José Luis Martínez-Almeida has attended this morning the Governing Board of the Cibeles Palace, the weekly meeting of the PP and Ciudadanos mayors, where all the movements of the Spanish capital are announced and approved: the works, the regulations , the new contracts… In the middle of the meeting, according to eyewitness sources, the mayor of Madrid announced an internal change in his team to the rest of the councillors:
— Announcement of Ana de Miguel as the new general director of the mayor’s office.
The movement, according to a person from the mayor’s circle, is due to “a normal restructuring in any government cabinet.” De Miguel now occupies the position left by Ángel Carromero, right-hand man and personal friend of the alderman, who resigned last February after being affected by the espionage attempt on President Isabel Díaz Ayuso. With this umpteenth change, some councilors consulted by this newspaper see an “internal weakness” in the command control of the City Council. Moreover, according to municipal sources, the mayor will appoint Óscar Romera as his new chief of staff in the next few hours.
The movement occurs just one year before the 2023 elections, where Almeida will repeat as a candidate and the polls published to date give the popular ones a stalemate. Romera, with a more technical than political profile, began his political career as an adviser to councilors of the PP in Alcorcón between 1999 and 2001. Later, he made the leap to the municipal seat as mayor of the Consistory between 2003 and 2007, where he served as spokesperson for the area economic. Between 2007 and 2008 he changed municipalities. He was appointed deputy mayor of the Tres Cantos City Council. In July of that year he was appointed chief of staff of Antonio Bateta, who at that time was in charge of the Ministry of Economy and Finance of the Community of Madrid. Eight years later, between 2016 and 2018, he made the leap to the national government. He was appointed deputy director of the Minister of Popular Development, Íñigo de la Serna.
“He is a man of numbers,” says a municipal source. It is not the only change in the organizational structure of the mayor. The current press officer, Daniel Bardavío, who arrived at the City Council in December last year after passing through the Ciudadanos cabinet in Brussels, has now added the Telemadrid journalist Almudena Falcón to his team, who covered local information for public television, where he had been working for 15 years.
Constant changes in the dome of the City Council
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Since the mayor of Madrid took office as mayor of the capital, the position of press officer has changed up to four times. The first was Daniel Hidalgo, who is currently the director of communication for the City Council. Five months later, he appointed the journalist Joaquín Vidal, who was in office until July of last year. The news of Vidal’s departure, after two and a half years, was known at the beginning of September with the entry of the new political course. According to municipal sources, the relationship between the two suffered severe wear during the pandemic, which ended with an agreement between the two: Vidal is now the head of communication for the Municipal Transport Company. Other voices consulted point to “bad relations” with other members of the mayor’s team.
After Vidal’s departure, there was no circle without some name coming out for the position of press officer between journalists and councilors. Since last September, the person in charge of directing the communication of the mayor of Madrid on an interim basis was Carlos Madejón, number two of Vidal. One hundred days later, Almeida made the decision to hire Daniel Bardavío, Albert Rivera’s director of communication, as press officer.
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