The Diplomat
The Council of Ministers yesterday approved, as planned, the appointments of three new State Secretaries in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Diego Martínez Balío (Foreign and Global Affairs); Fernando Sampedro (European Union) and Susana Sumelzo (Latin America, the Caribbean and Spanish in the World).
Sergio Cuesta was also appointed Director of the Foreign Affairs Minister’s Office, to fill the vacancy left by Diego Martínez Belío.
The appointments join that of the State Secretary for International Cooperation, Eva Granados, which took place a couple of weeks ago. The Foreign Affairs Minister, José Manuel Albares, thus renews the top management of his Ministry, in which only the Department’s Under-Secretary, Luis Cuesta, remains.
This is the second time that, of the four State Secretaries, three are occupied by politicians (Sampedro, Sumelzo and Granados) and one by a diplomat (Martínez Belío).
The first time this happened was in 2008 and 2009, also with a Socialist government, on this occasion that of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and with Miguel Ángel Moratinos -a diplomat, like Albares- at the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
At that time, three other PSOE members coincided as State Secretaries: in the European Union, Diego López Garrido, Professor of Constitutional Law and former spokesperson of the Socialist Parliamentary Group in Congress; in Ibero-America, Trinidad Jiménez, who had been a member of parliament and Secretary of International Relations for the PSOE and would later become Minister of Foreign Affairs; and in International Cooperation, Soraya Rodríguez, member of parliament and spokesperson of the Socialist Parliamentary Group, who, years later, would move to Ciudadanos. In those years, the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs was the diplomat Bernardino León.
In the governments of Felipe González, José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy there were also political State Secretaries, but there were never more than those from the diplomatic career.
The appointment of politicians to these high-level posts is not usually welcomed by diplomats, but it is something they have come to accept, possibly better than the choice of people who are not part of the diplomatic career to head some embassies. Recently, complaints have been voiced publicly by the Association of Spanish Diplomats (ADE), following the appointment of former ministers Miquel Iceta and Héctor Gómez to head the Permanent Representations to UNESCO and the UN, respectively, who could be joined in the OECD by the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Ximo Puig.
