Pedro Sánchez dismisses the third vice president of the government and Minister of Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera, as well as Reyes Maroto, who sent her to the Madrid City Council to lose the elections against Almeida, and he sends her as PSOE -Candidate for the June 9 elections to Europe.
This was announced by the PSOE, which will present the nomination this Friday to the List Committee, which will prepare an opinion together with the proposals of all the associations, and on Saturday April 27th the Federal Committee will vote, from which the final one List. A whole protocol procedure controlled by Sánchez, which consists in him personally deciding everything that concerns the Socialist Party.
If there is something that distinguishes Ribera at the head of the Ministry of Ecological Transition since Pedro Sánchez introduced the motion of no confidence against Mariano Rajoy after the defeat in the general elections and with only 84 deputies compared to 138 in the popular elections, it is his Lack of neutrality on energy issues, which has led to harsh confrontations with various players in the sector such as Repsol.
Ribera, 100% renewableThe silent minister has clearly sided with renewable energy, an energy that is only for the rich due to the high cost of installing it, after she postponed the construction of the nuclear power plants that leave Spain alone a phased closure plan that will be completed in 2035.
Through the Recovery Plan Accelerator, his department has introduced support policies for the expansion of renewable energy, self-consumption and energy communities and worked to address two of the potential barriers to clean energy: bureaucratic procedures and social resistance.
The aim was also to promote an energy vector with hopes of decarbonizing transport and heavy industry: green hydrogen. However, it has failed to build a sufficient infrastructure of charging stations for electric cars, and many solar energy companies, which have emerged in the heat of speculation generated by the executive itself with subsidies that reach the end consumer late and in a bad way, have gone bankrupt.
Confrontation with RepsolMinister Ribera will leave the Madrid complex of Nuevos Ministerios with open war with Repsol, one of the companies most critical of the government’s energy strategy, which she accuses of a lack of neutrality and of implementing a policy only for the rich, which is a punitive energy sources such as natural gas or synthetic fuels.
Iberdrola’s lawsuit against the Spanish multinational for alleged ecological money laundering of its advertising has been the last straw.
After a cryptic publication by Ribera on a social network – “And those who are fed up with #greenwashing are going to court,” she said – Repsol CEO Josu Jon Imaz asked her publicly: “Minister, do you want to “That we do that? “Close the refineries?” he said.
As the situation calmed down, the Third Vice President attributed the words of Imaz, whom she had accused months ago of “climate denial,” to a reaction typical of a “moment of inflammation.”
Controversy surrounding Ribera’s husbandIn September 2022, the government proposed to appoint the Energy Director of the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC), María Jesús Martín, as advisor to this body, replacing Mariano Bacigalupo, who moved to the National Commission for Stock Exchanges (CNMV). Bacigalupo is the husband of Vice President and Minister of Ecological Transition Teresa Ribera, and his position on energy issues in the CNMC had caused great controversy, as he was one of those responsible for overseeing the actions of the ministry headed by his wife.
Bacigalupo rose quickly when the PSOE came to power and Ribera took over the government. He has been President of the European Postal Regulators Group (ERGP) since 2022 and has been an advisor to the CNMC since 2017.
Between 2020 and 2022, Bacigalupo was Vice President of the Ibero-American Association of Energy Regulatory Entities (ARIAE) and since 2021 a member of the Council of Regulators of the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators of the European Union (ACER). .