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Spain’s deputy prime minister Nadia Calviño is set to become president of the European Investment Bank early next year after she won the backing of EU finance ministers on Friday.
Calviño, 55, a technocrat and former Brussels insider, defeated Margrethe Vestager, former EU competition chief, in the contest to lead the EIB, the world’s biggest multilateral lender with a balance sheet of more than half a trillion euros.
Spain’s deputy leader for the past two years and economy minister since 2018, Calviño brought a steely poise to her roles as a political pugilist for Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the country’s ambassador to the global economy.
“I am grateful and honoured to have the support of finance ministers to lead the European Investment Bank,” Calviño said on Friday.
The EIB, she said, “will have an even more important role going forward, to fund the green transition, to provide financial support to Ukraine and also support the role of Europe in the world”. She added she would prepare a brief on the bank’s priorities to be discussed by finance ministers in February.
Bruno Le Maire, France finance minister, congratulated Calviño, citing “the green transition, defence and nuclear energy” as some of France’s priorities for the bank.
Vestager was another lead contender for the post but dropped out of the race on Friday. “I will resume my duties at the European Commission,” she said.
Kristalina Georgieva, head of the IMF, was Calviño’s boss as a European Commission vice-president when the Spaniard was director-general of the budget department.
“She is dynamic. She has a very agile mind. One of the people that can follow the rules, but make the best out of what the rules provide,” Georgieva told the FT.
Recalling the gruelling nightlong negotiations that mark the end of the annual budget process, the IMF chief said: “I can tell you she and I were the perkiest people in the European parliament.”
Others who knew her inside the EU commission remember her as an engaging colleague who could often be tough and demanding. “She was very bright, very forceful, not always the easiest to work with,” said one of the people.
Monika Hohlmeier, the conservative chair of the European parliament’s budget committee who has sparred with Calviño as a Spanish minister, called her a “tough cookie”.
Born in Galicia as the daughter of a future head of RTVE, Spain’s state broadcaster, Calviño hit the spotlight as a young woman when she joined her father — a Socialist appointee — to vote in a 1986 referendum on whether Spain should stay in Nato. She was 17 at the time, under the voting age, and her vote sparked condemnation from the conservative opposition.
She is not a member of a political party and one person who knows her said she abhorred being the target of personal attacks in the rough and tumble of Spanish politics. But she nonetheless took on the opponents of today’s Socialist-led government with gusto, using oblique mockery as her weapon of choice.
Taking aim at a trio of former prime ministers who criticised Sánchez for agreeing to an amnesty for Catalan separatists in order to stay in power, she said “it seems like they can’t find their place” in life.
In corporate Spain, even executives who see her as an occasional scourge of business said they admired her professionalism, mastery of her mandate, and made-for-TV public speaking skills — in English and French plus Spanish.
She has overseen policies ranging from pandemic support measures and minimum wage rises to the contentious disbursement of billions in EU funds and a bid to tame inflation by cutting the link between gas and electricity prices.
When the Spanish infrastructure group Ferrovial shocked the government by announcing it was shifting its head office to the Netherlands this year, it was Calviño who picked up the phone to criticise its chair.
Most controversially, she has pushed a €3bn windfall tax on the “extraordinary profits” of banks and energy companies — and has supplemented it by calling on the same companies to give bigger pay rises too.
Christine Lagarde, president of the ECB, described Calviño as a “convinced European who has served our common project for many years” and who cares deeply about “European prosperity”.
One of her biggest tasks has been managing more than €160bn of grants and loans that Spain is receiving as EU post-pandemic recovery funds. Calviño says Spain is a model recipient, disbursing funds smoothly. But big business says its ideas had been ignored and Hohlmeier, the EU lawmaker, has complained about a lack of transparency over how money is being spent.
“As a former director in the commission, she is used to painting nice pictures. So if you ask her, everything is brilliant . . . economic growth is wonderful,” Hohlmeier said. “And if you look at the figures, the figures are not as brilliant as those on the page of Nadia Calviño.”
