At the start of 2024, the European Investment Bank (EIB) — the world’s largest multilateral bank — appointed Nadia Calviño as its new president. Until last year, she was Spain’s deputy prime minister and economy minister, in which role she saw through a €3 billion windfall tax on excessive profits of energy companies and the banking sector. But such progressive measures belie the reality that she was a committed centrist in Pedro Sánchez’s broad-left government — clashing with Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz over European Union (EU) “recovery funds.”

This €800 billion package, financed through the combined EU member states’ debt, was designed to kick-start the European economy after the COVID-19 shock through loans and grants. But the funding will end in 2026 — cutting the EU budget almost in half, on top of a return to austerity. Calviño managed Spain’s share of the investments, which were implemented by means of techno-capitalist public-private partnerships.

In her new EIB role, Calviño is now under pressure to move toward bankrolling the defense industry in the wake of the war in Ukraine. It’s a far cry from the European and Global Green Deal which the EIB — meant to be the EU’s “Climate Bank” — set out to deliver in 2021, after Ursula von der Leyen became European Commission president. Calviño’s personal influence on the EIB’s direction surely has its limits. Nonetheless, with her appointment — and the start of a new European Commission and Parliament after June’s election — left-wing and progressive forces should use this window of opportunity to repoliticize the EIB’s long-overlooked public mandate.