Patxi Lopez - Lehendakari
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By m.p. - May 18, 2009 - 12:44 PM
He became the first non-nationalist President of the Basque Government in May 2009

The first ever Socialist President of the Basque government and the first non-Nationalist in the region’s 30 years of democracy was invested as the region’s new Lehendakari in May 2009, thanks to an agreement reached with the Partido Popular.

Born in Portugalete on 4th October 1959 and married to Begoña Gil, a Socialist councillor at Bilbao City Hall, Patxi López is the son of the prominent Socialist politician and member of the UGT union, Eduardo ‘Lalo’ López Albizu.
Patxi – whose full name is Francisco Javier López Álvarez - was only 16 when he joined the Young Socialists – Juventudes Socialistas – and then became a member of the PSE Basque Socialist Party at the age of 18. He was General Secretary of Juventudes Socialistas from 1985 until 1988 and was also for part of that time a member of the Spanish national parliament when he was elected to a seat in Congress in 1987. He kept his seat in the lower chamber of Spain’s parliament for two years.

His first position within PSE came at the party’s VI Congress in February 1991, when Patxi López was elected Secretary for Organisation. He moved over to PSE’s Vizcaya executive in 1995 as head of its Secretariat for Institutions, and became PSE Vizcaya’s new General Secretary two years later. Patxi López was chosen as PSE’s Acting General Secretary when Nicolás Redondo resigned as regional leader of the Basque Socialists in December 2001. He was confirmed as General Secretary at the extraordinary congress held the following March, and was elected again in 2005 with the support of almost 97% of his colleagues in the party.

He led the PSE party to second place in the Basque regional elections held in March 2009, when the Socialists achieved 25 seats in the Basque parliament. With 30 seats, the PNV Basque Nationalists had failed to achieve an absolute majority, however, and at the end of that month, an agreement was reached between PSE and the party which came third in the poll with 13 seats, the Partido Popular, which would give the Basque Country its first Socialist Lehendakari. The Partido Popular would have presidency of the Basque parliament.

Speaking at the investiture session in the Basque parliament on 5th May 2009, Patxi López promised to be a ‘Lehendakari who will fight ETA day in and day out’ and to address the ‘real’ problems of the Basque people. He was invested as the new President of the Basque government with the support of the 25 Socialist regional MPs, the 13 from the Partido Popular, and one vote from UPyD. His predecessor and the PNV Basque Nationalists’ candidate in the vote, Juan José Ibarretxe, announced that same day that he was leaving politics after 10 years as the Basque Country’s Lehendakari.

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