Profiles
Gaspar Llamazares
By m.p.
Mar 11, 2008 - 6:59 AM

The results of the 2008 general election in Spain left the left-wing coalition Izquierda Unida with just two seats in Congress, down from their five seats in the 2004 poll, and it also means that the coalition has lost their own parliamentary grouping in the lower chamber of the Spanish parliament: five seats with 5% of the vote is the minimum, and they achieved that in 2004 with their own three MPs, and two from their electoral partners on that occasion, the Catalan coalition ICV-EUiA. They now pass over to the Grupo Mixto, with their General Coordinator, Gaspar Llamazares, representing Madrid, and Joan Herrera in Barcelona for ICV-EUiA.

Llamazares announced on the night the election results came in that he would not be standing for re-election as the IU General Coordinator when the coalition’s next Assembly takes place. He confirmed that he would retain his seat in Congress as the IU member for Madrid. He described the coalition’s failure at the 2008 pool as due to the two party ‘tsunami’ and criticised the electoral system in Spain which gave the coalition just two seats, despite its being the third most-voted party with 3.77 % of the vote. The Catalan party, CiU, came in fourth place on voting percentage – 3.03% - and gained 11 seats in Congress.

Izquierda Unida has seen a steady decline in votes since its heyday with Julio Anguita as General Coordinator, and 21 members of parliament after the March 1996 election, their highest number since the coalition was born in 1986. Anguita announced his resignation at the end of 1999 on the grounds of ill health.

Gaspar Llamazares Trigo was born in Logroño (La Rioja) on 28th November 1957. He was brought up in Salinas in Oviedo (Asturias), and is the second of six children. He is married with one child. He is the son of a doctor, and studied medicine in both the Autonomous University of Madrid and Oviedo University, going on to achieve a Masters in Public Health in Havana University in Cuba.
He began his professional career at the University of Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, where he taught in the Department of Preventive Medicine, moving on to the Family Medicine Teaching Unit in Cazoña, in Santander (Cantabria).

Llamazares first entered politics in 1981, when he joined the PCA – the Partido Comunista Asturiano (Communist Party in Asturias.) He was elected General Secretary of the PCA in 1988, and also General Coordinator of Izquierda Unida in the region, at the coalition’s constituent assembly which took place that year.

Three years later, in 1991, he was elected to the regional parliament of Asturias as a member for Izquierda Unida. He stood as the coalition’s candidate for Presidency of the Junta General del Principado de Asturias (the regional government of Asturias) in the 1995 and 1999 regional elections, holding on to his seat in the Asturias parliament in both those elections.
Llamazares was re-elected as General Secretary of the PCA for the third time in 1999, and as IU General Coordinator in Asturias for the second time, in 1998.

He gained his first seat in the Spanish Congress in the March 2000 general election, when he was elected as a member for Asturias. Llamazares was one of the most vocal opponents in Congress against the government of the Partido Popular Prime Minister, José María Aznar, during the legislation which lasted until March 2004. He was strongly opposed to the decision by the Spanish government of the time to support the invasion of Iraq.
Following Julio Anguita’s decision to resign, the coalition’s candidate for Prime Minister in the March 2000 election was named as Francisco Frutos. But the coalition lost more than half their seats in Congress, dropping down to just eight from their previous 21 MPs four years earlier.
Llamazares won the internal election to succeed Anguita as General Coordinator in October that year by a margin of just one vote ahead of Francisco Frutos. The new General Coordinator then resigned from his two regional positions at the head of the Communist Party and Izquierda Unida in Asturias, both of which he had held for the past thirteen years.

Gaspar Llamazares Trigo stood for the first time as the Izquierda Unida candidate for Prime Minister in the 2004 general election, a poll which saw the coalition dropping from its previous eight seats down to three (five in conjunction with ICV-EUiA). He is currently a member of parliament for Madrid and, until the coalition’s next Assembly, the General Coordinator of Izquierda Unida.