Mariano Rajoy

Biography

Mariano Rajoy was born in Santiago de Compostela in 1955, the son of a judge, and grew up in Pontevedra and León before attending a Jesuit school in Vigo. He graduated in law from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 1977 and two years later qualified as a property registrar, one of the youngest in Spain.

After early membership of the Spanish National Union, he joined the People's Alliance and entered the first Galician Parliament in 1981. He served in the Galician regional government, presided over the provincial deputation of Pontevedra from 1983 to 1986 and was briefly vice-president of Galicia in 1986-1987. When the People's Party was founded in 1989 he joined its national leadership and returned to the Congress of Deputies, where he sat until 2018.

Under José María Aznar he held a run of cabinet posts from 1996: public administrations, education and culture, the presidency and the interior, as well as first deputy prime minister. Chosen as Aznar's successor, he led the party from 2004 but lost the general elections of 2004 and 2008 before winning an absolute majority in November 2011.

As prime minister from December 2011, Rajoy governed through the euro-area debt crisis with austerity, a labour reform and a 2012 bank rescue. His party was damaged by the Bárcenas and Gürtel corruption cases, and in 2017 he became the first serving Spanish prime minister to testify at a trial, as a witness. After inconclusive elections in 2015 and 2016 he was reinstated in October 2016, and in 2017 he faced the Catalan independence referendum and declaration of independence, answering with direct rule over Catalonia. He was removed by a vote of no confidence on 1 June 2018 and left politics soon after.