The approval of the long-awaited Science Law has been the most outstanding achievement of the Valencian Diana Morant (Gandía, 1980), who will not only repeat as head of the Ministry of Science and Innovation but will also add universities to his powers.
Its continuity has not been a surprise since he was one of the profiles most likely to continue in Pedro Sánchez’s new cabinet. And the trust he has in her has resulted in him also commissioning universities, until now under the command of Joan Subirats, who had already announced that he would not continue in this new coalition government.
This telecommunications engineer He entered the Government in the middle of the legislature, during the great renewal of the Executive that Sánchez carried out on July 10, 2021. The until then mayor of Gandía left her position in the city council, which she had held since 2015, the next day to replace the astronaut Pedro Duque at the head of a ministry to which he arrived ten years after entering politics, because She began as a socialist councilor in the City Council of her hometown in May 2011.
Although her name was mentioned as a possible socialist candidate for the Mayor of Valencia in the last municipal elections – something that did not sit well with the PSPV-PSOE -, Morant finally remained in the central government as a minister and in recent months as an acting minister.
During the 28 months in which she has been at the head of her ministry, Diana Morant has managed the largest science budget that has ever existed in Spain thanks to an increase in the money allocated from Spain, but above all to the injection provided by the cohesion funds of the European Union. Thus, for 2023 the budget of his ministry reached a total of 3,991 million euros, 4% more than the previous year. Not counting European funds, the national budget grew by 20% compared to 2022 (within that total item, the national item amounted to 2,610 million).