• Party leader presents lineup of 20 candidates for PSOE cabinet posts
• List includes male-female parity, former Ministers & Supreme Court judge
The general secretary of Spain’s Socialist party (PSOE), Pedro Sánchez, on Sunday announced his “Shadow Cabinet’ in the run-up to 26th June (26-J) general elections, unveiling in a competitively football-themed event in Barcelona his lineup of 20 individuals that would comprise his government’s cabinet.
The list includes 10 women, eight independent experts with no party affiliation to the PSOE, a former president of the European Parliament, a Supreme Court justice, a Senegal-born trade union official and authority on immigration in Spain, and a Harvard medical professor and former advisor on healthcare to U.S. President Barack Obama.
In an obvious bid to recapture the centre-left Catalan vote in Catalonia, the list also includes Meritxell Batet, the head of the regional PSOE-PSC ticket for Catalonia in the 26-J elections and tipped to become vice-president under a Sanchez government; former European Parliament president Josep Borrell, author of the 2015 book Las Cuentas Y Los Cuentos De La Independencia (The Tales and Numbers of Independence), critical of the Catalan movement to secede from Spain; and, Nuria Parlón, mayor of the Barcelona suburb of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, the second-ranked official in the regional PSC party and proponent of a referendum on Catalonia’s independence within the framework of a reformed Spanish Constitution.
The Sánchez shadow cabinet named Sunday cuts across generations, with candidates ranging from 36 to 70 years of age, and also includes several former cabinet ministers and under-secretaries from the previous Socialist governments of Felipe González (1982-1996) and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2011).
► Read More in Spanish at El País, La Vanguardia and El Periódico …
► Read More in English at El País …
► Read Bios of PSOE ‘Shadow Cabinet’ in Spanish at El Mundo …
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