Manuel Fraga

Senate
In office 7 February 2006 – 27 September 2011
Member of the Parliament of Galicia
In office 17 December 1989 – 7 February 2006
Constituency	Lugo
Personal details
Born	(1922-11-23)23 November 1922 Democratic Reform
Spouse	Carmen Estévez Eguiagaray ​ ​ (m. 1948; d. 1996)​
Children	5, including Carmen
Residence(s)	Madrid, Spain
Alma mater	University of Santiago de Compostela
Signature

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Manuel Fraga Iribarne (Spanish pronunciation:

.

Fraga's career as one of the key political figures in Spain straddles both General

.

Biography

Early life

Fraga was born in

, he began his political career in 1945, during Francisco Franco's reign.

Fraga married Carmen Estévez Eguiagaray, whom he had met in 1945 in the Faculty of Law, on 17 January 1948.[2] They had 5 children: Carmen, Isabel, José Manuel, Ignacio and Adriana. He also adopted Amalia.^[2][3] Aside from Spanish, Fraga also spoke French, English, Italian, German, Portuguese, Galician and Basque.^[4]

Propaganda Minister during the dictatorship

Fraga started in the Franco cabinet in 1962 as

Fraga authorized the execution of

death sentence

. His death sentence caused a large controversy outside of Spain. Grimau was executed by firing squad in 1963. Fraga never publicly apologized or expressed regret for Grimau's execution.

Another notable case was the assassination by Spanish police of Enrique Ruano, a student activist who opposed the Francoist State. Fraga telephoned Ruano's father and threatened to arrest his other daughter, Margot, who was also an anti-Francoist, unless she immediately stopped her activism. The then-director of Spanish newspaper ABC, Torcuato Luca de Tena, later confessed that Fraga ordered him to publish a manipulated copy of Ruano's personal diary in order to present Ruano as a mentally unstable person who killed himself.^[6]

Later in the decade, Fraga established himself as one of the more prominent members of a reformist faction in the government who favoured opening up the government from above. He introduced an a posteriori censorship law, which was based on lifting pre-publication censorship and a reduction in its strictness. Additionally, a certain sexual liberality in films was popularly summarized in the expression Con Fraga hasta la braga^[7][8] ("With Fraga [you can see] even the panties"). His departure from the government was prompted by the MATESA affair: the debt of the important publisher Manuel Salvat Dalmau was tangled with members of the Opus Dei, faction which Fraga opposed. When he published this information, the caudillo Franco expelled both sectors.

Ambassador to the United Kingdom

In 1973, Fraga (according to his memoirs he had been in the shortlist for becoming prime minister along

He served until 1975.

Minister of the Interior during the Transition

Following Franco's death on 20 November 1975, Fraga was appointed deputy prime minister (Vice President of the Government) and Interior Minister (Ministro de Gobernación) on 12 December 1975,

chief of state

.

By this time, Fraga believed Francoism could not be maintained forever. However, while he still favoured liberalization from above, his vision entailed an extremely gradual transition to full democracy. The drastic measures he took as interior minister and head of state security during the first days of the

Leader of People's Alliance

La Moncloa

in July 1983.

In 1976, Fraga and other former prominent members of the Francoist government founded the

Spanish Socialist Workers Party

(PSOE).

Fraga was reckoned as the

Passing on the torch

Following a political crisis in AP in 1986 that saw former Secretary-General

until 1989.

With the AP in headlong decline, Fraga briefly resumed the leadership of the party in 1989. With the addition of several lesser Christian democratic parties and the remnants of the Democratic Center Union, he refounded the People's Alliance as the People's Party (PP). Later in the same year, Fraga encouraged the election of José María Aznar as the party's new president. Fraga was then appointed as honorary president of the PP.

Regional President of Galicia

Manuel Fraga returned to his Galician homeland in 1989, and following the results of the

He remained in charge for almost 15 years until 2005, when the PPdeG lost its overall majority.

Fraga was widowed on 23 February 1996.[16]^[3]

Fraga saw his credibility damaged in late 2002, when the oil tanker ship

sank off the Galician coast. It caused a massive oil spill that affected the shoreline in the northwest of the region. Fraga was said to have been slow to react and unable, or unwilling, to handle the situation. In 2004, a power struggle between factions of PPdeG further hurt the party's image.

Subsequently, in the autonomous elections of 2005, Fraga and the PPdeG lost their absolute majority in the Parliament of Galicia. Despite their obtaining a 45% plurality in the elections, a left-government coalition developed between the Socialists' Party of Galicia (PSdeG) and the Galician Nationalist Bloc, making socialist Emilio Pérez Touriño the new president. Fraga remained on the political scene from Galicia, as a member of the Senate representing the Parliament of Galicia. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, a member of the Galician Popular Party, succeeded Fraga as head of the PPdG on 15 January 2006.

Later life

Fraga was designated as member of the Senate by the Parliament of Galicia in 2006.^[16] He served in the Upper House until 2011.

Fraga died on 15 January 2012 of a

Overview

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Fraga was one of the writers of the democratic constitution and spent part of his political career lessening the censorship law during the latter years of the

. However, he had openly admitted admiration for General Franco and the Francoist State in public on several occasions. He was renowned for his temper tantrums in public at not being referred to or addressed as Don Manuel. He most famously shouted during a television interview, completely unaware the camera was filming and the show was being broadcast live on air. Fraga was probably one of the most important and yet controversial politicians in modern Spain.

To his supporters, Fraga was a Galician hero who throughout his rule, modernised Galicia and built up a fair level of tourism to the region^{[citation needed]}. He built great roads and motorways and in 2000, he approved the Galician Plan to build Spain's first high speed bullet train.

To his opponents he seen as a dinosaur from the Franco regime.^[19] He was a keen follower of Carl Schmitt's ideas,^[20] and granted the German political theorist honorary membership to the Institute of Political Studies in 1962,^[21] in a ceremony where he praised him as a "revered master".^[22] Fraga identified himself with the figure of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in 1976 for the first time; this idea of identification between Cánovas and Fraga was reinforced by historiographical trends close to Fraga in the 1980s in order to commend his figure.^[23] Despite their political differences, he developed a close friendship with Fidel Castro,^[24] himself of Galician descent, who met with Fraga in Galicia during a visit to Spain in 1992.^[25]

In popular culture

In 1962, a satirical magazine Ley Fraga was launched in Barcelona which was named after him.^[26]

Notes

References

1. ^ Politics: Obituaries The Telegraph. Retrieved 25 May 2013.
2. ^
   ABC
   . 21 January 2012.
3. ^ ^{a b} Hermida, Xosé (24 February 1996). "María del Carmen Estevez esposa de Manuel Fraga". El País.
4. 20minutos.es
   . 23 May 2009.
5. ^ Paul Geitner, "Spanish Town Struggles to Forget Its Moment on the Brink of a Nuclear Cataclysm", The New York Times, 12 September 2008, page A13.
6. ^ "No se tiró, lo mataron". El País (in Spanish). 18 January 2009. Retrieved 29 December 2016.
7. ^ Note to Estudios sobre Buero Vallejo, ed. Mariano de Paco, Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2000.
8. ^ Jaime Campmany attributes the doggerel to César González-Ruano. La falda de Marilyn, ABC, 31 August 2002.
9. ^ ^{a b} Río Morillas, Miguel Ángel del. De la extrema derecha neofranquista a la derecha conservadora: los orígenes de alianza popular (1973-1979) (PDF). Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. pp. 23, 30.
10. ^ ^{a b c} "Spanish Ministries". Rulers. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
11. ^ José María Maravall; Adam Przeworski (2003). Democracy and the Rule of Law. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 287. Archived from the original on 28 September 2013. Retrieved 4 September 2017.^{[ISBN missing]}
12. El Pais
    Retrieved 13 April 2009
13. ^ (in Spanish) "Detienen en Valencia al ex dirigente de la Triple A Argentina Almirón Sena" (Ex director of Triple A in Argentina, Almirón Sena, arrested in a subsidized apartment in Valencia", El Mundo, 28 December 2006
14. ^ "Manuel Fraga dimite como presidente de Alianza Popular". El País. December 1986.
15. ^ 1989 Galician election
16. ^ ^{a b} "89 intensos años". El País. 15 January 2012.
17. ^ "Spain Franco-era politician Fraga dies, aged 89". BBC News. BBC. 16 January 2012. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
18. ^ "Spain's Crown Prince, PM Attend Funeral Mass for Manuel Fraga". Latin American Herald Tribune. Madrid. 16 January 2012. Archived from the original on 26 February 2021. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
19. ISSN 1416-7263
    .
20. ^ Freire, Jorge (16 May 2017). "Schmitt en España". Letras Libres.
21. ISSN 1697-6924
    .
22. ^ Rivas, Manuel (2 April 2006). "La 'fiesta sagrada' de don Carlos". El País.
23. ISSN 0048-7694
    .
24. El País
    .
25. ISSN 1665-8574
    .
26. S2CID 194844851
    .

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Manuel Fraga.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Manuel Fraga Iribarne.

• Manuel Fraga death's announcement Antena3
• PPdeG's official website for the 2005 elections (in Galician)
• Biography of Manuel Fraga (in English)

Political offices
Preceded by Gabriel Arias-Salgado	Minister of Information and Tourism 1962–1969	Succeeded by Alfredo Sánchez Bella
Preceded by Rafael Cabello de Alba	Second Deputy Prime Minister of Spain 1975–1976	Succeeded by Alfonso Ossorio
Preceded by Jose Garcia Hernandez	Minister of the Interior 1975–1976	Succeeded by Rodolfo Martín Villa
Preceded by Fernando Ignacio González Laxe	President of the Regional Government of Galicia 1990–2005	Succeeded by Emilio Pérez Touriño
Party political offices
Preceded by Party Founder	Secretary-General of People's Alliance 1977–1979	Succeeded by Jorge Verstrynge
Preceded by Office created	Leader of the Congress of Deputies 1977–1982	Succeeded by Miguel Herrero y Rodríguez de Miñón
Preceded by Félix Pastor Ridruejo	President of People's Alliance 1979–1987	Succeeded by Antonio Hernandez Mancha
Preceded by Antonio Hernández Mancha (As President of People's Alliance)	President of the People's Party 1989–1990	Succeeded by Jose Maria Aznar
Preceded by Gerardo Fernández Albor	President of the People's Party of Galicia 1988–2006	Succeeded by Alberto Núñez Feijoo
Preceded by Jaime Pita	Leader of the People's Party Group in the Parliament of Galicia 2005–2006	Succeeded by José Manuel Barreiro