Sánchez is considering creating an ecological vice-presidency to strengthen the Ministry of Teresa Ribera

The acting Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, is considering recovering one of his old unfulfilled electoral promises and granting a vice-presidency in the new Executive to the Minister of Energy Transition, Teresa Ribera. After receiving the King’s commission for the investiture, the president set as “the first axis” of his new Government “the ecological transition, mitigation and adaptation to climate change of our country, which is a country that is clearly affected by the phenomenon of global warming of the planet”.

Sánchez already committed to environmental groups in November 2015 to create “a vice presidency of sustainability” to give “environmental coherence” to all government action. The decision, however, if he achieves the investiture, would require expanding the current number of vice presidencies and also creating another economic one in addition to the traditional political one. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had in one of his governments three vice presidents: María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, Elena Salgado and Manuel Chaves.

Socialist sources say that Ribera has promoted since her time as an advisor to the party to raise the rank of the Ministry before the transversality that its decisions demand and that this has been transferred to the acting president of the Government on several occasions. For its part, official sources from the Ministry of Ecological Transition point out to this newspaper that Ribera maintains, in fact, that “the ecological transition -not only the energy one- must be transversal”, but that he has not said “neither in public nor in private that he should have the rank of vice-presidency”.

It is obvious that he has maintained it since at least 2015 when he advised Sánchez on climate change. One example is that she herself accompanied the then socialist leader on November 13, 2015 when he committed to the spokesmen of the environmental groups to create the aforementioned vice presidency of sustainability in the Government if he won the elections. “Ribera clearly supported the measure at the meeting,” say attendees.

“We are aware that the environmental organizations want there to be a vice presidency,” they remark in the Ministry, although they clarify that in the previous legislature the minister was able to carry out the so-called Energy and Climate Plan without the rank of vice president and despite its transversal nature “with an interministerial working group that has worked.”

Ribera is making statements these days with a perspective of continuity and even rising power. For example, on the 5th, he ridiculed the president of Repsol, Antonio Brufau, who has criticized his climate plan as “quixotic” and endangering Spanish industry with excessively ambitious objectives, as if Spain could do something on its own in the global fight against emissions. “I was surprised by Brufau’s words. I had him as a modern man who understood the times and the challenges of an energy company that has a few important questions ahead (…) Denying reality is not the smartest thing,” Ribera said in an interview on Radio Nacional.

In Moncloa they support the minister and refer to the words of Sánchez in the Círculo de Economía in Sitges, a day after Brufau’s statements, in which the President of the Government addressed Catalan businessmen: “The European Commission has said this week that the National Energy and Climate Plan prepared by Spain, by the Government of Spain these last 10 months, is the most complete of those presented by the 28 Member States. The most complete. We are not going to apologize for being ambitious in this matter (…) the complicity of a dynamic business sector such as the one you represent is essential. So, I openly ask for your commitment.”

Ribera argued that Brufau, president of the first Spanish oil company since 2005, must “change the chip” and refocus his company towards another strategic line other than leading the fuels.

Sánchez begins this week the formal negotiations to get support for the investiture with these four priorities: “ecological transition, promotion of the digitalization of our economy, inequality and Europe”. And he says them in this order.

Source: El Mundo