general secretary of the Presidency, a position in which he was ratified in 2020 after the investiture. As such, he was in charge of coordinating the process device for the exhumation, transfer and reburial of the remains of the dictator Francisco Franco in 2019 and was commissioned to prepare the structure of the first coalition government since the second republic. He also led the negotiations with the PP in 2021 to renew various State institutions, a function that he continued as minister replacing Carmen Calvo in the remodeling that Sánchez undertook in June 2021. He came to agree on the renewal of the TC, the Court of Accounts, the Ombudsman and the Spanish Data Protection Agency, but not the General Council of the Judiciary, which has been in office for almost five years due to the blockade of the PP. In relation to Catalonia, Bolaños has led the dialogue table with the Executive of Pere Aragonès, in which an agreement was reached to overcome the judicialization of the process and reinforce the guarantees and another agreement for the protection and promotion of the Catalan language .
The Navarrese Santos Cerdán (Milagro, 1969) is one of Pedro Sánchez’s most trusted men. He currently occupies a key position in the party structure. He is the organization secretary in Ferrán. He is also president of the Pablo Iglesias Foundation and has been a deputy in the Parliament of Navarra as well as the Congress of Deputies. Sánchez also trusted him as Secretary of Territorial Coordination of the PSOE between 2017 and 2021. He completed second-degree vocational training and is a technician in Industrial Electronics. As stated on the socialists’ website, in addition to his political background, he has spent his professional career as a maintenance and industrial technician in various companies in the agri-food sector, such as Iberfruta or Bonduelle. Likewise, he had been organizational secretary in the Regional Executive of the PSN-PSOE and was a councilor in his town from 2007 to 2015.
A PSOE activist since 1990, he became mayor of Valladolid in 2015, obtaining the lowest number of votes in the history of the PSOE in the Castilian-Leonese capital and in second position behind the PP in his second attempt after agreeing with Podemos and IU. In 2019, the people of Valladolid endorsed his government, once again giving victory to the PSOE, something that had not happened since 1987. As an anecdote, Puente faced the last municipal campaign in poor conditions. Two weeks after starting, he suffered a fall while visiting the works in the Parquesol neighborhood that he himself had promoted and broke his quadriceps femoris, which is why he had to undergo surgery. After losing the mayor’s office despite winning, he had no qualms about accepting it although he left a sentence that sounded like exculpation. “The national dynamic has overwhelmed governments like ours, which I believe were well valued by citizens. “It is a very good result, but it is insufficient.” Feijóo reminded him of this in his reply, seeing in the phrase an indictment of Sánchez. Surprisingly, he was in charge of giving the reply to Alberto Núñez Feijóo in the recent failed investiture debate, demonstrating a biting verb that outraged the PP.
José Ramón Gómez Besteiro was the first socialist deputy in Congress to use the co-official languages ??from the lectern, in this legislature. He spoke in Galician. Born in Lugo in 1967, this lawyer, who graduated in Law from the University of Santiago de Compostela, has held various positions in the administration. He was president of the Lugo Provincial Council between 2007 and 2015, general secretary of the PSdeG-PSOE between 2013 and 2016, and Government Delegate in Galicia.
Daughter of a Lebanese father and a Spanish mother, the former deputy of the Madrid Assembly Hana Jalloul Muro was born in Zaragoza and grew up between Sabiñánigo and Madrid. She has a doctorate from the Complutense University of Madrid and has worked as an associate professor for the Carlos III University of Madrid. She is an expert in international terrorism. She was a deputy in the Madrid Assembly in the last two terms. She was a deputy for a few months from 2019 to 2020, when she held the Secretary of State for Migration in the Government of Pedro Sánchez, until 2021, since in the early regional elections of 2021 she was the number two of the PSOE and ended up as spokesperson in the Madrid parliament after the resignation of the candidate, Ángel Gabilondo. She currently holds the position of Secretary of International Policy and Development Cooperation of the PSOE.
Graduated in Philosophy from the UB, he became the organizational secretary of the PSC with Miquel Iceta, during the hardest years of the ‘procés’. With Sánchez’s second term, the president chose him as Minister of Health, so he had to deal with the covid pandemic shortly after taking office. The success of that company and the vaccination system was enough for Iceta to propose him to return to Catalonia and be the PSC candidate for the 2020 elections. The idea was to take advantage of the former minister’s pull to win over the independence movement and take advantage of the good relationship that he cultivated with the President of the Government in that crisis. Illa won the 2021 Catalan elections, although the entente between ERC, Junts and the CUP prevented him from governing. In the opposition, he designed a strategy of political normalization, forging as many agreements as possible with the two main pro-independence parties, which, together with the breakup of the Government due to the departure of Junts a year ago, has given him good results. Thus, the PSC has reissued the 2020 electoral victory in the last two elections held in Catalonia, the municipal elections in May and the general elections in July. In the latter, the 19 deputies harvested have been vital so that the victory of the PP has not given Alberto Núñez Feijóo to be invested, and instead allows Sánchez to reissue the progressive coalition government.
