José Ignacio Torreblanca

Dr José Ignacio Torreblanca is the head of the Madrid office and senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

He holds a PhD in political science from the Complutense University of Madrid and is a senior lecturer at the National Distance Education University in Madrid where he teaches graduate and postgraduate courses on the European Union. He was a Fulbright Scholar at George Washington University in Washington DC and a postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.

As an expert on disinformation, he has worked with Spain’s National Security Directorate Taskforce on Disinformation Campaigns at the prime minister’s office and submitted evidence on disinformation and foreign interference in the Joint Congress-Senate National Security Committee of the Spanish parliament.

He runs a weekly column in El Mundo called “Café Steiner” and is a weekly contributor on Spanish National Public Radio. Prior to joining ECFR, Torreblanca was the editorial director of El Pais where he authored a weekly column and a blog for 10 years.

His writing on EU politics and EU foreign policy has been published widely, including a 2001 book on eastern enlargement, The Reuniting of Europe: Promises, Negotiations and Compromises, one on the EU and the 2008-2011 financial crisis, ¿Quién gobierna en Europa?: reconstruir la democracia, recuperar a la ciudadanía?, and another in 2011 on EU foreign and security policy, La fragmentación del poder europeo. He has also published on the politics of populism, including a book on the rise of Podemos party in Spain in 2015, Asaltar los cielos: Podemos o la política después de la crisis, and the rise of the Spanish far-right in 2019, ¿Ha llegado Vox para quedarse?: la sorpresa Vox.

In his latest work, he has concentrated on the geopolitics of technology, where he has led various research projects focusing on EU external digital policies, including the EU-Latin America and the Caribbean Digital Alliance. In 2020, he published a book with Carla Hobbs on Europe’s digital sovereignty, La soberanía digital de Europa, and in 2023 published a journal article on “Social networks and democracy: problems and dilemmas of regulating the digital ecosystem”.