Rosa Díez González

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Rosa Díez at a 2008 election rally

Rosa Díez González (born May 27, 1952 in Sodupe , Bizkaia / Spain ) is a former Spanish politician and founder and former leader of the Unión Progreso y Democracia (UPYD) party. From 2008 to 2015 Díez was a member of the Spanish Parliament for the UPYD . Before that, she was a member of the European Parliament for the socialist party PSOE from 1999 to 2007 . She left the UPYD on February 8, 2016.

Political career

Beginnings in Basque Politics

Rosa Díez comes from a Basque family. Her father was a metal worker and was sentenced to death during the Franco dictatorship for membership of the banned socialist party PSOE , but was later pardoned to imprisonment. She herself worked as a telephone operator since 1973.

After the transition to democracy , Díez joined the PSOE, which has since been re-approved, and the UGT union , and took on various offices there. From 1979 to 1983 she was a member of the Provincial Parliament of Bizkaia , after which she was a member of the provincial government until 1987. In 1986 she was elected to the regional parliament of the Basque Country , of which she was a member until 1999.

After the Basque Nationalist Party PNV and the PSOE formed a coalition for the Basque regional government in 1991 , Díez became the Basque Minister for Trade, Consumption and Tourism. In 1997, the Basque terrorist organization ETA committed a murder attempt against them using a letter bomb , which, however, did not detonate due to a construction fault.

Before the Basque regional elections in 1998 Díez ran to be nominated by the PSOE as the top candidate, but lost the party election against Nicolás Redondo Terreros . A little later, the PSOE decided to leave the Basque regional government after the PNV had approached the ETA-affiliated Herri Batasuna party .

Member of the European Parliament

In the 1999 European elections , Díez was elected to the European Parliament as the PSOE's top candidate .

After the severe electoral defeat of the PSOE in the Spanish parliamentary elections in 2000 , she ran at a party congress in a fight for chairmanship against José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero , José Bono Martínez and Matilde Fernández . With 6.55% of the vote, she was the last of the four candidates; however, their participation in the election influenced the result, in which Zapatero narrowly prevailed against Bono.

In the 2004 European elections , Díez moved into parliament again, this time in second place on the list. However, despite her European mandate, she continued to interfere in Basque politics: in 2003 she ran a (albeit hopeless) mayoral candidacy in the small town of Ondórroa, which had previously been ruled by the - now banned - ETA-affiliated Batasuna party . She also repeatedly criticized the fact that the PSOE, under its Basque General Secretary Patxi López, did not distance itself sufficiently from the PNV.

Finally, in 2006, the differences between Díez and the PSOE became clear when the Zapatero government began negotiations with the terrorist organization following an announced armistice by ETA. When the Party of European Socialists tabled a resolution proposal in the European Parliament on October 25, 2006 to ensure EU support for this so-called "peace process", Díez abstained from arguing that the Basque Country was not lacking peace, but freedom. This public criticism led to party friends accusing her of supporting the conservative opposition of the Partido Popular (PP).

Leaving the party and re-establishing the UPyD

After several months of intensifying her contacts with political and civil society organizations that are hostile to Basque and Catalan nationalism, Díez finally announced in August 2007 that she would leave the PSOE to join a new party called Unión Progreso y Democracia (UPyD) establish. At the same time she gave up her European Parliament mandate. The founding of the party, which took place on September 29, 2007, was supported by various intellectuals, including the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater and the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa , who lives in Spain .

UPyD presented itself as a Spain-wide centrist alternative in the Spanish party system . In the Spanish parliamentary elections in 2008 , in which UPyD ran for the first time, Díez was the party's top candidate for Madrid and won the party's only seat in the Spanish Chamber of Deputies. In the Spanish parliamentary elections in 2011 , the UPyD made significant gains and won five seats, including one for Rosa Díez.

Withdrawal from active politics

As a result of the poor result of the UPyD in the regional and local elections in Spain in 2015, in which the party left all regional parliaments and lost massively to the Ciudadanos even in its stronghold of Madrid , it announced that it would no longer run for chairmanship at the upcoming party congress . Andrés Herzog was elected as her successor .

Díez did not run for the 2015 parliamentary elections, until then she held the office of parliamentary group leader of the UPYD. In the election, the party lost all seats and slipped to 0.61 percent.

After retiring from active politics, she announced that she wanted to return to work for the Basque government. On February 8th, Díez finally announced that she was leaving the UPYD. For the November 2019 parliamentary election, she supported the conservative Partido Popular .

Web links

Commons : Rosa Díez  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Rosa Díez y Andrés Herzog se dan de baja de UPyD , ABC Esp.
  2. ^ Motion for a resolution by the European Parliament on the peace process in Spain on the European Parliament's website.
  3. ↑ Minutes of the European Parliament's meeting.
  4. ↑ ABC, August 30, 2007: Rosa Díez deja el PSOE por "incompatibilidad" con sus "valores" (in Spanish).
  5. ↑ Rosa Díez no presentará candidatura para liderar UPyD , El Mundo from May 25, 2015 (accessed: July 3, 2015)
  6. ↑ Rosa Díez pide al Gobierno vasco jubilarse tras dejar la política activa , El País of December 30, 2015 (accessed December 30, 2015)
  7. ^ Dani Mateo: "Rosa Díez ha pasado del PSOE a UPyD y al PP, se ha montado un tripartito ella sola" , El Diario of November 7, 2019 (accessed on November 10, 2015)
personal data
SURNAME Díez González, Rosa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish politician, MEP
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Sodupe , Bizkaia , Spain