The last question that remained to be confirmed in the Government and in the PSOE, the candidacy of Carolina Darias for the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria City Council, has already been resolved.
The Minister of Health will formally announce on Saturday that she is presenting her candidacy to run for mayor in the city where she was born in 1965 and held her first public office as councilor in 1999. Her presentation will take place before the deadline for applying for the PSOE primaries, which concludes on November 21, and will close the week in which another minister, Reyes Maroto (Industry, Commerce and Tourism), confirmed that she will be the candidate in the capital of Spain.
The mayor of Gran Canaria, Augusto Hidalgo (PSOE), in charge of the consistory since 2015, will choose to preside over the Cabildo de Gran Canaria.
Darias plans to combine her responsibilities in the Government and as a candidate until weeks before the municipal elections in May, like Maroto in the Madrid City Council.
Therefore, her replacement will not lead to an imminent government crisis, according to socialist sources.
With experience in all rungs of the Administration —she has been a deputy, president of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, government delegate and regional Minister of Economy—, Pedro Sánchez signed her as Minister of Territorial Policy of the coalition government.
When Canarian politics presented the main lines of its project in Congress in February 2020, the goal that was set was the "strengthening of self-government" and that the conference of presidents be held annually and become the "maximum body collaboration and political coordination” between the Government and the autonomous communities.
The initial objective was for the conference of territorial leaders to take place at the end of the year and without absences, but the covid exceeded all forecasts and accelerated what was called co-governance.
In the end, there were 17 conferences of presidents during his time in Territorial Policy, of which 14 took place during the first state of alarm.
The downside was put by barons of the PP but also of the PSOE, who regretted that these meetings were not more operational.
Her move to the Ministry of Health instead of Salvador Illa, with whom she was so involved during the pandemic, was a "logical and natural" replacement, according to what was highlighted in the Government at the time.
After all, Darias had been attending the Interterritorial Health Councils for months.
Illa, the current leader of the PSC, tells in his book about the year of the pandemic, that in order to go to Catalonia as a candidate in the February 2021 elections, he made the requirement that the vaccination process against covid was already underway in Spain .
He did so, and when Darias arrived at the Ministry of Health on January 27 of that year, the process was already taking its first steps.
If Illa was the minister of the hardest part of the pandemic, Darias has been the minister of vaccination and the change in management of the covid.
She took command and had to face crises such as the secondary effects that began to be detected and make decisions about the progress of a process that, in general terms, has been a shared success between the Ministry, the communities and Spanish society itself.
After a few months in office, he decided to do without what had been the technical voice in managing the health crisis.
In June 2021, Fernando Simón gave his last press conference at the Health headquarters and Darias kept all the spotlights.
In the ministry, there are those who think that decisions such as the change in strategy in monitoring the covid, which was carried out at the beginning of this year, should have been communicated by a technician, and not by a politician.
It was the moment in which everyone who had it was no longer diagnosed with covid, quarantines and isolations were abolished and, shortly after, the mask disappeared, except in health facilities and public transport.
This is the legacy that this minister will leave: the steps towards the normalization of the coronavirus and the measures that have restored a normal life.
Meanwhile, Darias has not stopped looking at the Canary Islands.
Her agenda has been full of events on the islands, to which she has attended very frequently to visit health infrastructures.
The only thing missing was for her to confirm what had been an open secret for weeks: in the press conferences after the Council of Ministers, there was no shortage of the question of whether she could confirm her candidacy every time she appeared.
Her response was always the same: "I am campaigning for citizens to be vaccinated against covid."
In the must it leaves in the drawer a national tobacco strategy that should already be approved and without completing the creation of a Public Health Agency, whose birth is taking its first steps at an administrative level.
Some of his critics in the ministry reproach that “no new law has been promoted that was not in place or updated the framework that constitutes the general law on health and cohesion nor developed the general law on public health;
Nor has it addressed matters that were urgent, such as specifying the organic special measures in public health that so many jurists and courts have requested.