José Antonio Griñán - President of the Junta de Andalucía

José Antonio Griñán - President of the Junta de Andalucía
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By m.p. - May 9, 2009 - 10:22 AM
José Antonio Griñán was invested as President of the Junta de Andalucía on 22nd April 2009

José Antonio Griñán - EFE

A lawyer and a qualified works and social security inspector, José Antonio Griñán became, in April 2009, the fourth President of the Junta Andalucía since the first elections of the newly-autonomous region were held in 1982. He was invested with the votes of the 56 Socialist MPs in the regional parliament. The 53 Partido Popular and Izquierda Unida members of the chamber all voted against his investiture.
He took over from Manuel Chaves, who left presidency of the regional parliament after almost 19 years in the job when he was named by the Prime Minister to join the Cabinet as Minister for Territorial Policy and Third Deputy Prime Minister. Griñán had until then been Chaves’s second vice-president and regional councillor for the economy.
The two men first met when Griñan was lecturing in employment law in Seville University in the early 1970s, the university where he had also taken his law degree. Born in Madrid in 1946, Griñán was to maintain close ties with Manuel Chaves throughout his personal life and political career. Both would serve as Ministers in the Spanish Cabinet, and both would become President of the Junta de Andalucía.
Griñán joined the Socialist Party in the early 80s and was appointed deputy regional councillor for employment following the Socialists’ victory in Andalucía’s first parliamentary elections in May 1982. He moved over to the same position in the health department in the second legislature in 1986.
It was Manuel Chaves, who was now Employment Minister in the Cabinet of Felipe González, who called Griñán to Madrid in 1987 as his General Technical Secretary for Employment. Griñán returned with Chaves to Andalucía three years later as his regional councillor for health in Manuel Chaves’s first legislature as President of the Junta de Andalucía.

José Antonio Griñán was called back to Madrid in 1992 for his own position in the Spanish Cabinet, as Minister for Health for Felipe González. He had first met González during his time in Seville in the 1970s.

He moved to the Employment Ministry in 1993 and, as Spain’s Employment Minister, was president of the European Union’s employment and social affairs council during Spanish presidency of the EU in 1995.

Griñán remained in national politics as an MP for Córdoba after PSOE lost to the Partido Popular in the 1996 general election. He stayed in Congress for eight years before returning to his adoptive home of Andalucía in 2004 as Manuel Chaves’s regional councillor for tax and economy. He retained the position after the 2008 regional election, when he was also given additional responsibility as second Vice-President of the Junta de Andalucía.

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