PP proposes that Academy in Rome and Instituto Cervantes be attached to Culture Ministry after the “reputational damage caused by Foreign Ministry”

Eduardo González The People's Party (PP) Parliamentary Group has asked the Government to report on the alleged irregularities committed during the selection process for the appointment of the new director of the Spanish Academy in Rome and has asked the Ministry of Culture if it has "considered" the possibility of requesting the affiliation of this academy and the Cervantes Institute "given the serious reputational damage caused by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during this term." At the end of April, the Government appointed Spanish professor and researcher María Teresa Méndez Baiges to the position of director of the Spanish Academy in Rome, which reports to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Méndez Baiges thus took over a position that had required up to two calls for applications. On April 25, 2024, the Official State Gazette (BOE) published an initial call for applications, but the new team at the Undersecretariat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs subsequently warned that the call for applications contained technical errors. For this reason, on October 15, it adopted a Resolution, published in the BOE on October 21, correcting the initial resolution of April 8. As a result, according to sources familiar with the procedure, one of the applicants filed an appeal requesting the annulment of the published correction of errors and the selection process followed, and the convening of a new selection process. Finally, according to diplomatic sources who spoke to The Diplomat, the previous selection process was annulled, so the Ministry announced a new call for applications on January 24, which concluded with the aforementioned appointment of Maite Méndez Baiges, a professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Málaga (UMA) specializing in the history, theory, and aesthetics of modern and contemporary art and architecture. On May 7, MPs Borja Sémper, María Soledad Cruz-Guzmán, Eduardo Carazo, and Jaime Miguel de los Santos, from the People’s Party Parliamentary Group, filed a series of written parliamentary questions "following the recent completion of the selection process for the appointment of the new director of the Spanish Academy in Rome," in which they asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to clarify whether it was true that it "initiated the second selection process" when "the first, contested, process was still pending," and whether "all the required and desirable guarantees and forms of publicity were provided when publishing the new selection process." The PP also asked "what reasons explain, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, why in both processes the candidates with the highest scores were not chosen to lead the Spanish Academy in Rome" and whether "the Ministry of Culture has considered requesting the affiliation of the Spanish Academy in Rome, as well as the Cervantes Institute, to its Ministry, given the serious reputational damage caused by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during this term." In its written response, registered on June 18 and published this week by the Official Gazette of the Cortes Generales (BOCG), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asserts that "the selection process followed has scrupulously respected the provisions of the Regulations of the Spanish Academy in Rome, approved by Royal Decree 813/2001, of July 13."

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