EU Cloud and AI Law Lead Drafting Role Awarded Through Party Vote

When European governments and companies renegotiate who controls the cloud infrastructure supporting hospitals, power grids and national AI systems, the person with the greatest early-stage authority over the rules will be a 46-year-old IT professional from Valencia who submitted his CV to an acquaintance, had never previously stood for elected office and is now best known in Brussels for filing a harassment complaint against the populist social media figure who first brought him into politics.

Diego Solier is lead rapporteur for the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), the European Commission's wide-ranging proposal for regulating the next generation of data centres and cloud infrastructure across the EU. His appointment — reported by Spanish technology outlet eldiario.es on September 4, 2026 — has renewed scrutiny of how the European Parliament assigns primary drafting authority over major technology legislation, and whether the system used to make those decisions is fit for purpose.

CADA is far more than a routine legislative measure. Proposed by the European Commission on June 3, 2026, as the centrepiece of its wider European Technological Sovereignty Package, it is intended to address two structural weaknesses the Commission regards as existential: Europe's persistent shortage of data-centre capacity and the bloc's heavy reliance on a small number of non-European cloud providers. Companies based in the EU now account for about 15 percent of Europe's cloud market, down from roughly 29 percent in 2017. The Commission estimates that about €120 billion, or approximately US$139 billion, in combined public and private investment will be required by 2035 to make European capacity competitive. For the 450 million people covered by EU law, CADA will influence where governments run their most sensitive digital operations, which companies may compete for those contracts and on what terms American and Chinese cloud providers can continue serving European institutions.

As Parliament's lead rapporteur, Solier is responsible for preparing the chamber's initial position on all of these issues.

How the Rapporteur System Allocates Drafting Power

In the European Parliament, rapporteurships are distributed through a points-based auction system. Each political group receives points according to its number of seats and then bids for legislative files, much like an auction. The largest groups generally secure the most important dossiers. Within each group, the choice of the individual rapporteur is mainly governed by internal party dynamics. Academic research describes the process as bottom-up self-selection, with members choosing files based on their policy interests and group coordinators acting as referees when there is competition.

The rapporteur's formal powers are considerable. According to the Parliament's own description, the role involves analysing the proposal, consulting experts and affected parties, recommending the political direction, presenting the report to the full chamber and leading negotiations with the European Commission and the Council of the EU. Research on EU lawmaking has found that the rapporteur is the most influential actor in coalition-building at the proposal stage. Other political groups can generally challenge the rapporteur's draft only by moving it towards the parliamentary median, rather than away from it.

That concentration of authority makes the choice of rapporteur — rather than the proposal's text alone — one of the most important early decisions in CADA's legislative process. The rapporteur establishes the starting point. Later amendments respond to that starting point. It is set by one person chosen through internal group procedures, whose name and record most European voters have never encountered.

In Solier's case, that record spans roughly two years.

Who Is Diego Solier and How He Reached CADA

Solier's political career began in April 2024, when he sent his CV to an acquaintance from his technology career and was placed second on the electoral list of Se Acabó La Fiesta (SALF), a Spanish populist movement founded by social media personality Luis "Alvise" Pérez. Pérez built a following on Telegram and other platforms through anti-corruption messaging and has portrayed himself as a defender against "the deep state". Solier told eldiario.es that he had known Pérez only through his online presence, met him for the first time days before the election and accepted the invitation after consulting his family: "A person from the tech world I had worked with on some projects, a person I trust with a brilliant mind, who said to me: 'Look Diego, we're designing this and we're looking for professionals who love their country.'"

SALF won three seats in the June 2024 European Parliament elections — a result that even Pérez found surprising — finishing sixth among Spanish parties. Solier, as the second candidate on the list, won one of those seats.

Before entering politics, Solier worked throughout his career in corporate IT. He studied systems engineering and completed an MBA at the Technical University of Valencia. He later worked in Dublin for Trinity Biotech, the Irish Medicines Board and Irish Continental Group before returning to Spain. From 2012 to 2018, he headed Disney's Iberian IT operations for The Walt Disney Company. He then joined Attindas, a multinational personal-care company specialising in incontinence products, including adult and infant nappies, with factories in Spain, Sweden, Italy and the United States. He served as the company's global IT director and director of support services.

Solier's official European Parliament biography page remains blank.

The Split and the Lawsuit

The alliance with Pérez broke down in April 2025. SALF's leader publicly suggested that Solier and fellow SALF MEP Nora Junco had been bought by the arms lobby after both voted for an €800 billion European rearmament package, worth approximately US$928 billion — a position opposed by Pérez. In an online broadcast, Pérez urged his followers to locate and confront the two MEPs, comments Solier described as incitement. In October 2025, Spain's Supreme Court opened an investigation into Pérez over alleged harassment and disclosure of private information involving Junco and Solier.

Pérez was already the subject of a separate Supreme Court investigation. Spanish prosecutors had established that cryptocurrency entrepreneur Álvaro Romillo — later arrested in November 2025 as the alleged organiser of a US$300 million Ponzi scheme that affected more than 3,000 victims in eight countries — admitted making a €100,000 cash payment, approximately US$116,000, to Pérez's campaign on May 27, 2024, days before the European elections. Pérez acknowledged receiving the money. The European Parliament lifted his immunity in May 2026, and Spain's Supreme Court resumed its investigation into his campaign accounts in July 2026.

Solier and Junco cut their ties with Pérez and SALF by June 2025. They had already joined the ECR in December 2024 — the European Conservatives and Reformists group led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia. Pérez's application to join the ECR was rejected, partly because of a parliamentary conduct review and opposition from Spain's Vox party.

What Solier Has Signalled on CADA

Solier says he is currently in a "listening phase", consulting stakeholders before taking firm positions on the legislation. His public record, however, indicates a clear ideological direction.

On energy, he has argued that AI data centres require stable and affordable electricity that renewable sources alone cannot provide. He has also explicitly called for Spain to reverse its government-mandated nuclear phase-out timetable. Writing in a Spanish-language publication in March 2026, he concluded: "If Europe wants to be free, first it has to be able to turn on the light with its own resources." His position is consistent with that of several major US cloud companies that have signed or pursued agreements with nuclear power operators to supply energy for AI infrastructure.

On regulation, Solier said in a July 2025 interview that "too much regulation, too many barriers" were Europe's main technology problem. He has indicated that he favours simplifying the existing rulebook rather than introducing new obligations. At the CEE AI Summit in Prague on September 3, 2026, he said: "Europe must move from regulating technology to building technological capacity."

On transatlantic relations, he supports building "alliances" with US technology companies while developing a European innovation ecosystem at the same time — a position critics say favours incumbent companies.

The ideological gap between Solier's deregulatory, pro-nuclear and alliance-first approach and the opposing position of the S&D group is wide. Nicola Zingaretti, the former president of Italy's Lazio region who was appointed as the S&D shadow rapporteur in July 2026, has described the regulation as a test of whether the EU can "build the European digital ecosystem" while protecting citizens from technology giants. The eventual compromise between the two positions, to be worked out in trilogue negotiations expected to continue until at least mid-2027, will determine whether CADA functions primarily as an industrial strategy tool or embeds meaningful safeguards for data governance, environmental accountability and civil liberties.

Is This a Repeating Pattern in EU Tech Law?

Questions surrounding Solier's appointment echo those raised earlier in 2026 about Aura Salla, the MEP chosen to lead the Digital Omnibus in the ITRE committee. Seven civil society organisations, including Corporate Europe Observatory, Transparency International EU and The Good Lobby, published an open letter in February 2026 calling for Salla's removal. They noted that before entering the European Parliament she had been Meta's public policy director and head of EU affairs, lobbying EU institutions on privacy rules for the company. Meta has been fined seven times for breaching the GDPR over five years, with penalties totalling €2.6 billion, or about US$3 billion.

The two appointments are structurally different. Salla brought substantial industry expertise to a file that directly affected her former employer, while Solier has no previous legislative experience and no documented financial relationship with cloud-sector stakeholders. But both cases share the same structural feature: the EU's rapporteur system placed significant early-stage legislative power in one person without a formal process for public review, independent vetting or appeals by stakeholders beyond the internal political-group process that selected the rapporteur.

Digital rights advocates say it is this structural weakness — rather than the qualifications or background of any individual rapporteur — that needs reform. The European Parliament updated its conflict-of-interest declaration rules in 2025, requiring rapporteurs to formally declare that they are aware of conflicts of interest for each legislative file. It has not been publicly confirmed whether Solier has submitted such a declaration for CADA.

How Can Readers Follow What CADA Becomes?

Solier has said he aims to secure a European Parliament vote on CADA by June or July 2027. Trilogue negotiations with EU member-state governments would then begin. Not all shadow rapporteurs who will negotiate with him have been formally appointed. Zingaretti represents the S&D, while appointments from other groups remain pending.

The civil society organisations that followed the Salla controversy — Corporate Europe Observatory, Transparency International EU and The Good Lobby — have not yet issued formal positions on the CADA rapporteurship. The consultation period Solier calls his "listening phase" is the practical opportunity for advocacy groups, technology companies and citizens to influence the initial draft before it becomes established. Once a rapporteur's draft report is tabled in committee, the amendment process responds to it rather than replacing it.

CADA will regulate the physical backbone of European AI: the data centres, cloud layers and sovereign procurement criteria that determine which companies can build and operate infrastructure on which European governments depend. Who writes Parliament's first draft on these issues is not a procedural footnote. In practical terms, it is the most consequential single decision in CADA's early legislative history — and it was made through the ECR's internal group procedures, not through a process that European voters could observe or challenge.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), and why does the rapporteur matter so much?

CADA is a European Commission legislative proposal adopted on June 3, 2026. It establishes a four-tier cloud-sovereignty framework for public-sector procurement across the EU and sets rules for investment in AI infrastructure. The European Parliament's lead rapporteur is responsible for drafting Parliament's initial position on the regulation. That position becomes the baseline for later amendments, negotiations and trilogue discussions. Academic research on EU lawmaking describes the rapporteur as the most influential player in coalition-building at the proposal stage, meaning Solier's first draft will effectively shape the terms of debate throughout CADA's parliamentary process.

How does the EU rapporteur selection system work, and what are its accountability limits?

Political groups in the European Parliament receive points according to their number of seats and bid for rapporteurships through a points-based auction. The group that wins the file then chooses one of its own members to serve as rapporteur, mainly through internal self-selection among members interested in the subject. There is no public competition, no independent vetting of the selected person's qualifications or possible conflicts of interest beyond a formal self-declaration, and no formal process through which citizens or civil society organisations can challenge the appointment. In effect, rapporteur selection is an internal party decision with external legislative consequences.

What specific positions has Diego Solier taken on CADA and EU technology policy?

Solier has publicly supported using nuclear energy to power AI data centres, arguing in March 2026 that Spain's nuclear phase-out undermines European technological sovereignty. He has consistently favoured simplifying existing EU technology rules rather than adding new obligations. He has also argued that Europe should build "alliances" with US technology companies instead of treating them primarily as competitors to be displaced. Those positions broadly match the ECR's deregulatory platform but differ sharply from the S&D shadow rapporteur's stated aim of protecting citizens from technology giants through structural safeguards in CADA.

What happened between Solier and Alvise Pérez, and why does that backstory matter for CADA?

Solier was recruited by an unnamed contact from his technology career to run second on the SALF list in 2024. He met SALF founder Alvise Pérez for the first time only days before the election. After winning a European Parliament seat, Solier and Nora Junco voted in April 2025 for an €800 billion European rearmament package, approximately US$928 billion. Pérez publicly portrayed the vote as evidence that they had been "bought by the arms lobby". Spain's Supreme Court subsequently opened an investigation into Pérez over alleged harassment and disclosure of private information involving Solier and Junco. The history does not disqualify Solier — he has committed no legal wrongdoing — but it highlights how little the rapporteur selection system requires the public to know about the person given primary early-stage drafting authority over rules that will govern AI infrastructure for 450 million people.

Originally published on Tech Times