Las Palmas De Gran Canaria (EFE).- Carolina Darias has been practically everything in the ranks of the PSOE and has been at all possible levels of public administration. She now returns to the starting point of her political life, the City Council of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where she held her first public office as a councilor in 1999, and which she aspires to chair as mayor after the municipal elections next May.
Since then, she has been Deputy and President of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, Delegate of the Spanish Government, Regional Minister of Economy, Minister of Territorial Policy and, later and until now, Head of Health. Darias even had time to try to lead the PSOE’s candidacy for the presidency of the government of the Canary Islands in the 2015 elections, but he ended up losing those primaries.
Of the current Minister of Health, his rank comrades on the islands highlight his capacity for work and his “absolute” devotion to the party. “She is a high official for better or for worse”, they say because of her adherence to regulations, laws and, in general, “to things well done”.
There are also those who describe her as a person who is always open to dialogue but who can become “tough” in complex negotiations, such as those she had to lead at the dialogue table with Catalonia when she was Minister of Politics. territorial. .
“She works like the most, to the maximum. Sometimes you can feel like she lacks imagination because she’s used to sticking to the script, but she does her job very well,” says another party member, who also adds. that Darias is not a headline-grabber and that She will always be “where her party needs her, without disruptive positions”.
Those who worked alongside him also point to his “institutional ceremony”. “It’s old habits,” they point out, and he doesn’t hesitate to call old lifelong friends by their position rather than their first name.
Her subordinates also remember her as a “tireless worker with an enormous vocation for public service and a high institutional profile” who zealously underlined every sentence of the documents prepared by her team while traveling and waiting. On these trips, she is “the last to fall asleep and the first to sit down at the hotel breakfast”.
If we have to look for a “but”, a colleague from the Canarian PSOE points out that, although he has a very technical and prepared profile, “he has long been away from close politics, and this can make him project the image of a cold person.”
At the PSOE in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, however, they point to his constant involvement with the local group and see in his candidacy “the best possible consensus”.
“It was time for a woman with such a long history to take the step to become mayor of Las Palmas. I think it reinvigorates the project that Augusto Hidalgo leaves behind after two terms.
HIS LAST MINISTERIAL STAGE
Carolina Darias took the reins of the Ministry of Health on January 27, 2021, when the first month has just ended of the vaccination campaign against covid-19 that her predecessor, Salvador Illa, had outlined before returning to Catalonia .
Today, he still has more than 90% of Spaniards with the full plan and the fourth round of the campaign – that of the second doses of memory – well advanced; but along the way there have been mines, such as those that exploded with the changes in criteria with the AstraZeneca vaccine or the low vaccination coverage in young people and children, not to mention the hazards with masks and restrictions.
A journey in which other unusual “bugs” have also crossed his path, such as monkeypox, childhood hepatitis of unknown origin or even the first indigenous case of avian flu, which eclipsed the other major commitments that awaited him. for years in the drawers of the Ministry to be filled.
The most anticipated, that of toughening the tobacco law, which it already seems that it will not be possible in this legislature, or reforming the law on alcohol among minors.
Yes, he saw the acclaimed euthanasia law moving forward in parliament, the grand scheme of his colleague and predecessor in power, María Luisa Carcedo, and he paved the way for others who still have to face to this process, such as the law of equity, universality and health cohesion and the regulation of the National Public Health Agency (Aesap).
During this time, Darias showed the application of a co-governance that was not seen in this way by all the advisers he met in the Interterritorial Councils of the National Health System, which were losing their weekly character. of the intensity of covid has decreased in favor of other issues such as mental health, the strategy of which was finally updated a year ago.
And also to always be on the side of health professionals who did not however feel rewarded for the gigantic sacrifices that these long years of pandemic have made by the administrations.
Darias leaves precisely at a time when the profession has said enough is enough and warns of an imminent collapse of the SNS if no one does anything to improve their conditions. Now it’s up to your replacement to hear their voices. EFE