Family Relations Are Good For Your Health

Well, it was hardly unexpected. For new members of the regional government, there was the potential pitfall facing the health minister, Patricia Gómez. And blow me, she has tripped up in precisely the fashion that had been suggested. It is, therefore, wholly to have been expected that the Partido Popular - minus a leader but being represented in parliament by the presentable Marga Prohens - should shout nepotistic foul. When you, as newly made health minister, go and appoint your husband as director-general of the IB-Salut health service, then you should anticipate that some flak might come your way. The surprising thing is that there isn't more of it.

Juli, otherwise known as Julio, Fuster is Mr. Gómez. He had been in the running for the health minister's job, but the missus got it instead: it would have been less likely that she, had Juli secured the ministerial post, would have got the IB-Salut post. Marga has described the appointment as "unacceptable", "neither transparent nor good government" and "an insult to the intelligence". She might also have added that it looks like a bit of a carve-up.

President Armengol insists that there are now two people who are "professionally magnificent and exceptional" in terms of their CVs in situ at health. Patricia, meanwhile, does not consider there to be any conflict in the appointment when the "director-general has a brilliant professional career" which rises above his personal background.

I'm not for one moment doubting that either of them is anything other than professionally magnificent and exceptional, but no conflict? Come on, of course there is. Marga's accusation of lack of transparency might be said to not hold much water when Fuster's name is there for all to see on the government's website, but the allusion she makes to transparency is perfectly understandable. What were the criteria for the appointment and who else had been in the running? Anyone?

But even assuming that Fuster matched the criteria perfectly (which I'm sure he does) and was a superior candidate to others, Marga's transparency charge cuts deep into what we believed we would now be getting from governments. Open ones, free of suspicions; transparent ones with no hints of anything conducted behind closed doors. Transparency is code for being against corruption, of which there is absolutely no suggestion in this instance, and I'm most definitely not saying there is, but in the murkiness of all that brought Podemos (and now others) to the conclusion that the time was right for a "new politics", there often lay allegations of nepotism, of favouritism, of "amiguismo": more than just allegations; they were fact.

It was nepotism and cronyism that went a good way to bringing Spain to its knees. This was because of the appointments to boards of banks - mainly smallish, local savings banks - of those with no banking experience and seemingly no ability to ensure good governance or to not succumb to the occasional temptation.

There is no reason, let me stress again, for believing that the appointment has been made for anything other than perfectly sound professional reasons, but the merits of Fuster are not, in the current climate, what matter above all else. What does matter is perception. If the public (and opposition) perceive negativity because of a suspicion of nepotism, then I'm terribly sorry, Patricia, but there is conflict.

When, during the lifetime of the previous administration, the tourism minister Carlos Delgado appointed his girlfriend (later his wife) to a post as adviser to the ministry (on a salary of some 50,000 euros), PSOE and Més demanded that he resign. Carlos defended the appointment, saying that Lourdes, the girlfriend, was highly qualified for the role (something to do with communication at the ministry) as she was a journalist and spoke five languages. No doubt she was perfectly qualified, and the PP leadership at the time didn't, despite Bauzá's mission to preside over a government minus any hints of sleaze, see anything amiss, until the story blew up in the leadership's and Delgado's faces: he was forced to withdraw the appointment.

The circumstances may be different, but is the principle not the same? And where, one has to ask, are Podemos in all this? As they seem to have poked their noses into mostly all parts of the new government's organisation, does Fuster's appointment not strike them as being maybe contradictory to what they avow?

Fuster is eminently suited to the post. He was previously the IB-Salut director during the first PSOE-led government from 1999. So yes, he's surely the right man and, yes, the health service will be in good hands. But. The new politics. What's changed? Ada Colau in Barcelona has appointed her husband to her team. The co-ordinator at the Madrid mayor's office is the husband of the niece of Manuela Carmena (the new mayor). Podemos types both.