Antonio Hernando was, for a few weeks, him New government interlocutor with PNV and Bildu. The head of the executive branch, Pedro Sanchez, chose his former deputy director of the Council of Ministers to be the new liaison with the two separatist forces. … Basque. Hernando replaces the former secretary of the socialist organization, Santos Cerdán, who is being investigated as the alleged leader of a criminal organization.
With this decision, the President Placed in the hands of a member of the government He has great knowledge of the party, having been second-in-command in the Ministry of Digital Transformation and having previously held positions in the SWP’s federal executive and in the parliamentary group, and has relationships with two of the executive’s key partners.
The political collapse of the former leader of Navarrese, who was forced to resign after a first report led him to be temporarily imprisoned until Wednesday, He left a starting position vacant In the mechanism of relations between the executive authority and its two main partners. This is a situation that Sánchez wanted to reverse immediately to avoid unforeseen events at the most tense moments in the Legislative Council, without guarantees of the ability to continue legislation, with the election of Hernando, as confirmed to ABC by reliable sources close to the negotiations.
Hernando was one of Sánchez’s trusted men during his first years as Secretary General, and assigned him the position of the group’s official spokesman in Congress, in a way that made him He already has negotiation experience. Although at that time, unlike now, the Socialists were in opposition and the positions they defended regarding Catalan and Basque separatism were very different from those now.
After a period of staying away from politics, and after not supporting the incumbent president in the 2016 primaries, he was restored in 2021 as deputy director of his government. In October 2024 he stopped becoming Number two for Oscar Lopez in the Ministry of Digital Transformation And public service.
From this position in the executive branch, as Secretary of State for Communications and Digital Infrastructure, he will lead the complex relations between the PSOE, the PNP and BILD. Without these negotiations with Basque nationalists and separatists having anything to do with the position he currently holds in the ministry responsible for digitizing the country, which means leaving aside part of the powers inherent in his responsibility in the government during the period he allocates to decorating relations with the two Basque parties. Its main function is to support the remainder of the legislature.
Hernando, as revealed by socialist sources at the highest level, has indeed maintained several contacts, both telephone and personal, with the PNV and Beldo, during the past few weeks. Sanchez’s mission, specifically, is Maintaining the good relations that existed in Cerdan’s time Which in the case of PNV, according to the latest UCO report, could be linked to its suspicious affairs. From Euskadi Puro Patzar, the ruling body of the Basque Party, they denied the contacts reported by the Civil Guard.
In an interview with Lier Diez
Current Minister of State for Communications and Digital Infrastructure This week, businessman Javier Pérez-Dolcet pointed outduring his testimony before the judge of Plaza de Castilla, when he confirmed that Hernando was present at one of the meetings held by the sewers of the Socialist Workers’ Party, led by the “plumber” Lier Diez, at the party’s headquarters on Ferraz Street in Madrid. A meeting was scheduled to take place during the president’s five days of reflection, in which Sánchez threatened to resign.
As Diez herself confirmed a few days ago, in a television interview after Pérez Dolcet’s confession, that the former second-in-command in the president’s government and now socialist negotiator with PNV and Bildó “He did not play a secondary role” in the meetings held.