The Diplomat
The new Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, who has been a diplomat since 2010, has chosen two of his fellow diplomats for some of the most trusted positions.
Thus, he has chosen Álvaro Albacete, who belongs to his own class, as Director of the Minister’s Cabinet, and María Pérez Sánchez-Laulhé, as Undersecretary of the Department.
María Pérez already formed part of the Ministry of Culture under the previous minister, Miquel Iceta, in the same post, having joined the Ministry in August 2021 as head of the Cabinet of the Secretary General for Culture and Sport. She entered the diplomatic service in 2006 and after being posted to the EU and Latin American Secretariats of State, she became an advisor to the Cabinet of the Minister of Health and Social Affairs. She has been posted in Bolivia and Costa Rica, where she was director of the Spanish Cultural Centres, and in 2019 she returned to Madrid and joined the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), until her appointment at the Ministry of Culture.
For his part, Álvaro Albacete, who, like Urtasun, entered the diplomatic career in 2010, had been granted the green light to be appointed ambassador to Libya, but the calling of the general elections in July this year had delayed his appointment, as well as that of ten other diplomats for ten other embassies.
Having been chosen by the Minister of Culture to head his cabinet, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will have to find someone else to take charge of the embassy in Tripoli.
Álvaro Albacete was, since March 2022, deputy secretary general of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), after having been, for seven years, deputy secretary general of the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID), based in Vienna. Previously, he was Ambassador-at-Large for relations with the Jewish Community and Jewish Organisations (2011-2014) and Deputy Director in the Cabinet of Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos.
