Felipe González Márquez

(b. Seville, 5 Mar. 1942) Spanish; Prime Minister 1982 – 96, leader of the Socialist Party 1974 – 97 One of the country's leading political figures in the twentieth century, González first joined the Socialist Party (PSOE) in 1964, having previously been a member of the Socialist Youth. After university studies in Seville and Louvain in Belgium, in 1968 González set up a labour law practice in the Andalucían capital. Together with his friend and subsequent first lieutenant, Alfonso Guerra, González soon established a reputation for trenchant arguments and a highly critical attitude towards the party's "historic" leadership, based in Toulouse following defeat in the Spanish Civil War. Repeated interference and pressure from the exiled executive led to both their resignations, followed in 1974 by a successful assault on the existing leadership.

Once established in the new executive, González and Guerra consolidated their position. Guerra became editor of El Socialista, and González moved to Madrid in 1975, where he largely bypassed the existing PSOE organization and set up his own party machinery, aided by Miguel Boyer (later to become Economy Minister in the first González administration). González was able to attract loyalty and support on the basis of his undoubted political talents: he was intelligent, highly articulate, and charismatic. Equally important, in Guerra he had the perfect partner, who operated behind the scenes to set up and run a dynamic party machine.

As Prime Minister, González dominated Spanish politics. His first period in office saw the consolidation of Spanish democracy and the full incorporation of the country into the international community, as Spain joined the European Community and confirmed its membership of NATO. His second administration (1986 – 9) reaped the economic rewards of these developments and saw Spain enjoy dramatic levels of growth. However, González appeared to become disillusioned during this period. His presence in the Spanish parliament became increasingly infrequent, and he concentrated ever more on international affairs, apparently seeking to assume a role similar to that of the French president.

Often looking weary, or even bored, with domestic political matters, González announced that the 1989 general election would be the last in which he led the Socialist Party. He was forced to retract this remark as a major struggle developed over the succession. Indeed, his third administration (1989 – 93) was marked by internal party strife, exacerbated by growing evidence of corruption. After the enforced resignation of Alfonso Guerra — implicated in a scandal involving his brother Juan — as Deputy Prime Minister in 1991, relations between the two PSOE leaders deteriorated sharply. González associated himself ever more closely with the liberal market-orientated version of social democracy espoused by his controversial Economy Minister Carlos Solchaga, against the more populist leftist rhetoric of Guerra and his followers. As the boom of the mid- to late 1980s was replaced by recession in the early 1990s, arguments within the PSOE became increasingly bitter. González remained identified, however, as the party's greatest electoral asset. This was dramatically demonstrated in the 1993 general election, in which he took full charge of the PSOE campaign and defied opinion polls to pull off an unexpected victory, although he was forced to rely on support from Jordi Pujol's Catalan Nationalists to remain in office.

Following the 1993 elections, González came under fire for presiding over a government which seemed increasingly mired in corruption scandals. An escape route seemed to open as the Spanish premier was widely tipped to succeed Jacques Delors as president of the European Commission in 1995. However, González refused all approaches, insisting that his duty lay in rooting out corruption and in steering Spain through the challenge of meeting the convergence terms for European economic and monetary union. Having lost the support of Pujol, he was forced to go to the polls a year early in March 1996. This time he did lose the election, but by a much smaller margin than had been predicted in opinion polls. Although effectively abandoned by many leading party colleagues, who were convinced that the PSOE was heading for a catastrophic defeat, González won sufficient support to prevent an outright victory for the opposition and thereby secured his own position as leader of the PSOE against any internal challenges.

Prime Minister of Spain from 1982 to 1996, Felipe González Márquez (born 1942) helped lead Spain into the European community of nations.

Birth and Childhood

Felipe González Márquez was born on March 5, 1942, in Seville, the largest city in western Andalusia in the south of Spain. His father, Felipe González Helguera, bought and sold cattle and owned a small dairy in a lower-middle-class district of Seville. His mother, Juana Márquez, was, in her son's words, "the driving force of the family."

The particular period of Spanish history in which González grew up had a decisive influence on what were later to be his ideological beliefs. Between 1936 and 1939 Spain had suffered an horrific civil war, resulting from a military rising that overthrew the reformist government elected to power in February 1936. Under the ultraconservative regime established by General Francisco Franco at the end of the war in 1939, all political parties and trade unions were banned except those organized by the state. All forms of dissent were prohibited. González was born at a time when Spanish prisons were full to overflowing with political prisoners. Thousands of people had been executed since the end of the war because of their liberal beliefs. In his neighborhood in Seville lived a number of former political prisoners who had served their sentences in a nearby Francoist labor camp. Finally, the 1940s were years of extreme hardship. The combined effects of the civil war, the subsequent world war, the Francoist policy of economic autarchy, and a long, severe drought brought shortages of even the most basic necessities of life. Spaniards refer to the 1940s as "the hungry years."

During those years González attended a school run by Claretian priests, then entered the Faculty of Law at Seville University. There he was soon influenced by the highly politicized atmosphere which characterized Spanish (and other European) universities in the 1960s. In 1962 he joined the illegal and secret Socialist Youth movement and, two years later, the equally clandestine Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE). It was also at Seville University that he met Carmen Romero López, whom he married in 1969.

By the mid-1960s the economic and social situation in Spain had changed considerably from the hunger and scarcities of the 1940s. The Franco regime had abandoned autarchy and Spain had been reincorporated into the world capitalist system. Politically, however, the regime had not changed at all. Strikes were illegal, but became increasingly frequent in these years, as did demonstrations, go-slows, lock-outs, unfair dismissals, and numerous other manifestations of conflict between employers and workers. When González graduated from Seville University in 1966, he set up the city's first labor counseling office and, as a lawyer specializing in labor cases, acted on behalf of the employees in various parts of the country in some of the most important disputes of the time.

Early Political Career

While he was advancing his professional career, González was also gaining a name for himself as a member of the clandestine Socialist party. In 1939 most of the party's surviving leaders had left Spain for exile. Inside the country a minimal organizational structure managed to keep going, from which new leaders began to emerge. Felipe González was one of this new generation of activists. In 1965 he became a member of the Seville provincial committee and, later, of the national committee. In 1970 the PSOE held its 11th congress and González was elected to the party's most important internal body, the executive commission. By then González and his contemporaries in the PSOE felt increasingly uncomfortable with an aging exiled party leadership that seemed to be divorced from the realities of contemporary Spain.

In 1974 at the 13th party congress held at Suresnes near Paris, González was elected as the party's first secretary-general. His election represented the triumph of the "new" PSOE over the "historic" sector. It also constituted the recognition of González as a major figure within the Spanish socialist movement and the beginning of a new phase in his political career. As leader of the PSOE (with the nom de guerre "Isidoro") his political responsibilities and activities had already increased when, in November 1975, General Franco died, opening the way to the legalization of a multi-party system in Spain. Throughout 1976 González traveled widely in Europe discussing the political future of Spain and of the PSOE with the leaders of other European socialist parties. He established particularly strong links with the West German Social Democratic party. At home he participated in negotiations between the centrist government of Adolfo Suárez and the opposition parties which were designed to achieve consensus on the need for moderate reformist policies, rather than radical change, in order to ensure a peaceful transition to democratic rule. When the first free elections in 41 years were held in June 1977 the PSOE became the main opposition party in the Spanish Cortes (parliament).

Under the leadership of González, the PSOE worked to consolidate Spain's nascent democracy and to increase its own appeal to the progressive, but moderate, sectors of Spanish society. In May 1979 at the 28th party congress, González resigned as secretary-general when the majority of the delegates rejected his motion that the word "Marxist" be dropped from the party's definition of itself. Four months later, however, at an extraordinary congress, he was reinstated and the motion was carried. Giving the party a social democratic image earned González criticism from the left wing of his party, but it paid dividends with respect to the electorate. In October 1982 the PSOE won a landslide victory at the polls and González became Spain's first Socialist prime minister since 1939.

Spain's First Socialist Prime Minister

González' personal charisma, his prestige as a politician, and his control of the PSOE's executive apparatus subsequently enabled him to weather a number of internal storms and to implement controversial policies. Most notably, the leader of the PSOE altered decisively the party's position on Spanish membership of NATO. The PSOE was strongly opposed when Spain joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1981. After the 1982 election, however, the González government and the majority of the PSOE advocated remaining in the alliance. In a referendum held in March 1986 the question was decided in favor of retaining NATO membership. Three months later González again led his party to victory in a general election. He won his third term in office in the elections held on October 29, 1989, although this time, unlike the two previous occasions, the PSOE did not secure an absolute majority in the Cortes.

During González's mandate, Spain definitively left behind the international isolation of the Franco years, becoming a member of the European Economic Community in 1986 and of the Western European Union in 1988. Prime Minister González maintained close relations with a number of Latin American leaders and, as vice-president of the Socialist International, took a particular interest in national and international efforts to resolve the problems occasioned by economic and political instability in Central America.

After serving his forth consecutive term, González announced in June 1997 that he would not seek re-election. His withdrawal followed a series of financial and political scandals. The most serious were charges against some 20 political and police officials under González, including a former Interior Minister, over organizing squads that killed Basque separatists in the 1980s.

Further Reading

The history of the PSOE from 1879 to 1982 is competently recounted by Richard Gillespie in his The Spanish Socialist Party (1989). There is, as yet, no analysis in English of the PSOE in power, but Paul Preston's The Triumph of Democracy in Spain (1986) provides inter alia, an acute analysis of the role of the Spanish Socialist party in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. See also Santos Juliá, "The Rights and Wrongs of Self-Avowed Marxism: The Ideological Conversion of the Leaders of the PSOE between 1976 and 1979" in Frances Lannon and Paul Preston, editors, Elites and Power in Modern Spain (1990). A good history of the Spanish Civil War is Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939 (1965).

González Márquez, Felipe (fəlē'pā gōnthä'lĕth) , 1942–, Spanish political leader. After joining (1962) what was then the Spanish Socialist Workers' party, González became (1974) its secretary-general and revived it from the moribund position into which it had fallen under Franco. In 1979 the party officially abandoned Marxism. González led the Socialists to a landslide victory in the 1982 parliamentary elections and became premier of Spain's first leftist government since the Spanish civil war. The Socialists were returned to power in 1986, 1989, and, as a minority government, 1993. González led social-democratic government that presided over a decade of impressive economic growth in Spain, and in 1986 he led Spain into the European Community (now the European Union). Another notable achievement was domestication of the armed forces after the failed coup attempt of 1981. In the 1990s, however, González's government was beset by various scandals and an increasing loss of public confidence. After a narrow victory in the 1993 elections he and his party lost the election of 1996 to the Popular party, and its head, José María Aznar, became prime minister. He resigned as Socialist party leader in 1997, and retired from the Cortes in 2004. In 1997 several members of his government in the 1980s, including the former interior minister, were convicted of engaging in a “dirty war” against Basque terrorists; González has denied any knowledge of their actions. In 2007 he was chosen to head an official panel to examine the future of the European Union.