Mariano Rajoy
Mariano Rajoy was prime minister of Spain from December 2011 to June 2018, the property registrar from Galicia who lost two elections to Zapatero and won the third by a landslide in the depth of the crisis, took the European bank bailout of a hundred billion euros in 2012 while insisting it was not a bailout, cut the budget, reformed the labour market against two general strikes and brought unemployment down from twenty-six per cent, governed for ten months of 2016 as a caretaker while the parties could not agree, faced down the Catalan independence referendum of 1 October 2017 with the police and Article 155, and was removed by the first successful motion of censure in Spanish democracy after a court found his party had run a slush fund for twenty years. He was born in Santiago de Compostela in 1955, the son of a judge, passed the registrars' examinations at twenty-three, and was a deputy in the Galician parliament and a minister under Aznar in education, the interior and the presidency, the fixer who handled the Prestige spill and the trains of 11 March. Aznar named him successor in 2003 and he lost in 2004 and 2008, surviving both. The election of November 2011 gave the People's Party 186 seats. The programme was what Brussels asked. VAT went up, public wages down, the banks merged into a bad bank with European money, a labour law that made dismissal cheap, and the Basque and Catalan governments starved of money, which in Catalonia fed the independence movement he answered with the courts. The Gurtel corruption case, whose treasurer Barcenas kept the handwritten accounts of the envelopes, shadowed him from 2013. He testified as a witness in 2017 and the verdict of May 2018, finding the party a beneficiary, gave Sanchez the votes for the censure on 1 June. The referendum in Catalonia was held in schools the police tried to close, with batons and rubber bullets filmed by the world, the declaration of independence of 27 October was suspended in the same breath, and his government dissolved the Catalan parliament and called an election that the independence parties won again. The leaders went to prison or to Belgium. He went back to the property registry in Madrid in 2018 and writes memoirs.
- Lived: 1955 CE – ?
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
