María Jesús Montero, Sánchez's squire who is promoted to vice president to solve the puzzle of regional financing

María Jesús Montero will once again be Minister of Finance for the third consecutive time and this time, with the additional position of fourth vice president. Since Pedro Sánchez took the Presidency of the Government from Mariano Rajoy in the 2018 motion of censure, the president has always trusted her to direct the country's fiscal and budgetary policy.. A task that Montero has combined since July of last year with the management of Ferraz's affairs as 'number two' of the PSOE.

After a particularly turbulent legislature marked by a pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the Minister of Finance faces a new mandate with her sights set on the puzzle of regional financing and the return to fiscal discipline in the European Union.

The story of how a Sevillian doctor ended up in charge of the fourth largest public treasury in the euro begins in the Sevillian neighborhood of Triana in 1966.. Daughter of teachers and politicized from a young age, she began management in the healthcare world in the nineties, where she held management positions in two Sevillian hospitals.. In the 2000s she jumped into party politics, first as number two in Health of the Board and then as a counselor in the sector, a position she would hold between 2004 and 2012.. In 2013 she would leave health management to make the leap to the Treasury Department, which she led for five years until Sánchez took her to Madrid.

In Andalusia, Montero forged her reputation as a skilled negotiator, a virtue that over time has become her great political asset.. His role in the conversations with Unidas Podemos was key to forming the coalition. “The number of times I have gone to fight with you about so many things and you have ended up disarming me with your sympathy,” Pablo Iglesias would admit to him the day he left the Council of Ministers to run in the Madrid elections.

That ability to reach agreements would give Sánchez the confidence to be part of the PSOE negotiating teams for some of the most important agreements of the legislature.. Her last service has been the complicated pacts to achieve the inauguration of the president, where the minister has played a prominent role.

Those who know her say that Montero is an affable and close person with her collaborators, but also with representatives of other political forces.. A private tone that contrasts with the harshness of some of his public interventions, often riddled with harsh reproaches of the Popular Party.

Sánchez opted for her as minister spokesperson in 2020, a job that she had to perform during the hardest moments of the pandemic and that she handed over to Isabel Rodríguez in mid-2021.. After removing her spokesperson, the president reinforced her organic role in the PSOE – to which she has been affiliated for 16 years – and appointed her deputy secretary general in July 2022.

Montero is one of the few ministers who has always had a seat in the Council of Ministers since Sánchez governed. Only Nadia Calviño (Economy), Margarita Robles (Defense), Fernando Grande-Marlaska (Interior), Luis Planas (Agriculture) and Teresa Ribera (Ecological Transition) have systematically repeated with the socialist leader.

Budgets, fiscal discipline and autonomy

After a turbulent legislature marked by the fiscal response to a pandemic, European recovery funds and then a war in Ukraine, Montero now faces a mandate marked by the return of Brussels discipline and an even more complex balance of parliamentary forces.

The first challenge that your department will have to address will be the approval of General State Budgets for 2024 that are capable of bringing at least seven different parties (PSOE, Sumar, ERC, PNV, EH Bildu and Junts) to agreement and that convince to the European Union. Montero has slipped on previous occasions that the Treasury has been working privately for months to prepare the new public accounts.

The second challenge will be to convince the European Union that Spanish public finances are sustainable. The Government committed in the last legislature to reduce the deficit to 3% of GDP in 2024, an objective that will be difficult to combine with the social agenda that the president intends to deploy during his renewed mandate. In the European section, it is still not clear whether the Treasury will propose a more in-depth tax reform or will be content with the package of measures that accompanied the 2023 budgets (including the three special taxes on large fortunes, banking and energy).

But the most complex challenge that a priori awaits Montero in the next four years is the reform of the regional financing system.. A pending issue since 2014 that has come to the fore again after the compromises reached between the PSOE and the Catalan nationalists. On this front, the minister will have to draw up a program to forgive part of the regional debt in the hands of the State.

But the real challenge will be to design a new system for distributing regional resources that leaves the current one behind.. A tricky issue in which Montero will have to deal with the autonomous power of the PP, which governs in eleven of the 17 autonomies, and with the pressure of Junts, which claims a special status with its own estate in the style of the Basque Country and Navarra.