Profiles
José Montilla - President of the Generalitat de Cataluña
By m.p.
Mar 31, 2008 - 8:30 AM

José Montilla Aguilera was sworn in as President of the Generalitat de Cataluña in November 2006, becoming the 128th President of the centuries-old institution which governs the second most-populous of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities. He is married with five children, studied Economics and Law at Barcelona University, and is a qualified public administration official.

Montilla was born in the Córdoba village of Iznájar on 15th January 1955 and, like many andaluces, in the wave of emigration from one of Spain’s most poverty-stricken regions between the 1950s and mid 1970s, moved with his family to what some refer to as Andalucía’s ‘ninth province,’ Cataluña.
Montilla was 16 years old when his family made the move to Sant Joan Despí, Barcelona province, in 1971.

He first joined the Socialist Party in 1978, when he became a member of the Catalan Socialist Party, Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya. He was elected a councillor to the Town Hall in Sant Joan Despí in the first municipal election held after the death of Franco, and had responsibility for tax and was also spokesman for the Socialist grouping at the Town Hall. Montilla became Socialist Mayor of neighbouring Cornellà de Llobregat, the largest town of the Baix Llobregat district of Barcelona province, in 1985, and was re-elected with an absolute majority in successive local polls until 2003. He became President of the newly-created Baix Llobregat District Council in 1988 with the new town and country planning introduced at that time in Cataluña which established the District Councils. He remained in the position until 1997.
He also became a provincial MP for public works on the Barcelona Provincial Council in 1983 and held Presidency of that body from July 2003 to April after holding a number of second vice-presidencies, as well as first vice-presidency in 1999, during his years with the Council.

Montilla has been a member of his party’s Executive Commission since 1987, was elected PSC’s Secretary for Organisation in 1994, and has been First Secretary of PSC since 2000. He also became a member of PSOE’s Federal Executive that year.
He made the move to national politics in the March 2004 general election when he successfully stood as PSC’s number one candidate for Barcelona province. The national poll saw a defeat for the Partido Popular government and a new Socialist government in Madrid, and José Montilla became Minister for Industry, Commerce and Tourism in José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Cabinet.

There’d also been a change in government in Cataluña just a few months previously, after Jordi Pujol, who had been President of the Generalitat at the head of the Convergencia i Unió coalition for more than two decades, retired. His successor as CiU’s candidate for presidency of the region, Artur Mas, achieved the highest number of seats in the regional election in November 2003, but was behind PSC in votes.
The PSC-PSOE candidate, Pasqual Maragall, was sworn in as the 127th President of the Generalitat in December that year, thanks to a pact to form a tripartite government with the centre-left Catalan nationalist party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, and the green-left electoral coalition formed by Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds and Esquerra Unida i Alternativa.

Maragall was only to remain in the job for one term and announced in June 2006 that he would not be standing for re-election. PSC chose José Montilla as their new candidate for Presidency of the Generalitat in the regional election due to take place in November that year, and Joan Clos, the Mayor of Barcelona, took over as Industry Minister in September.

As with the 2003 election, CiU again achieved the highest number of seats in the Catalan parliaments but also, unlike the previous poll three years earlier, achieved the highest number of votes. Artur Mas was kept out of government again, however, when PSC, ERC and ICV-EUiA agreed a repeat of the three-way coalition which had governed the region since 2003.
José Montilla Aguilera was invested as President of the Generalitat of Cataluña on 24th November 2006 and took office four days later.