Adolfo Suarez

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Adolfo Suárez (disambiguation) .

Adolfo Suarez (1978)

Adolfo Suárez González, 1st Duke of Suárez (born September 25, 1932 in Cebreros , Ávila province , † March 23, 2014 in Madrid ) was a Spanish politician and the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Spain after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco . Installed and commissioned by King Juan Carlos I , he was the main promoter of the democratization of Spain . In January 1981 he resigned.

Life

Childhood and early career

Adolfo Suarez (1979)

Coat of arms of Adolfo Suárez González, 1st Duke of Suárez

Suárez, the son of a lawyer, came from a middle-class family. He began studying law at the University of Salamanca , studied with some difficulties and obtained his doctorate from the Complutense University of Madrid . Under the protection of Fernando Herrero Tejedor , the long-time general secretary of the Francoist Party, Suárez served for 18 years in various posts with the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS ("National Movement", Movimiento Nacional ) party. As an exponent of Catholic Action and a member of the influential Opus Dei (as confirmed by the son of his mentor, Suárez 'friend and companion Luis Herrero , in 2007) he was deeply rooted in church life and networked with the economic and media elites of the regime. From 1958 he rose to the general secretariat of the Movimiento Nacional , was head of the technical cabinet of the general vice- secretariat from 1961, became a member of the Francoist Cortes for Ávila in 1967 , civil governor of Segovia from 1968 to 1969 , and from 1969 to 1973 director general for radio and television , where he since 1964, and from 1973 president of the board of directors of the state tourism organization. In April 1975 he was nominated by Herrero Tejedor to be the movement's vice-general secretary. When he was killed in a car accident on June 12, 1975, Suárez was appointed general secretary of the movement. Until Franco's death in November 1975, he was a member of the first cabinet of Carlos Arias Navarro as Secretary of State for the National Movement. After Franco's death, Suárez resigned and founded the Unión del Pueblo Español (UPE, Union of the Spanish People).

Transición

On July 1, 1976, King Juan Carlos I forced Carlos Arias Navarro (Prime Minister since the turn of 1973/74) to resign. On July 3, Suarez was commissioned by the king to form a government. At the time, Suarez was unknown to most Spaniards. He was rejected by many who had hopes for democratic reforms because of his career in the Francoist apparatus. Suárez, only 43 years old, showed some skill in rallying a group of politicians of his generation who had expressed their democratic beliefs in various ways. Together with other former Franco supporters who had joined the Social Democrats, Liberals or Christian Democrats, he wound up the Francoist regime between 1976 and 1979, where he succeeded in bringing opponents and supporters of the old system together: On the one hand, he convinced skeptical Franquists of the Necessity of democratic reforms, on the other hand he was able to persuade democratic and left-wing forces to renounce revenge and settle accounts with the representatives of the regime. In this context he promoted, inter alia. the self-dissolution of the Francoist Cortes and their replacement by a democratically elected bicameral parliament, which was implemented with the support of Torcuato Fernández-Miranda with the “Law on Political Reform” ( Ley para la Reforma Política ) in November 1976. This, and the admission of political parties (including the communist PCE ) and trade unions , promoted and confirmed by a referendum in December 1976 with a majority of 95% of the votes cast, earned him the respect of the democratic forces. The Lieutenant General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado has been assigned the role as Deputy Prime Minister, the officer corps, as far as possible to control. This still largely consisted of participants in the civil war who supported the Francoist regime and feared a shift to the left and the collapse of Spain under a democratic government.

democracy

On June 15, 1977, Spain voted in free general elections for the first time since 1936. Suárez won it at the head of an electoral alliance with a conservative-liberal orientation, which called itself Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD, Union of the Democratic Center) and rallied around him. In July 1977, Suárez was already forming a government made up of experts from his party and non-party members. The Cortes that emerged from this election became a constituent assembly. The constitution passed there was adopted by the people in a referendum on December 6, 1978. At the same time, he began the regionalization of the Spanish state centralized by Franco, starting with the Statutes of Autonomy for Catalonia and the Basque Country , and presented a program to rehabilitate the economy and increase tax equity. In 1978 Suárez also became chairman of the UCD, won the national parliamentary elections on March 1, 1979 for the second time and remained head of government.

In January 1981 he resigned because of growing tensions within his own party and in view of the country's major political, social and economic problems; Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo Bustelo was chosen as his successor and was to be elected by parliament on February 23. In his ten-minute resignation speech on January 29, 1981, Suárez formulated his message to his country:

"Yo no quiero que el sistema democrático de convivencia sea, una vez más, un paréntesis en la Historia de España."

"I do not want the democratic system of coexistence to remain a mere interlude in the history of Spain again."

- Adolfo Suarez

In the attempted coup on February 23, 1981 , while Suárez was still in office as executive head of government, he demonstrated an exemplary attitude by opposing the coup officers of the Guardia Civil in parliament as one of three deputies. He first tried from his seat to support Gutiérrez Mellado, who had stood in the way of the putschists as the highest-ranking military man in the hall. When they fired shots and ordered the MPs to lie on the floor, he stayed upright at his desk, as did the communist Santiago Carrillo .

retreat

A week after his resignation as head of government, Suárez also resigned as party leader and worked as a business lawyer. In July 1982 he resigned from the UCD and resigned from parliament. He founded a new group, the Centro Democrático y Social (CDS), which elected him on October 5, 1982 as its chairman and was located in the center left of the UCD. But the three-week election campaign leading up to the parliamentary elections, in which the dispute over remaining in NATO dominated, for which Suárez advocated, was not enough for a new profile. The CDS received only 2.8 percentage points nationwide and thus two seats in the Cortes. Since then he has continued to work on his comeback in politics, which he no longer succeeded.

Last years and death

Avila Cathedral , tomb of Adolfo Suárez

In 1991 he retired from politics for political and family reasons. In 2005 his son announced that Adolfo Suárez had been suffering from dementia for two years and that the disease had already reached an advanced stage. On March 17, 2014, Suárez was rushed to a Madrid hospital with a respiratory infection. He finally succumbed to this disease on March 23, 2014. Suárez received a state funeral and was buried in the cloister of the Cathedral of Avila after three days of state mourning .

Honors

In 1996 he received the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de la Concordia , the Prince of Asturias Prize for unity of the Spanish Crown Prince, for his important contribution to the Transición , the Spanish transition to democracy . The Spanish king made him Duke and in 2007 appointed him Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece , where he personally visited the seriously ill with dementia. Adolfo Suárez also received a number of honorary doctorates, including in 1998 from the Polytechnic University of Valencia .

As early as February 2009, there were considerations to rename Madrid-Barajas Airport in honor of Adolfo Suárez. The day after Suárez 'death it was decided to add to the name, and since March 26, 2014 the airport has been called Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas .

On March 24, 2014, Suárez was posthumously awarded the Order of Charles III at its highest level (the highest civilian honor awarded in Spain).

family

His wife Amparo Illana Elórtegui and his older daughter Marian Suárez Illana died of cancer in 2001 and 2004, respectively. His second daughter, Sonsoles Suárez Illana, became Antena 3's television news anchor . His son Adolfo Suárez Illana was proposed by José María Aznar as a candidate of the Partido Popular (PP) for the office of President of the Autonomous Community of Castile-La Mancha , but he was defeated by the incumbent José Bono of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). Suárez had a sister named Laura and a brother named Javier.

Web links

Commons : Adolfo Suárez  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Adolfo Suarez this, steered Spain out of post-Franco turmoil
2. ↑ [1] welt.de, March 23, 2014, accessed on May 16, 2018
3. ^ Raphael Minder: A. Suarez Dies at 81; Led Spain Back to Democracy. nytimes.com, March 23, 2014, accessed March 23, 2014
4. ↑ Javier Cercas: Anatomy of a Moment: The Night in which Spain's Democracy Was Saved, 2011
5. ↑ Los que le llamábamos Adolfo. In: El Cultural , September 27, 2007, accessed August 9, 2018.
6. ↑ Walther L. Bernecker : History of Spain in the 20th Century, 2010
7. ↑ What an error ; Der Spiegel 3/1977, pp. 80-81
8. ^ Ex-Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez has died. spiegel.de, March 23, 2014, accessed on March 23, 2013
9. ^ Dieter Nohlen , Andreas Hildenbrand: Spain: Economy - Society - Politics . Leske + Budrich , Opladen 1992, ISBN 978-3-8100-0754-4 , pp. 309 .
10. ↑ ABC.es: Report on the renaming discussion in Aeropuerto Suárez , message of February 10, 2009
11. ↑ El aeropuerto de Madrid-Barajas pasará a denominarse Adolfo Suárez, Madrid-Barajas ( Memento of March 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ). Ministerio de Formento, March 24, 2014, accessed March 25, 2014.

predecessor	Office	successor
Fernando de Santiago y Díaz de Mendívil	Prime Minister of Spain 1976–1981	Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo