<h6><strong>Luis Ayllón</strong></h6> <h4><strong>Diplomat Ildefonso Castro has been, for quite some time, Alberto Núñez Feijóo's main advisor on foreign policy and international affairs, but the leader of the PP has decided to strengthen his position by giving him a management position within the party's organisation. Since Monday, when the Executive Committee formalised the decision, Castro is the PP's Secretary of International Policy.</strong></h4> Ildefonso Castro replaces the MEP Gabriel Mato, who will go on to preside over the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (Eurolat), and joins the PP's Institutional Vice-Secretariat, headed by Esteban González Pons. The new head of the PP's International Affairs is a personal friend of Núñez Feijóo, with whom he shares Galician origins, having been born in Ferrol (La Coruña) in 1964, and who was already one of the main advisors of the leader of the PP when he ran in the general elections on 23 July last year. In fact, when the polls pointed to a future PP Government, his name was put forward to take charge of the Foreign Affairs portfolio. When the expectations of the 'popular' were frustrated by Pedro Sánchez's pacts with various formations, Ildefonso Castro remained at Núñez Feijóo's side and ended up asking for leave as a diplomat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be an advisor to the PP Parliamentary Group in the Congress of Deputies and, mainly, Feijóo's personal advisor on matters related to foreign policy. Last Friday, The Diplomat learned, Núñez Feijóo expressed his desire that he also take charge of the party's International Policy Secretariat, something that he accepted. In recent weeks he has accompanied the leader of the PP on his trips to Athens to see the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriákos Mitsotákis, and to Rome to meet with the President of the Italian Council of Ministers, Giorgia Meloni, as well as the meeting he held this week in Madrid with the Vice President of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas, to explain his party's desire for a European plan to address the migration problem. Ildefonso Castro, who participated last Friday in the debate on the last ten years of foreign policy organized in the Senate by The Diplomat, has a long diplomatic career that began in 1992, and which has led him to occupy various positions both in Spain and abroad. Between 2012 and 2017 he was Mariano Rajoy's main advisor in the Presidency of the Government for International Affairs, as director of the International Department of Moncloa, and from January 2017 to June 2018, State Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He has also been ambassador to Ireland (between October 2018 and October 2022) and in the first part of his diplomatic career he was posted in Equatorial Guinea, Paraguay and Sweden, as well as in Ireland.
