Minister Carolina Darias, PSOE candidate for mayor of Las Palmas

The Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, will be the PSOE candidate for mayor of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, as confirmed by sources consulted to Europa Press.

The head of Health will foreseeably combine her responsibilities in the Ministry and as a candidate for mayor until the municipal elections to be held in May, in the same way that the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, will do with respect to the elections for the Madrid town hall.

For his part, the mayor of Gran Canaria, Augusto Hidalgo (PSOE), in charge of the City Council since 2015, will choose to preside over the Cabildo de Gran Canaria.

His candidacy will be formally announced this Saturday at a public event with the Socialist Party of the Canary Islands, which will also be attended by the Minister of Finance and Deputy Secretary General of the PSOE, María Jesús Montero.

Darias (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1965) has a degree in Law from the University of La Laguna, belongs to the Superior Corps of General Administrators of the Public Administration of the Canary Islands, and has spent twenty years holding different public positions, beginning with her first position as Councilor in 1999 in his hometown, and going through the Presidency of the Parliament of the Canary Islands or the Government Delegation in the islands.

Before leading the Health portfolio, Darias entered the Government assuming the Ministry of Territorial Policy in January 2020 when she was the Minister of Economy, Knowledge and Employment of the socialist Government of the Canary Islands.

Canarian politics was one of the new faces of the coalition Executive that Sánchez designed together with Unidas Podemos, since it was not part of the previous PSOE government alone. Upon being appointed, Moncloa highlighted that she combines a technical profile with a political character.

The Minister of Health began her political career as councilor of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria City Council in 1999, a position she held until 2004, when she became a subdelegate of the Government in the province of Las Palmas with the arrival of the socialist president José Luis Rodríguez Shoemaker to La Moncoa.

Already in 2008 she was appointed delegate of the Government of the Canary Islands, until 2011, and between 2011 and 2015 she was a councilor of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria. Subsequently, between 2015 and 2019, she held the Presidency of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, from where she jumped to the Ministry of Economy, Knowledge and Employment when the PSOE arrived in 2019 to the Canary Islands Government, and from there, to the central Executive in 2020.