Buttigieg, first member of the LGBTQ collective to lead a portfolio in the US

Pete Buttigieg poses for a portrait in February.FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP

The president-elect, Joe Biden, has decided that the person who will occupy the Transportation portfolio is the former candidate for the Democratic nomination for the White House Pete Buttigieg, according to several media outlets, including

, CNN or Reuters.

Biden thus places the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in a high-ranking position within the federal government.

Buttigieg will be the first secretary from the LGBTQ community to face Senate confirmation to make his nomination effective.

For the young politician, 38 years old, this is the beginning of the governmental experience forged in the corridors of Washington that many Democrats reproached him for not possessing during the caucus and primary process in the race for the presidential nomination.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) is called upon to play a central role in implementing the necessary infrastructure plan for the nation that the future Biden Administration yearns for.

The Department manages hundreds of billions of dollars that it distributes in federal highway funding as well as in the regulation of aviation and railroads.

As part of his proposal to make the leap to clean energy, Biden proposed during the campaign the installation, for example, of 500,000 recharging stations on the country's highways and that federal vehicles run on electricity and not gasoline or diesel.

The president-elect announced as a measure to curb the contagion of covid-19 in his first 100 days at the helm of the Government the mandatory use by passengers of wearing masks in means of interstate transport such as airplanes, trains or buses, something to which that the Donald Trump Administration flatly denied.

During the crowded Democratic primary process, the speech by the unknown mayor of a small town in the Midwest was reminiscent of Barack Obama's.

Buttigieg presented himself to his followers as an agent of change and hope.

He was not offering the centrist electorate a return to the past, as in his opinion the one who will now be his boss, Joe Biden, did, but an exciting future but far from extremes.

"We know that it is time not only to end the era of Donald Trump, but to launch the new era that we know has to come," he said.

Buttigieg was the surprise of the Democratic race when he announced his candidacy.

A then 37-year-old man who aspired to become America's first millennial president and had no more public management experience than two terms as mayor of South Bend, a city of just over 100,000 residents.

A Harvard graduate, polyglot, highly educated, religious, Afghan military veteran, and married to a 31-year-old professor, he came to the battle for the Democratic nomination almost as a curiosity.

Buttigieg put an end to his campaign in March, after the disaster suffered in the South Carolina primaries, those primaries that, however, were the beginning of the take-off of the one who was about to be certified as a political corpse, Biden.

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