Pasqual Maragall

Pasqual Maragall

Pasqual Maragall i Mira (born January 13, 1941 in Barcelona ) is a Spanish politician. From 1982 to 1997 he was mayor of Barcelona and from 2003 to 2006 the 127th head of government of the autonomous community of Catalonia ( President de la Generalitat de Catalunya ).

Career

After studying law and economics at the University of Barcelona , Maragall began working in the Barcelona City Council in 1965. He was a member of the underground party Frente de Liberación Popular in the 1906s . 1971 to 1973 he lived in New York , where he New School University visited and there to in Master of Arts in Economics acquired. In 1978 he received his PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Through his work at the union, he came to Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) . In the first local elections after Franco's death in 1979, he entered the city council of Barcelona. When then Mayor Narcís Serra was called to Madrid in 1982, he took over the office of Mayor of Barcelona and was confirmed in the 1983, 1987, 1991 and 1995 elections. In 1997 he passed the office to Joan Clos . During Maragall's tenure, the 25th Summer Olympic Games were held in 1992, and he chaired the organizing committee.

In 1999 he went into the elections for the Catalan Parliament as the PSC's top candidate. Since his opponent Jordi Pujol was able to forge a coalition of his party Convergència i Unió and the Partido Popular , Maragall was defeated in the newly constituted parliament in the election for the office of President of the Generalitat and became leader of the opposition. In 2003, however, he succeeded in forming a three-party coalition from the PSC, the Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds (IC-V) and the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), and so after four years of opposition he became President of the Catalan government to take over. The coalition broke up in May 2006 in the dispute over the new Statute of Autonomy, which the ERC did not go far enough. Maragall then announced an early election for October and announced in June - possibly under pressure from his own party - that he would not stand again. His successor in the office of head of government on November 28, 2006 was his party colleague José Montilla .

In October 2007, Maragall announced that he had been diagnosed with early Alzheimer's in the spring of 2007, and that was one of the reasons why he decided to retire from any public office he held. Because of ongoing rumors about his health, he decided to go public with the diagnosis. Maragall is President of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, which was established shortly afterwards (April 2008) for research into Alzheimer's disease.

Web links

• Pasqual Maragall i Mira website (Catalan / Spanish / English)
• Pasqual Maragall Foundation (Catalan / Spanish / English)