José María Aznar
José María Aznar was prime minister of Spain for eight years, from 1996 to 2004, the tax inspector who had survived an ETA car bomb in 1995, beat Felipe González by a single point and governed with the Catalan and Basque nationalists, took Spain into the euro in the first wave in 1999, won an absolute majority in 2000 on the growth of those years, stood with Bush and Blair at the Azores summit of March 2003 that launched the Iraq war against ninety per cent of Spanish opinion, and left office three days after the Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004, which his government blamed on ETA for the three days before the election it lost, when the evidence pointed to Islamists. He was born in Madrid in 1953 into a family of the Franco regime's journalists, passed the state examinations for tax inspector, and was Fraga's choice in 1989 to lead the People's Party out of its Francoist past. He was president of Castile and Leon before that, and refounded the party as a European centre-right one. The bomb of April 1995 in Madrid destroyed his armoured car and left him unhurt. The first term met the Maastricht criteria by privatising Telefonica, Repsol and Endesa, cut the deficit and the taxes, and negotiated with ETA during its truce of 1998 and 1999, which ended with the killing of his party's councillors. The second, with the majority, was the ban on ETA's political wing, the Prestige oil spill, the labour reform that brought a general strike, the Perejil island standoff with Morocco that a dozen marines settled, and Iraq, to which he sent thirteen hundred troops and where Spain lost its intelligence officers in an ambush. He kept his promise not to serve a third term and named Rajoy as his successor. The bombs on the commuter trains at Atocha killed a hundred and ninety-two people on a Thursday. The government said ETA until Saturday, the streets said who was it, and Zapatero won on Sunday. He has since chaired his foundation and the board of a media company, taught at Georgetown, and written that the war was right.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
