In a matter of minutes this Tuesday, the PP went from announcing its support for the nomination of Teresa Ribera as future vice-president of the European Commission to contradicting one of its most powerful leaders, Miguel Tellado, and declared in a statement that it would vote “no” to the Spanish woman occupying one of the most important positions in the next community executive. The contradiction became even more evident when the Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno, personally congratulated Ribera on Twitter.
The sequence of events on Tuesday was dizzying. A few minutes after 1pm, the PP’s parliamentary spokesman, Miguel Tellado, appeared before the media. Asked specifically about the PP’s vote for Teresa Ribera, Tellado responded in his usual tone: “You remember what the PSOE did with Cañete, right? Well, we won’t do that.”
What the PSOE did in 2014 was to vote against the nomination of Miguel Arias Cañete as European Commissioner, because of interests in oil companies that he hid at the beginning. In the end, he received limited support in the European Parliament.
From Tellado’s words, we can only deduce an abstention or a “yes” to Teresa Ribera. In no case would the PP block her nomination. The parliamentary spokesperson who said this publicly is not just any PP leader, but is part of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s Steering Committee that designs the party’s strategy (and which met this week on Tuesday). He has also been a pillar of Feijóo’s hard core for years, when he was appointed secretary general of the PP of Galicia, and participates in all the decision-making of the current state leadership.
A few minutes after the end of its intervention before the media, the PP sent a brief statement to journalists to “transmit a correction regarding the PP’s support for the nomination of Teresa Ribera as European Commissioner, which was discussed today in our round table press”. “The correct title is: ‘The PP will not support Ribera and we will do what the PSOE did with Cañete.’ Sorry for the confusion, responsibility of the press team”, the brief message concludes.
This correction, assumed by the press team, is another example of the lack of coordination that has been installed in the PP’s communication policy, and against which voices are already being heard within the party itself, as reported by elDiario.es last week. The error, whether by Tellado or the technicians, before the round or in the subsequent decision to disavow him, masked the intervention of the Deputy Secretary of Education and Health, Ester Muñoz, who tried to valorize the agreement to approve what is known as the SLA law. The PP has been demanding this pact for months.
The coordination problems within the PP have become more evident, especially in the mouth of someone who was one of Feijóo’s main supporters. The Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno, expressly congratulated Teresa Ribera on his Twitter account. “I hope that times of agreement will come,” he wrote.
Moreno and Ribera have precisely starred in one of the few images of agreement between the government of Pedro Sánchez and an autonomous community of the PP after the pact reached to try to save the Doñana wetland, in danger due to the intensive and sometimes illegal use of the aquifers that supply the national park.
The PP is once again getting confused, as it has done in recent months due to its approaches to Junts, immigration policy, with almost opposing speeches, or as happened with the reform of regional financing, with the ban on questions from journalists included. This Friday, the president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, and Moreno himself go to the Moncloa Palace to meet Pedro Sánchez.
Out of the ordinary
The opposition of Feijóo’s PP to Ribera in Brussels is not common. The general rule among the different groups is that political parties support their compatriots, although there are also exceptions.
This was explained by the PP candidate in the recent European elections, Dolors Montserrat, who, in an interview with Ok Diario last June, said about Ursula von der Leyen: “Her government, the College of Commissioners, which would be the Council of Ministers in Spain, is made up of commissioners from each country. She cannot choose them. The commissioner from each country is chosen by the prime minister of that country. That is why we have Borrell.”
It is true that the PSOE opposed the nomination of the European PP in the EU for the first time in 2014, but until then the main parties had supported each other for positions in the European institutions.
This changed in 2014: the PSOE voted against Jean-Claude Juncker for the presidency of the European Commission. It was the time of the hangover of austerity and austerity policies in Europe dictated by the troika, the emergence of Podemos in Spain, the rise of Syriza in Greece, the growth of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France… And, later, the PSOE opposed the candidacy of Miguel Arias Cañete for the post of European Commissioner and ended up abstaining in the plenary session during the vote for the entire Juncker Commission. And why did the PSOE oppose Cañete?
Cañete’s problem, besides being from the PP in a political context of contestation of austerity policies, in the middle of the abdication of King Juan Carlos, with Pedro Sánchez who has just arrived as secretary general of the PSOE and Mariano Rajoy in the last year of the legislature, was his economic life.
Cañete won (83 votes for, 42 against) in October 2014 in the final vote of the audience of the European Parliament’s parliamentary committee for the Commissioner for Energy and Climate Change Action. And he did so despite the relationships of some of his close associates – such as his son, who eventually resigned, and his brother-in-law – with oil companies as directors; Cañete’s stakes (2.5% and which he sold before taking office) in Dúcar and Petrologis Canarias (both suppliers of fuel for ships) without any possible conflict of interest being detected. Or the bonus that he included in his declaration of assets a day before the examination in the European Parliament, after hiding it for weeks, in the midst of the scandal of the Bárcenas papers and the irregular financing of the PP, which ended in a conviction and a motion of censure by Mariano Rajoy in 2018.
In fact, Cañete was forced to modify at the last minute the declaration of economic interests that he had presented in Brussels to include a bonus that the PP paid him for chairing the Electoral Committee. The former Commissioner for Energy and Climate Change did not indicate in the previous declaration that he had received income from the party for chairing this commission from 2008 to 2011.
The PP, in 2019, barely crushed Josep Borrell in the exams in the European Parliament as High Representative for EU Foreign Policy. But now, in 2024, it threatens to vote against Teresa Ribera and hides behind the precedent of the Socialists with Cañete.
In the current case, unlike this one, there are no known financial interests of Ribera and his family that could pose conflicts of interest with his new European portfolio. Nor is it known that he hides bonuses from his party. Even his party does not have arguments comparable to those of the Bárcenas newspapers.
The PP’s decision does not seem to have much impact on its colleagues in the European judiciary. Among other things, because the European Commission, fundamentally, is a group made up of 27 commissioners sent by each of the 27 EU governments, and this is not easy to change because it affects the unstable balances. Some commissioners are always overthrown, as in 2019 with Emmanuel Macron’s envoy, Sylvie Goulard, who had hidden that she received a sum of 10,000 euros per month from an American think tank, which was added to the investigation by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) for the way she used European funds during her term as an MEP.
But this does not seem to happen with Ribera, because his position is also a commitment to the socialist political family, the second in Europe, in a Commission chaired by Von der Leyen, of the European PP and coming from a country governed by the social democrats. In the same way, these balances will mean that, most likely, the socialists will not vote en bloc against Giorgia Meloni’s vice-president, Raffaele Fitto, because no one has an absolute majority and everyone needs the votes of everyone to keep their seat.
In any case, even before the vote in plenary session of the corresponding parliamentary committee, a vote is held within the coordinators of this committee, with a smaller group of MEPs among whom, at most, there will be one from PP Feijóo. And, in case there is no agreement on the approval of Ribera, it could be decided to send some questions or a second audience.
Abstention with De Guindos
The PSOE also abstained in the European Parliament during the ratification of Luis de Guindos as vice-president of the European Central Bank.
“It will be a critical abstention,” said Adriana Lastra, then number two of the PSOE, about the vote on the report prepared by the coordinators of the groups of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament after De Guindos’ appearance.
The PSOE had previously announced that it would vote against, but it finally leaned towards abstention, after the withdrawal of the Irish candidate, to whom the social democrats had given their support during the first phase of decision on the candidacy for the ECB. The European Parliament opted for Philip Lane rather than De Guindos in this phase.
However, the European Parliament’s position was not binding in this case, unlike the Commissioners’ vote during parliamentary reviews.
