The Spanish Government has nominated second deputy prime minister and labour minister Yolanda Díaz for the post of director-general of the International Labour Organization, the Geneva-based United Nations agency founded in 1919. If elected, she would be the first woman and the first Spaniard to hold the office.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the candidacy on the social media platform X on July 23, calling it an honour and saying Díaz had shown her commitment to labour rights through policy and results. Díaz said on Bluesky that the bid would let her represent Spain, Europe and the global South.
Under a timetable set by the ILO in April, candidatures close on August 31 and a public event with all contenders is scheduled for September 23. The agency’s governing body will hold private hearings on November 9 and elect the director-general by secret ballot on November 16, for a five-year term starting on October 1, 2027.
Díaz faces the incumbent, Gilbert Houngbo of Togo, who took office in 2022 as the first African to lead the organisation and is seeking re-election. The governing body has 56 voting members, of whom 28 represent governments, 14 employers and 14 trade unions.
Moncloa said Díaz had driven 30 social dialogue agreements, the 2022 labour reform, a law on digital platform work and the largest minimum wage rise of Spain’s democratic period. Spain’s parliament rejected her flagship bill to cut the working week in September 2025.
Díaz, a member of the Communist Party of Spain, founded the left-wing Sumar platform in 2023 and gave up its leadership after the 2024 European elections. In February she said she would not stand in the next general election.
The trade union confederations CCOO and UGT backed the candidacy. The employers’ body CEOE declined to take a position, saying it would wait until the bid was formalised.
The opposition Partido Popular (PP) said the nomination was payment for Díaz’s silence over corruption cases involving Sánchez’s Socialist party, and pointed to the jobless figures. Spain recorded an unemployment rate of 10.3 per cent in May, the second highest in the European Union after Finland and well above the bloc average of 5.9 per cent, according to Eurostat.
The vote comes as the ILO struggles with a cash shortfall. The United States, its largest contributor, owed 257 million Swiss francs (€276 million) at the end of May, according to Reuters, and the agency has frozen the appointment of an American deputy director-general.
Díaz is the second Spanish minister in the running for a UN post, after agriculture minister Luis Planas was put forward in March to lead the Food and Agriculture Organization.
