Luis Ayllón
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, is preparing the new senior staff of his Department, after leaving his three current State Secretaries to other three important embassies. The Council of Ministers next Tuesday will make the appointments, according to diplomatic sources.
As The Diplomat reported yesterday, the current State Secretary for Foreign and Global Affairs, Ángeles Moreno, will be the new ambassador in Washington, while Juan Fernández Trigo, State Secretary for Ibero-America, the Caribbean and Spanish in the World, will become ambassador in Lisbon.
For his part, according to reliable sources told The Diplomat, Pascual Navarro, until now State Secretary for the EU, will be the new ambassador in Berlin, replacing Ricardo Martínez, who had been in the post since October 2018, and whom the Government decided to keep in the post at the end of the Spanish Presidency of the EU.
A diplomat since 1987, Pascual Navarro has been Spain’s ambassador to the Czech Republic, advisor for Institutional Affairs of the European Union and director general for Internal Market and other Community Policies in the State Secretariat for the EU. He was also Counsellor at the Permanent Representation of Spain to the EU and Director of the Cabinet of the State Secretariat for the EU. He has served in the Spanish Embassies in Damascus, Copenhagen and Brasilia.
Although it is foreseeable that other ambassadorial appointments for important capitals, such as Rabat or Algiers, will be known shortly, Minister Albares has hastened to give instructions to request the green light from the United States, Portugal and Germany, for the three state secretaries, in order to carry out the reshuffle of his team.
Some names have already been bandied about in the corridors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including those of some politicians, but there is no confirmation of who the new state secretaries will be, who will join Eva Granados, appointed a couple of weeks ago as State Secretary for International Cooperation, replacing Pilar Cancela, who, in turn, became State Secretary for Migration, in the Ministry of Inclusion.
On the other hand, it does not appear that the current Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, Luis Cuesta, will be replaced immediately. Cuesta would be the only member of the senior staff at the Ministry who would remain in place.
On the other hand, according to The Diplomat, the minister intends to issue a call for ambassadorial posts shortly – known in diplomatic jargon as the ’embabombo’ – which will probably not include the most important posts. Between the end of this month and the beginning of the next, the ten ambassadors who were recently appointed to the same number of diplomatic missions, most of them in Africa, will be incorporated after waiting several months because the government is in office.
