Pedro Duque loses the poker game for the European Space Agency Directorate

None of the three ministers proposed by Pedro Sanchez to lead international organisations have achieved their goal. The last to be shipwrecked in his attempt has been the head of the Science and Innovation department, Pedro Duque, who has received his second beating in just ten days. Following the recent loss of the satellite that his ministry had financed with 200 million, he has just been defeated in his aspiration to be nominated to exercise executive command of the European Space Agency (ESA), a post to which he applied on 30 July.

The one already proposed by the official delegates of the 22 ESA member countries is the Austrian Josef Aschbacher (59), who had the support of the Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz. At the head of the Agency's Earth Observation Directorate since July 2016, Aschbacher enjoys an international reputation for successfully managing the Copernicus programme, the world's largest initiative to protect and monitor the Earth from space. Considered one of the strongest candidates to succeed ESA's current Director General, Germany's Jan Woerner, he will take up his new post on 1 July 2021. 

In the last 48 hours, at least the Director of the Norwegian Space Agency, Christian Hauglie-Hanssen, the former British Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, Chris Skidmore, and the President of the European launch services company Arianespace, the Frenchman Stéphane Israel, have come forward to congratulate the Austrian via their respective Twitter accounts. 

Josef Aschbacher thanked them for their congratulations and replied that he needed to "hold his breath until election day on 17 December", the date on which the ESA Council, its highest decision-making body, will meet. On that day and under the chairmanship of the Director of the Swedish Space Agency, Anna Rathsman, the ministers responsible for space affairs must officially ratify Josef Aschbacher, the person proposed by the candidate selection committee.

Pedro Duque's dismissal as captain of the ESA is the third and absolute failure of the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez, in his attempt to position three of his ministers at the head of international organisations, which shows how little influence the current executive has on the international scene, particularly in Europe.

Last July, the Minister of Economy, Nadia Calviño, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, Arancha González Laya, were shipwrecked in their attempts.

The former, whom the government claimed was "the great favourite", was defeated by the Irish Paschal Donohoe in the presidency of the Eurogroup, the informal forum of economy and finance ministers of the Eurozone.

The second threw in the towel and ruled out running for the presidency of the World Trade Organisation, after seeing its slim chances of success. Pedro Duque completes the triumvirate of ministers sponsored by President Pedro Sánchez, who have crashed in their aspirations. 

The candidacy of the veteran Spanish astronaut to sit on the armchair of the ESA-the main European organisation devoted to exploring the cosmos and which feeds the space industry-was based on the belief that the four aces in the Spanish deck were needed to win the game. However, the reality has been that a kind of poker game has been played, in which all the participants had a very high curriculum profile, and in which dissimulation and 'sotto voce' negotiations have also been of key importance in the final result.

Both Moncloa and Pedro Sánchez himself and his team had taken four hypotheses for granted which, in the end, proved to be of very little consistency. The first, the Spanish option, was based on the fact that many of the official representatives of the ESA member countries had stated verbally to the minister himself and to the members of his team that they were going to support the election of Pedro Duque, which encouraged him to take the step. 

Secondly, in order to demonstrate and reinforce Spain's commitment to the ESA, Pedro Sánchez's Executive had increased its level of investment in the Agency by nearly 600 million euros for the period 2020-2026. This increase in participation was intended to be "a strong argument that will be taken into account", explained the minister's team. 

The third reasoning was based on the fact that Pedro Duque was the Spanish Minister of Science and Innovation and, therefore, could accredit experience in high institutional management, a highly valued requirement for piloting the organisation. To complete the list of reasons, the President of the Spanish Government himself had addressed a letter to the candidate selection committee, in which he officially endorsed his minister, which is considered to be "of very high value". 

To complement the supposedly good card game that Pedro Duque could play before his European colleagues, the minister's team considered that the decision would also take into account another aspect. The good memory that the summit of European ministers responsible for space affairs, which had been held in Seville at the end of November 2019, hosted by Pedro Duque, had left among the senior officials of the Agency.

In case anything was missing, the fact that Pedro Duque was an astronaut in the European Astronaut Corps and had flown into space twice was considered to weigh heavily on the national market. However, none of the foregoing has led the representatives of the various countries to opt unanimously or in the majority for the Spanish proposal, which will be very difficult to repeat in the future.

Pedro Sánchez's career path of promotion to land for four years at the ESA headquarters in Paris began to be diverted shortly after the candidature period opened to replace the current director general, who is due to step down on 30 June. Around a dozen candidates with a high intellectual and professional profile applied to head the Agency until mid-2025, and what appeared to be a difficult but not insurmountable obstacle gradually became insurmountable until it ended in disappointment.

Among those who also disputed the position of the Spanish minister were the Belgian Eric Morel de Westgaver, Director of Industry, Acquisitions and Legal Services of the Agency, who enjoyed the confidence of the Belgian Federal Prime Minister, Sophie Wilmès; the Italian Simonetta di Pippo, with the backing of the Italian Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte; France's Jean-Yves Le Gall, President of the French Space Agency, supported by President Emmanuel Macron; and one of the first to congratulate the elected president, the aforementioned Christian Hauglie-Hanssen, Director of the Norwegian Space Agency, who had the backing of the Scandinavian country's Prime Minister, Erna Solberg.