José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was prime minister of Spain from 2004 to 2011, elected three days after the Madrid bombings on the anger at the government that had blamed ETA, who brought the troops home from Iraq within weeks, legalised same-sex marriage in 2005, the third country to do so, passed the laws on gender violence, dependency care and historical memory that dug up the Franco regime's mass graves, negotiated with ETA to its permanent ceasefire of 2011, and presided over the housing bubble he had inherited and the crash that followed, denying the crisis in 2008 and, in May 2010, under orders from Brussels and Berlin, cutting wages and pensions in the speech that ended his government; his party lost five million votes in 2011 and he did not stand. He was born in Valladolid in 1960 into a family of Republican lawyers, his grandfather shot by the Nationalists in 1936, read law at Leon, and was the youngest deputy in the Cortes in 1986. He took the Socialist leadership in 2000 after Almunia's defeat by nine votes over the party's establishment, as the new way, and was mocked by Aznar's people as Bambi. The election of 14 March 2004 gave him a plurality he governed with the Catalan left. The first term was the social laws and the Catalan statute of 2006, which the Constitutional Court cut down in 2010 and which is the origin of the independence movement, and the regularisation of six hundred thousand immigrants. The economy grew at four per cent on construction and he said Spain had overtaken Italy and would overtake France. He won again in 2008 as Lehman Brothers fell. The unemployment doubled to twenty per cent in two years, the savings banks failed, and the bond markets in the spring of 2010 put Spain next to Greece. The cuts of 12 May 2010 and the constitutional amendment of 2011 fixing a deficit limit, agreed with Rajoy in a week, were the end of the party's social democracy and of him. ETA declared the definitive end of its armed activity in October 2011, a month before the election, which Rajoy won by a landslide. He has mediated in Venezuela since 2015 as a friend of Maduro's government, which his own party has found awkward.
- Lived: 1960 CE – ?
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
