The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, defended this Wednesday the appointment of José Luis Escriva, current Minister of Digital Transformation and Civil Service, as the new governor of the Bank of Spain: “He is one of the best economists this country has. One of the greatest experts in monetary policy. And that is why the Bank of Spain gains a great governor and the Spanish economy gains prestige at European and international level.”
Sánchez, however, has been critical in the past of the appointment of people with political backgrounds to independent bodies or regulatory agencies. Especially with the Bank of Spain. In 2014, immersed in the campaign for the PSOE primaries, Sánchez was very critical of the appointment of Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez to this post under the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Fernández Ordoñez was Secretary of State for Finance and Budget until a few months before his appointment in July 2016.
“I recognize that we made a mistake in the last legislature, that of appointing the former political leader Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordoñez as governor of the Bank of Spain,” said Sánchez, then a grassroots deputy in the Congress of Deputies, in an interview on TVE.
“I also believe that the government made a mistake in appointing a PP activist as president of the Constitutional Court,” said Sánchez, referring to the election by Mariano Rajoy’s government of Francisco Pérez de los Cobos as head of the court, a PP member between 2008 and 2011.
“I think we have to face a process of institutional regeneration,” he said, before adding: “Perhaps these things that I say do not suit the current leadership of the Socialist Party, but I think it is important that we regenerate the institutions and that we place the political debate where it should be, that is, in Parliament, in the government and in the rest of the institutions, because those who are in charge of these institutions, of these organizations, must be people of recognized prestige, whatever the ideas they have of the regulators.
