Cristina Almeida

Cristina Almeida

María Cristina Almeida Castro (born July 24, 1944 in Badajoz ) is a Spanish lawyer and politician .

She studied law at the University of Madrid and opened her first law firm in 1967, primarily representing clients in the field of labor law and political prisoners; Meanwhile she is more involved in the representation of abused and abused women and in marriage / divorce law. She is considered a social and feminist lawyer.

From 1963 to 1981 Almeida was a member of the Partido Comunista de España (PCE) ( banned until 1977) before she left the party as part of a “reform wing” after arguments with General Secretary Santiago Carrillo . For the PCE she sat in the city government of Madrid since 1979. From 1979 to 1983 she was also Chair of the Fuencarral District Assembly and from 1981 to 1983 City Councilor for Education and Culture of Madrid.

In 1986 she was one of the founding members of the new left-wing alliance Izquierda Unida (IU), for which she was a member of the House of Representatives of the Spanish Parliament from 1989-1993 and 1996-1999 . Within the Izquierda Unida, Almeida belonged to the bloc of the party-independent, which, especially after Julio Anguita's election as chairman of the PCE (the other most important bloc of the IU) and general secretary of the IU, were in opposition to it. The blocks differed mainly in that the PCE leadership of the social democratic ruling party Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) contested its role as the leading left party and the independents wanted to seek rapprochement with the PSOE. Anguita is mainly held responsible for the fact that Almeida and others ( Nicolás Sartorius , Pablo Castellano ) were not nominated for the 1993 parliamentary elections. Almeida and other members of the IU founded the Partido Democrático de Nueva Izquierda (PDNI, German Democratic Party of the New Left ) within the left alliance , of which Almeida became chairman.

After disputes with IU leader Anguita, the PDNI finally left the Izquierda Unida in 1997 and joined the PSOE in 1999, initially for an electoral alliance that led to the PDNI's institutional accession to the PSOE in 2000. Almeida ran in 1999 as a socialist candidate for the presidency of the Autonomous Community of Madrid and for the Parliament of the Autonomous Community. In the elections for the regional presidency she was defeated by the Christian Democrat Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón ; She won a seat in the parliamentary elections. From 1999 to 2003 she was a delegated representative of the Madrid region, a member of the Spanish Senate and from 1999 to 2000 second spokeswoman for the Education and Culture Committee and from 2000 to 2003 second chairwoman of the Committee on Autonomous Affairs Communities.

As an editor and author, she worked on various magazines on legal and women's issues as well as on neighborhood associations. (Neighborhood associations emerged in Spain during the Franco era due to often uncontrolled building activity and poor infrastructure, and they formed part of the opposition to the dictatorship). She wrote the essay La mujer y el mundo del trabajo ( 1982 ).

In 2006 she took part in a television program on the Spanish private broadcaster laSexta , in which courses are given in comedic, political and other monologues .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal, Izquierda Unida: Un dilema imposible ( Memento of the original of March 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Lecture at the Colloquium Políticas de alianza y estrategias unitarias en la historia del PCE , Fundación de Investigaciones Marxistas, 5. – 7. May 2005, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, pp. 13, 20 (Spanish, PDF, in print, see the author's homepage ( Memento of the original of March 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ).  

Web links

• María Cristina Almeida Castro ( Memento of November 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) in the database of representatives of the Spanish Parliament (Spanish)