Felipe González
Felipe González was prime minister of Spain for fourteen years, from the Socialist landslide of October 1982, the first time the left had governed since the Republic, to 1996, the years in which the country joined the European Community in 1986, voted in a referendum the same year to stay in NATO after he had campaigned against it and then for it, built the motorways, the high-speed train and the welfare state with European money, held the Olympics in Barcelona and the Expo in Seville in 1992, and was brought down by the corruption of his party's treasurers and by the GAL, the death squads that his interior ministry had run against ETA in France in the 1980s and for which his interior minister and his security chief went to prison. He was, at forty, the youngest head of government in Europe, and the Spain he left was a different country from the one he found. He was born in Seville in 1942, the son of a dairyman, read law, and joined the clandestine Socialist party at twenty, taking its leadership at the Suresnes congress in France in 1974 under the name Isidoro from the old exiles who had kept it since 1939. In the transition he took the party off Marxism in 1979, resigning and being called back to do it. The 1982 election gave him 202 of 350 seats. The government cut the steel and shipyard workforce, liberalised the labour market against a general strike in 1988, expanded the pensions and the health service to everyone, and negotiated the entry to the Community that made Spain the largest recipient of its structural funds. The NATO referendum of March 1986, in which he asked for a yes he had once opposed and got it with fifty-three per cent, was the turn from the party of the street to the party of the state. He won absolute majorities in 1986 and 1989 and a plurality in 1993, and the last term was the scandals. The head of the Civil Guard fled with the funds. The GAL trials reached the ministry, and the Bank of Spain's governor was arrested. Aznar beat him narrowly in March 1996. He left the party leadership in 1997, sat in the Council of State and on boards, mediated in Colombia and Venezuela, and has spent his eighties criticising the party he made from the pages of the right-wing press.
- Lived: 1942 CE – ?
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
