This Tuesday, the Council of Ministers approved the appointment of Ion Antolín Llorente as the new Secretary of State for Communication. The current PSOE press officer will take over from Francesc Vallès, who after three and a half years in office had asked not to continue, as Government sources explain to EL PAÍS. With experience in the public and private sectors, Antolín already worked for almost a year at the Secretary of State for Communication during the Vallès period, so “continuity in the strategy of La Moncloa’s communication policy is assured.” government sources say.
Antolín will take the reverse path that he took in August 2022. The PSOE then appointed him the party’s communications director to replace Maritcha Ruiz Mateos. Until that moment, he served as general director of Government Information Coordination in the Vallès team, which had hired him as an advisor in September 2021. The President of the Executive and leader of the PSOE, Pedro Sánchez, thus chose to renew the communication that was carried out from Ferraz and coordinate it with Moncloa’s communication strategy. Now, Antolin returns to head that function from the Government.
Vallès had been contemplating his departure from office for some time, always according to these sources, and the conclusion they reached in La Moncloa was that the ideal moment was for the PSOE to celebrate last weekend in Seville. Ion Antolín, they point out, “is ultra-prepared.” “Throughout this stage there has been fluid coordination between La Moncloa and Ferraz,” they emphasize.
The new Secretary of State for Communication was born in Valladolid in 1977. He finished his studies in Audiovisual Communication at the COAR Arsenio Revuelta in Palencia in 1994 and completed a MBA (master of business administration) with orientation for entrepreneurs at The Power Business School. He has worked at Televisión Palencia, Arnedo TV Rioja and Antena 3 Televisión. For more than five years he lived in the Basque Country, working as a public affairs and communications advisor for several city councils.
Already in Madrid, he was director of the digital module of the Master in Political Communication at the Camilo José Cela University and academic director of the postgraduate degree in Digital Content and Community Management at the same university. Outside of teaching, Antolín has served as director of External Communication and Communication 2.0, and as director of External Communication of Banca Cívica (Ibex Medium Cap). He is on leave from CaixaBank (Ibex 35), where he worked as a manager in the Communication and External Relations area before Vallès signed him for La Moncloa in 2021.
Francesc Vallès has been the second most senior Secretary of State for Communication in the recent democratic period. The average in office is two years and seven months, and he has carried out that task Carmen Martínez de Castro, responsible for communication for the Government of Mariano Rajoy between December 2011 and June 2018, is the one who has lasted the longest in the position. post.
Former PSC deputy in the Catalan Congress and Parliament, Vallès replaced Miguel Ángel Oliver and gave a more political profile to the Executive’s communication. He had not even been in office for a month when he had to manage communication about the evacuation of Spaniards from Afghanistan after the victory of the Taliban. Then came other crises, such as the La Palma volcano or the consequences of the war in Ukraine, and now the management of the dana in Valencia. The NATO summit in Madrid in June 2022, with a press center with more than a thousand people, was quite a challenge, like the Spanish presidency of the EU Council in the second half of 2023. “A Secretariat was practically created of State of Parallel Communication”, highlighted in La Moncloa.
Throughout this period, Vallès has experienced nine electoral processes, that is, nine campaigns with the requirement of preparing speeches, content or social networks that they entail. The carousel of elections began in Castilla y León in February 2022 and continued with the Andalusian elections four months later, the regional and municipal elections of July 2023, the general elections of July of that year and the culmination of the Galician, Basque, Catalan and European elections in the first half of 2024. The night of 23-J was one of his most pleasant moments, after working side by side with Óscar López —the current minister and future candidate for general secretary of the PSOE of Madrid was then President Sánchez’s chief of staff— in La Moncloa and with Antolín in Ferraz in the design of a campaign in which the PSOE recovered from the loss of power territorial that had just suffered two months before in the municipal and regional elections. The comeback allowed Sánchez to revalidate the Government.
A year and a half has passed since then. And the PSOE has just re-elected its leader for a fourth term. “It was the right time. The president and the party come out of the meeting strengthened and with a new impetus for the legislature,” they justify in La Moncloa the replacement in the Secretary of State. A succession that Vallès communicated to Antolín on Monday afternoon. Afterwards, the new head of government communications spoke with the president. Today he will attend with Vallès the press conference after the Council of Ministers, within an “orderly and trustworthy” transition as defined at the headquarters of the Government.