The Ceuta crisis has become a real headache for Diego Rubio, chief of staff of the Presidency of the Government. As this newspaper has learned, prominent socialist leaders are moving to promote the replacement of the Extremaduran academic by Pedro Sánchez. These leaders privately express harsh criticism of the Moncloa Palace’s management of the migratory avalanche in Ceuta and the days that followed. In the corridors of Ferraz there is a desire for the President of the Government to once again put a “black leg” socialist at his side. Rubio lacks socialist roots. Everyone in the Government agrees that it is a super-technical profile that also tries not to be contaminated by the vices of the parties.
In a certain way, as a socialist source jokes, the only direct thread this time between the President of the Government and the Secretary General of the PSOE is Pedro Sánchez himself, precisely because he combines both positions.
It is true that several ministers are part of the federal executive – Félix Bolaños, Elma Saiz, Óscar Puente or Pilar Alegría – but the gear that designs and executes the president’s strategy on a daily basis is located in Moncloa. It is there that hundreds of decisions are adopted under a fundamentally institutional logic, while Ferraz necessarily contemplates those same movements from another perspective: the protection of the party, its cadres and its political interests.
The problem, according to the sources consulted, appears when both logics are no longer sufficiently connected. At this time there is no mechanism that guarantees that the decisions adopted in the heart of Moncloa also incorporate the sensitivity and internal needs of the PSOE, especially in the context of an electoral campaign. A circumstance that, these same sources admit, should not be strange either: any political organization tries to protect itself, preserve its space and guarantee its own survival.
The distance, furthermore, is not accidental. Moncloa has tried in recent years, with Rubio at the helm, to build a firewall with Ferraz. Especially since the “Cerdán case” broke out. Moncloa has tried to separate the fate of the Government as much as possible from the problems that affected the party. A strategy that could have been useful to protect the president during the crisis, but now, at the threshold of the electoral cycle, is beginning to generate the opposite reaction within the PSOE: Ferraz wants to once again have a voice in the decisions made around Sánchez. It can be said, according to a party source, that the organization “wants to give it back to Rubio.”
In Moncloa and in the PSOE they admit that the president “is touched.” The party has not forgotten the moments in which Moncloa tried to establish a safe distance from Ferraz and now some leaders consider the time has come to regain ground. The debate over the continuity of the chief of staff is, therefore, more than just a discussion about a name: it is a battle over where Sánchez’s political center of gravity should reside during the final stretch of the legislature. And Ceuta has accelerated everything.
The crisis has placed the Government on the defensive for much of the summer, has revealed coordination problems between different departments and has revealed internal struggles that had been hidden for years. Never before has a crisis been so hard.