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José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (August 4, 1960) is the 5th Prime Minister of the Spanish Government since the democratic restoration in 1978, following his party's victory in the March 14 Spanish general election. He was sworn in by King Juan Carlos on April 17, 2004. He has been General Secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) since 2000.

Rodríguez Zapatero was born in Valladolid but his family (with a long tradition of left-wing politics) was from León. His grandfather was a Republican captain who was executed by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He attended his first political rally in Gijón in 1977, when Spain was about to hold its first democratic elections following the death of long-time dictator Francisco Franco. The speaker at the rally was the PSOE leader Felipe González (who became Prime Minister of Spain in 1982 and served until 1996), and Rodríguez Zapatero joined the PSOE soon after. The PSOE had not yet renounced to marxism-leninism as its ideological base (that happened in 1979). This could explain Zapatero's foreign policy in his first months as president (abandoning Irak as a challenge to the Bush's policy and approaching extreme-left leaders such as Fidel Castro or the President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez).

By 1982 Rodríguez Zapatero headed the socialist youth organisation in his home province of León. In 1986, he became the youngest member of parliament in Spain when he won a seat representing the province. In 1988 he was elected to head the regional chapter of the socialist party in León, and in 1997 he was appointed to the Federal Executive Committee, the party's governing body.

In 2000, after the PSOE had lost its second successive election to José María Aznar's People's Party, Rodríguez Zapatero was elected party leader as the representative of a modernising faction of the party known as Nueva Vía ("New Way"), which drew its inspiration from Tony Blair's "Third Way" politics. But the People's Party continued to lead the PSOE in opinion polls until the 11 March 2004 Madrid attacks.

Rodríguez Zapatero has been insistent that a PSOE government will not be "soft on terrorism" and will not allow regional nationalists to endanger Spanish unity. This issue became important in the elections, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Madrid on March 11, which were initially widely thought to be the work of Basque terrorist organization ETA.

Upon winning the election, Rodríguez Zapatero's first action was to order the Spanish troops home from Iraq. Zapatero also announced his intention to undertake limited reforms to the Spanish Constitution and legalize same-sex marriage. On the issue of Gibraltar, Zapatero has taken a strong line with the United Kingdom, complaining strongly at Gibraltar's celebrations of its tercentenary and rejecting the Gibraltarians' requests for Spain to recognise its right to self-determination.

In October 2004 Zapatero's government undertook the task of morally and legally rehabilitating those who were repressed during and after the Spanish Civil War, by instituting a Memory Commission chaired by his Vice-president María Teresa Fernández de la Vega.

Married in 1990 with Sonsoles Espinosa and father of two girls, Laura (1993) and Alba (1995), Rodríguez Zapatero is a fan of the Barcelona football team, the first among Prime Ministers in Spain.

External links

• Spanish Socialist Workers' Party
• Right-wing website highly critical of Rodríguez Zapatero (in Spanish)
• Extended biography by CIDOB Foundation (in Spanish)
• News about Rodríguez Zapatero (in Spanish)

See also

• History of Spain
• Politics of Spain
• Prime Minister of Spain

• 1960 births
• Spanish politicians
• Spanish politics